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Flagstaff, Arizona, is located at the intersection of Interstate Highways 17 & 40 in the middle of the state. The area around it was the homeland for ancient pueblo people and archaic peoples before them. The name "Flagstaff" comes from a pine tree that was used as a flagpole sometime during the nineteenth century. That much is certain, but there are a lot of stories about who did it, when they did it and exactly where they did it. One such account has it that in 1855 Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale camped at the spring located there while on a surveying expedition. His men cut the limbs from a pine tree and raised the United States flag. Other accounts credit celebratory lumberjacks. In any case, in 1871 Edward Whipple built a saloon near the spring for men working in the timber industry, but the location did not immediately attract permanent settlement. It was not until 1876 that Thomas F. McMillan became the second Anglo-European to settle there. In 1896 Lowell Observatory was built in Flagstaff. By the 1890s up to one hundred trains a day passed through Flagstaff on the principal rail route between the East and West Coasts. Route 66 was completed in 1926 and automobile travel began to bring new business to town. The first motel was built in Flagstaff in 1929. Today Flagstaff is an important regional center and serves as a gateway to the Grand Canyon National Park.
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