Archives West Finding Aid

The Beverly Kuhns collection consists of 80 digital scans taken from 35mm color transparencies. The original slides were taken by Ruth Pieroth, a retired schoolteacher from Escalante, Utah, during a series of visits to the Glen Canyon damsite from 1957 through about 1962. According to Beverly Kuhns, who was a personal friend of the photographer, Ms. Pieroth frequently visited the Navajo Indian Reservation around the Four Corners area from her home in Escalante, and made a practice of stopping at the Glen Canyon site to document the rising dam. She took photographs during virtually the entire period of construction of the dam, from about 1957 through about 1962 (dates are estimated based on the phase of bridge and dam construction). Included are shots of the building of the Glen Canyon bridge; the construction camp that would become Page, Arizona; the footbridge that was the first thing built; the diversion tunnels; the cofferdam that held back the Colorado River; the area around the rim of the canyon, including the gantry cranes, aerial tramways, and batch plant; the rising dam itself, and the completed dam with Lake Powell rising behind it. Her vantage at first was the north rim of the canyon, but after the Glen Canyon Bridge was completed she apparently favored a viewpoint from near the southern end of the bridge. Also included are a number of shots obviously taken from a light airplane that give an excellent aerial overview of the damsite, the construction camp, and the Glen Canyon Bridge.

After the period documented by these photographs, Ms. Pieroth moved to southern California, where she died in 1992. The slides were given to Beverly Kuhns at the time Ms. Pieroth moved to California. They were loaned to the Special Collections Dept., J. Willard Marriott Library, in October 2002, and scanned as 300 dpi .tiff files. The originals were returned to Mrs. Kuhns in November 2002.