Tumamocville

When Daniel MacDougal & Frederick Coville were searching for a site for The Carnegie Laboratory in February, 1903, The Tucson Chamber of Commerce could taste the new jobs and business it would bring to the Old Pueblo. They engaged in a bit of a hard sell. William Hornaday describes the tactic:

They took Daniel MacDougal ... to the top of (Tumamoc Hill) and told him, "All this shall be thine, and more, if thou wilt pitch thy tent herein, and become one of us."

Little did they realize what they were asking. Tucson had a housing shortage and "pitch their tents" is exactly what many of them would have to do. They established a tent city on Tumamoc's northeastern edge. (At least it was close to work.) Tucsonans called it Tumamocville.

The photo above shows Mary Lloyd tending to her kitchen in the family encampment in 1906. When the picture was taken, she was pregnant with their first child! But I think she was quite tidily dressed for an outdoors-woman.

   

An earlier photo (1904 or 1905) shows Mary's husband, Francis, flopping a flapjack over an open fire in Tumamocville. In the background, looking on, Burt Bovee does his best to play the part of a caryatid and hold up the roof of the tent.
 
Interestingly, I scanned this old photo from the collection of the Long Family, Burt's descendants. The scrawl under it identifies the flopper as "Dr. Loyd" but no one in the Long family knew who that was. Today's Long and Lloyd families met for the first time on Tumamoc Hill in November, 2012.

 

Probably Godfrey Sykes and his family, including their two sons, lived in Tumamocville longer than anyone else. They arrived in 1906 and rather liked the atmosphere. Soon after, Godfrey's first wife died of heart disease. When dad went off on an expedition to the Salton Sea (California) in 1907 (and many times afterward), he simply left the kids alone with their pet chickens. Sykes did arrange for someone to bring his children a hot meal every day. Those boys were completely comfortable in the Sonoran Desert in the shelter of the wings of protection offered by the community of Tumamocville.

Sykes saw no reason to move and did not do so until sometime between the two world wars. He then built a house for his sons and new wife ... a few yards away from the tents.

The traces of Tumamocville remain to this day but, of course, its inhabitants are long gone.