Vanished Vail Episode 4: Legacy Restored: Lamar Cobb & Arizona's Roads

welcome to vantage vale where we discover vale stories together we are at the intersection of highway 83 and i-10 near a concrete obelisk for most of its existence the monument's plaque has been missing and its history really wasn't very known, there are actually many local Myths about the meaning and importance of the obelisk now we know that the obelisk was built to honor Lamar Cobb, but who was Lamar Cobb and why is the obelisk here in Vail and who placed it. The obelisk right behind me is a monument to Lamar Cobb. he was an Arizonan who rolled up his sleeves and helped turn a territory into a state.

The concrete obelisk behind me has recently been

restored

. It welcomes travelers heading south on the scenic Sonoita Highway that Lamar Cobb first designed in 1917. The Vale Preservation Society is very proud. Having been able to work with Adot and our excellent partners at Granite Construction Incorporated on the restoration of the Lamar Cobb Monument, the monument now that it is

restored

can once again share a very important Arizona history and welcome travelers and residents alike to the community. of the veil, as well as our Today's special guest is Pastor David Hook, who is also a civil engineer and a traffic engineer and wears many hats.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm glad to be here. That's great. Could you share with us exactly what a civil engineer is? I would be more than happy to do so. share what civil engineering is, oh that's cool, civil engineers deal mainly with

roads

, bridges, anything that's like a group project, if you think about the word civil, it's like in civilization, so when people They met and built projects for the community, a civil engineer participated. in those are

roads

, bridges, water systems, sewage systems, if you think about it, civil engineers have been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years, like the aqueducts in Rome were built by civil engineers, you could even say that The pyramids were built by civilians.

Engineers, we've been around for a long time, it's an ancient profession and they really make it possible for a community to live together. That is the purpose of a civil engineer is to bring a community together to build structures that help a community exist better than before. civil engineers, yeah, that's cool, so to see this monument to Lamar Cobb being restored and honoring real civil engineers and that

legacy

of good roads, what does that mean to you as a civil engineer? Well, honestly, it means a lot because civil engineers rarely get recognized, we do. a lot and for us to actually see a monument to a civil engineer is a wonderful thing because I know he had to do a lot of things with very limited tools and try to improve the roads to improve the community and I'm sure he spent a lot of time, effort, energy and passion in it, and just seeing it honored is a really wonderful thing.

Now this monument is right off Highway 83 and it's a designated scenic road when you drive down that highway and you know you really see his work. and the alignment of the highway now is not what he designed, but in 1917

lamar

cobb

designed the first sound highway, but what is that? um actually as you drive by it and think about the design work that had to be done, what are they? Some of your thoughts on it, well, is that every time you drive on a road and you're a civil engineer, you notice things about the road, how much it curves and how much it tilts, whether it's safe or not, whether the guardrail is there or not. it's safe and stuff, but they didn't have much of that back then, it was just a very narrow road and you think about the cars they had back then and how they probably went at a much slower speed.

And, but it's like that, there's a lot of blasting work and you know, creating a road doesn't just happen, but even that happened thousands of years ago they would also make roads, roads have been around for a long time, well, we've done it. to get to where we're going, that's right, that's right, and we need good roads to do that and that's, you know, I'm really happy to honor that

legacy

of good roads here in Vail. Lamar Cobb was Arizona's first state engineer. I'm just trying to imagine what it would be like to really be that innovative person who really set the standard for the future.

That really impresses me about anyone who is doing this kind of work. He was the first engineer, so he not only had to build roads, but he had to build a whole system of how we are going to finance the roads and how we are going to prioritize which roads are built and what materials we build the roads with and what people we hire and all those kinds of things and when you first start a completely new state, all those things you have to start from scratch and I know you had to work a lot of hours to try to figure it out.

I've read a couple of articles about him, but he was actually hired by the first governor, Governor Hunt, and he basically, Lamar Cobb, started figuring out how to prioritize roads, what roads get built, what roads don't get built right when You're governor, you realize that where roads are built influences whether you get elected again, so it became highly, it's always a very politicized process to figure out where public funds should be spent, so he, Lamar Cobb and Governor Hunt crossed paths later, but I think in the early years. I think he was probably trying to do the best he could to start a department and now we have the Arizona Department of Transportation, which is the legacy agency that he started and he was the one who laid the foundation for it and probably will.

