The Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum

Comprising several rooms, the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum is located on the first floor at the rear of the Boulder Dam Hotel and contains an extensive collection of historic written and photographic material, as well as items of interest.

The Museum tells the story of the Boulder Canyon Project as it was experienced by the men and women who braved the desolation of the Southern Nevada desert to build Hoover Dam and Boulder City.

Its three-dimensional, interactive displays and exhibits describe the great social and economic forces surrounding the 1929 Stock Market Crash and Depression that drove thousands of unemployed citizens from their homes into the isolation of the Nevada desert where the Boulder Canyon Project was one of the few places in the United States where men could find work.





Photographs, artifacts, oral histories, and the sounds of Hoover Dam construction ringing off the walls of Black Canyon provide a sense of the complexity, danger, and immense scale of the construction project, as well as a picture of ordinary life in an extraordinary time and place.


Watch the 20-minute official construction film made by the Bureau of Reclamation. You can listen as these pioneers tell about their lives in Boulder City and down at the Hoover Dam construction site in the desperate years of the early 1930s.

Mothers describe how they set up households in the sandy wastes along the Colorado River. Dam workmen tell stories of the dangers they faced building Hoover Dam, an engineering project unlike any attempted before.

Construction began in 1931 and Hoover Dam was completed in 1936. It still stands tall as an engineering marvel high above the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada. Hoover Dam attracts over 7 million visitors from around the new world every year feeding vast tourism into the Las Vegas Nevada and Arizona economy.

The building of Hoover Dam took the brilliance of over 200 engineers to pull-off what many deemed as almost impossible. And it was the fortitude of over 7,000 dam workers that endured amazingly harsh conditions and extreme dangers to complete Hoover Dam almost two years ahead of schedule. The picture on the right is a down-stream view of the dam today. There are many sites you can go to, to learn more about the dam. Here is a good one to start with. Arizona Leisure/Hoover Dam