Fred A. Riecker papers

Fred A. Riecker was born in San Francisco, California, 1878, but shortly thereafter moved with his mother to Tucson, Arizona. He later began his professional career as a railroad survey engineer during the early 20th century for various locomotive companies throughout the American Southwest. In subsequent years, he worked as a civil engineer in Tucson. Throughout his life, he was intellectually engaged in a number of civil issues concerning Tucson and the greater Southwest that prompted his extensive writing of letters to various newspaper editors and politicians. In his later years, Fred A. Riecker published a semi-autobiographical manuscript detailing the pre- and post-railroad Tucson pioneer life of his family in “Horatio Algebra and Chief One and One.”

His father, Paul Riecker, was a nationally renown civil and mining engineer who drew the first official map of the Arizona territory which was published in 1879 from his previous topographical survey of California and Arizona as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He led an early exploration party across the Colorado Plateau and was among the first to make contact with the Havasupai at the Grand Canyon. Paul Riecker sued for homestead rights, thereby creating the origins of Riecker’s Addition. He built the first houses north of the railroad tracks in Tucson in 1880. In 1896, Paul Riecker mapped Pasadena, California, and laid out Inglewood and Redondo Beach, California. He was also involved in the Panama-Nicaragua Canal controversy as one of the original surveyors of the Nicaragua Canal route.