Thomas Patrick O'Neill Papers
Name/Title
Thomas Patrick O'Neill PapersEntry/Object ID
MS.56Scope and Content
Thomas Patrick O'Neill Papers MS 56 Thomas Patrick O'Neill Papers Born in Brooklyn, New York on September 16, 1880, Thomas O'Neill [spelled variously as O'Neil and O'Neal] was a member of the first Bureau of Reclamation crew to do diamond drilling investigations in Boulder Canyon in 1921-23. He served as the Boulder Canyon camp cook under Walker Young, who was the Bureau of Reclamation's construction engineer on the Boulder Canyon Project in 1931-35. When operations in Boulder Canyon were finished in 1924, O'Neill went to the Umatilla Project on the Columbia River in Oregon. In 1929, when the government began diamond drilling operations in Black Canyon prior to construction of Hoover Dam, Walker Young sent for O'Neill to be the Reclamation camp cook once again. In 1932 O'Neill was put in charge of the government engineers living in McKeeversville; worked nine and a half years in Boulder City at the government garage; and in 1942 became supervisor of the janitorial staff at the Bureau of Reclamation administration building. O'Neill retired in 1950. The cookbook in this collection, copyright 1923, was used by O'Neill at the Black Canyon camp in 1929, and may have been the cookbook he used in his last year, 1923, as cook in the Boulder Canyon camp. * * *Collection
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