On Mars Hill, just west of downtown Flagstaff, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. This map prints Mars Hill, Sheep Hill and Wildcat Hill in shaded relief, and from Downtown Flagstaff out to Sunnyside it names five historic districts and the Museum of Northern Arizona.
Flagstaff is the county seat of Coconino County, at about 7,000 feet on the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of Sheep Hill, Wildcat Hill and Mars Hill comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. The Flagstaff Southside Historic District, the Northern Arizona Normal School Historic District and the Museum of Northern Arizona were checked against National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places records. The city covers 63.9 square miles in the pines below the San Francisco Peaks, and 76,831 people lived here at the 2020 census. In Navajo the city is Kinłání Dookʼoʼoosłííd Biyaagi, the city below the San Francisco Peaks, and in Havasupai it’s Wii Hagnbaj, “snowy mountain,” a name it shares with the peaks.
A flag on a pine
The Sinagua people moved into the area around 700 CE, and the eruptions of Sunset Crater in 1064 and 1066 covered the land in ash that made the soil richer for farming. By the early 15th century the Sinagua had left, likely moving north and later becoming the Hopi, and the San Francisco Peaks above the city are a sacred site in Hopi culture. Until western expansion in the 1860s, the Northeastern Yavapai, the Wi:pukba, held the land up to the San Francisco Peaks, and two bands of the Northern Tonto Apache, the Oak Creek band and the Mormon Lake band, lived where the city stands.
When Beale’s wagon road came through, the place was called Antelope Spring, for the spring at the foot of Mars Hill. The name Flagstaff comes from a real flagstaff, a stripped pine raised at that spring on July 4, 1876, where Thomas F. McMillan kept his sheep camp. The common story credits a scouting party from Boston, raising the flag for the nation’s centennial, though other tellings give the honor to a railroad surveyor in 1855 or to Beale’s men in 1859. Edward Whipple opened a saloon on the wagon road in 1871, the first non-Native settlement, and McMillan’s cabin of 1876 was the first permanent one. After the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad arrived in 1882 the town went by Old Town and New Town for a while, and the name Flagstaff came back in 1884, when a post office opened beside the depot. By 1886 Flagstaff was the largest city on the railroad between Albuquerque and the West Coast. It became the county seat in 1891, incorporated as a town in 1894 and became a city in 1928.
Mars Hill and the dark sky
Percival Lowell, of Boston’s Lowell family, wanted an observatory to study Mars, and in 1894 he and the astronomer A. E. Douglass settled on Flagstaff for its elevation, its dark skies and its railroad. The Lowell Observatory went up on Mars Hill that year, and it’s among the oldest observatories in the United States, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Its 24-inch Clark telescope, built in 1896, is still used for public viewing. In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto there, and the blink comparator he used is kept in the observatory’s Rotunda Museum, built in 1916. In the 1960s the same Clark telescope helped map the Moon ahead of the Apollo landings.
The city has guarded its night sky for decades. In 1958 it passed Ordinance 400, which banned large searchlights in town, and on October 24, 2001, the International Dark-Sky Association named Flagstaff the world’s first International Dark-Sky City.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: Forest Hills Dr, Elden Lookout Rd, W Mount Elden Lookout Rd, E Moonrise Valley, W Sinagua Ln, Blackhawk Ln, W Pack Trail Dr, E Fir Ave, W Hogan Dr, Old Forest Rd, Failte Ln, S Creekside.
More street names, A to Z
Access Rd, Ash Ln, Church Dr, Country Club Dr, Daniela Ave, E Forest Ave, E Mount Elden Lookout Rd, E Railhead Ave, Forestdale Rd, FS Rd 506, Huntington Dr, Industrial Dr, Knoll Dr, Motel Dr, Mountain View Rd, N Fort Valley Rd, N Lost Creek Trl, N Primrose Way, N Quintana Dr, N Thorpe Rd, N Turquoise Ln, N US Hwy 89, Old Santa Fe, Quintana Dr, Ranch Rd, River Valley Rd, S Beulah Blvd, S Clubhouse, S Lake Mary Rd, S Pine Knoll Dr, S Pinyon Jay Dr, S Powell Blvd, Tyree Rd, Wild Rose, W Santa Fe Ave.
Downtown and the historic districts
Downtown Flagstaff is a narrow strip between the Northern Arizona University campus to the south and the Museum of Northern Arizona to the north. Many of its buildings are made of red Moenkopi sandstone, quarried a mile east of town and used from the 1880s because it resisted fire, among them the Weatherford Hotel, the Babbitt Brothers Building, the Coconino County Courthouse and the university’s Old Main. The Railroad Addition Historic District is tied to the Santa Fe Railway and Route 66, and it holds buildings linked to John W. Weatherford, the four Babbitt brothers and Thomas E. Pollock Sr. After fires swept the early town, an 1897 ordinance required every building in the business area to be brick, stone or iron. John Weatherford opened his hotel on January 1, 1900, and it’s still in use. In 1926, the year Route 66 was completed through Flagstaff, Front Street was renamed Santa Fe Avenue, and the people of Flagstaff paid together for the Hotel Monte Vista, which opened on January 1, 1927. In the 1990s, after years of decline, store owners and the city brought downtown back, with Heritage Square at its center.
Flagstaff has seven historic districts on the National Register. Five of them are printed here by name: the Railroad Addition Historic District, the Flagstaff Southside Historic District, the Flagstaff Townsite Historic Residential District, the North End Historic Residential District and the Northern Arizona Normal School Historic District. In the 1950s the Southside was a neighborhood largely of Spanish, Basque and Mexican heritage. The Northern Arizona Normal School opened on September 11, 1899, with 23 students, two faculty members and two copies of Webster’s International Dictionary bound in sheepskin. It was the third and final university founded in the Arizona Territory, and in 1966 it was renamed Northern Arizona University.
Harold S. Colton, a zoologist, and the artist Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton came from Philadelphia and founded the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1928 to preserve the history and cultures of northern Arizona and the Colorado Plateau. It started in two rooms of the Flagstaff Woman’s Club and grew into a 24,700-square-foot exhibits building, and Katharine Bartlett, who became curator in 1930, stayed for 51 years. Its Ethnology Gallery focuses on the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo and Pai tribes. Sheep Hill and Wildcat Hill rise in the relief, and Sunnyside has its place on the sheet.
This Flagstaff map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Flagstaff home, from Downtown Flagstaff out to Sunnyside, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Flagstaff map.
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