Timothy and Michael Riordan arrived in Flagstaff when Arizona was still a territory, and they didn't leave quietly. The two brothers — who married two sisters and built a single thirteen-thousand-square-foot duplex to house both families — were lumber barons who, alongside the McMillan and Babbitt families, helped shape the early town. For the mansion they commissioned Charles Whittlesey, the same architect behind the Grand Canyon's El Tovar Hotel, who delivered log-slab siding, volcanic stone arches, and hand-split wooden shingles, completed in 1904. The structure still stands as an Arizona State Park, its original family furnishings intact. Flagstaff grew around families like this — people who built in stone and wood and expected the buildings to last. Most of them did.