I don't get enough credit for all the work that he did, yeah, well, and I'll take this opportunity to thank Adot um for partnering with us and allowing us to work with a granite construction to restore this monument. Yes, they have done a great job. The granite construction has done a great job and it looks beautiful and is just a great testament to someone, a little known figure in history who should probably get more recognition than he gets. Yes, yes, and when you think about the purpose of roads, Markov was a civil engineer. At a time when the function of roads was really changing from serving a specific community to connecting a larger community, what's interesting is that the first civil engineers who designed roads mostly emerged from railroad design, so much of the terminology used.

In the beginning, road design actually came from the railroad, which is interesting and all those engineers came from all the surveyors, they came from railroad projects, but it quickly morphed before it was trains that took you from one place to another. another and then the roads were built within a community, it wasn't until what you're talking about until it became an entity that would build the long roads and the short roads in the community. I think a big question is why Lamar Cobb's monument to his life's work ended up here in Vail, Arizona, do you have the answer?

I will, in fact, so Lamar Cobb designed Highway 83 in 1917 and Highway 83 replaced a road called Borderlands Road, so he really designed, you know, this scenic route that we all know. I love driving to Sonoita and other places in the South in 1910. Lamar Cobb was a member of the Arizona constitutional convention. In fact, he helped shape the Arizona constitution that we still live under today. Incredible. He really cared. about the civic life of the place where he lived, so in 1918 he decided to run for governor, of course, Governor Hunt was a very powerful man in Arizona and there was some discord and after that election, of course, Lamar Cobb did not win, he came back to his hometown of Athens, Georgia, where he was born for a few years, but I think he really missed Arizona.

He returned years later and in 1926 he passed away, so in 1927 Governor Hunt decided to honor Lamar Cobb's legacy of good roads and his service to Arizona and you know it seemed appropriate that the monument be placed next to Highway 83 that he designed in 1917, that is a beautiful place for the monument, it sure is Okay, it is a beautiful place, we have so many beautiful mountains around us. I'll be very proud to know that your monuments here in Vale, I think a hundred years ago, building a road and a veil would have been a big challenge because one of the things we have here, where we are in Vail, is a lot of streams and washes. which are very difficult to cross by vehicle or stagecoach or even on horseback and that created a problem when you get to the foothills of this area where we are, large bridges and culverts had to be built and even like butter, the butter field.

The stagecoach had to find a way to navigate this area because it's not a flat area, there are a lot of washes and deep washes and if you look at some of the old train trestles that still exist, they built some old train beams to go across these washes and some of these were built hundreds of 100 years ago and still exist and still function. This is a challenging area to build because of all that, we now have incredible capacity to build roads and culverts. the big washes, but back then it would have been quite a challenge and that's probably why the Bell road system developed the way it did with so few what we would call arterial roads, which can actually make we are isolated in some cases from the main road. which goes from the downtown road to the colossal cave, if you follow the contour of that road, it actually goes along a line of mountain ridges to get there, it doesn't go into the valley, it follows the line of ridges and you can still see pieces of the old, old, old aerial photography road where they tried to keep the road, you know, in a way that was safe for people, yeah, and you know, follow the landscape, work with the landscape instead of against it, probably He drove to Highway 80, the first in the south. -climate Coast-to-coast route that passes directly through the center of Vale.

The old Vale road was the original Broadway of America alignment. It ran through the center of Vale. It's amazing, when you drive down it you don't even realize how historic some of these roads are. Yeah yeah, it's pretty amazing and I love the colossal cave path. I know it has some sharp turns, but I love the fact that it is an old historic road. At some point, a civil engineer will say that we have to widen that path that we have to take. cornering we need to make it safer, but for now, as it is, it's fun to drive because it gives you the feeling of a road that's been around for a long time and there's something comforting about knowing you're part of something that's been around for a long time. time and that you are part of a continuing legacy of civic participation because that highway was built before automobiles, so it was built primarily for people on horses or even for stagecoaches that transported livestock and that was actually in 1921. that some of locals, including month and family Frank Schmidt and others, got together and petitioned Pima County to take over the maintenance of that road, yes, so it's important to participate civically, I think so, yes, well, everything what government does is a way for people to pool their resources to make life better, that's all government is, yes, yes, and it's very appropriate to say it right here where we honor Lamar Cobb and his legacy of civic engagement and good roads.

Thank you so much for joining us this month I hope you'll tune in next month for our next veil gone see you soon well this is November 2020 this has been a year like no other but it's also the month of action thank you for which we are grateful. The legacy of Lamar Cobb and other public officials like him laying the foundation for the communities we all enjoy, so from our family at Vail Preservation Society to you and your family, we wish you a blessed Thanksgiving.