The construction of Hoover Dam in 1936 was an engineering marvel that many had not thought possible in the harsh terrain of Nevada's Black Canyon. When construction began, there were no roads leading into the canyon, so the workers had to build roads and catwalks to bring supplies to the job site.
After the Great Depression, work was hard to find in the United States. Workers and their families began arriving in Las Vegas two years before the start of construction looking for a job on the Hoover Dam crew. The city of Las Vegas was mostly undeveloped in the 1930s, so the workers had to live in tent cities with many other families. Construction on the dam was moved up six months because of the number of workers camping in Las Vegas without adequate money for basic needs like food and clothing.
Before Hoover Dam could be built, the waters of the Colorado River had to be diverted from the construction site. Four tunnels were carved out of the walls of the canyon to redirect the water to another point along the Colorado River. Once the water was gone, the workers could concentrate on removing sediment from the river bottom so the dam's foundation could be built on the solid bedrock underneath.
Over 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete were used in the construction of Hoover Dam. There was no feasible way to bring that quantity of concrete into Black Canyon, so two production plants were built at the construction site. The concrete was distributed to the work areas via overhead cables in buckets that held four or eight cubic yards.
One of the most amazing engineering features of Hoover Dam's construction was the method used to cool and cure the massive concrete blocks needed to build its base. If allowed to dry naturally, it would have taken a century for the concrete to cure and harden. To solve the problem, construction workers ran steel pipe through 582 miles of concrete block. Ice water was pumped through the pipe to quickly cool the concrete.
Quite a bit of controversy was involved in the naming of Hoover Dam. The custom was to name a new dam after the president in office at the time of its construction, but none of these presidents were still in office when the projects were actually completed. When President Hoover's Secretary of the Interior announced that the project would be named Hoover Dam, it bothered Theodore Roosevelt, who was in the middle of a fierce battle against Hoover's re-election campaign. After Hoover lost his bid for re-election, Roosevelt decreed that the dam would be called Boulder Dam instead. The Hoover Dam name would not be restored until 1947, when Harry Truman was President.
