That’s Hoover, Not Boulder : When It Comes to Names, Dam Confusion Lingers

Hoover Dam or Boulder Dam, which is it?

It may no longer be the tallest or most massive dam in the world, but it is probably the only one with two commonly used names and historians blame petty politics for the confusion.

The problem started in 1930 when then-Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur officially designated it Hoover Dam in honor of President Herbert Hoover, a Republican and prominent figure in the dam’s planning stages.

“Democrats didn’t like that,” says Boulder City historian Dennis McBride, “because the nation was in the depths of the Depression and they were down on Hoover.”

Hoover’s foes in Washington began calling it Boulder Dam, a name derived from the Boulder Canyon Act of 1928, which was the law that authorized its construction.

The fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt used “Boulder Dam” in a speech dedicating the project in Sept. 30, 1935, didn’t help matters. But it may not have been his fault, McBride said. It seems the new secretary of Interior, Harold L. Ickes, wishing to avoid reference to the previous Administration, had deleted the word “Hoover” from Roosevelt’s speech and substituted “Boulder.”

Residents of nearby Boulder City, Nev., also liked Boulder Dam better. Some wrote letters to Hoover “asking him to graciously remove his name from the project,” McBride said.

He added that some others, when asked how to get to Hoover Dam, gave city slickers “the wrong directions into the desert.”

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman sought to end the confusion. He instructed the 80th Congress to investigate and find the real name. In April of 1947, the name Hoover Dam was restored by Congress.