All Denver Public Library locations will be closed on Friday, July 4, in observance of Independence Day. More Information.

Works Progress Administration Photographs

[Gallery Tip: Click the gray area to the sides of the image to make the navigation panes disappear, then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to advance the slides.]

Works Progress Administration

Writer's Project of the WPA

Children eat at tables in a W.P.A. nursery school in Denver, Colorado; food includes cake and tin cups of milk.

Work Projects Administration (WPA) railroad construction workers in overalls and fedoras use a hammers and a crowbar to install rails at a switch on railroad tracks near Lowry Air Force Base in the Lowry Field neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. Shows a railroad signal and a culvert beside the tracks. The tracks were constructed to connect Lowry to the Union Pacific Railroad line.

African American soldiers in uniform and women laugh as they stand near, or sit on, a piano at a W.P.A. armed forces center in Denver, Colorado. The women wear dresses, one has on strap heeled shoes.

A student welds a metal frame with a threaded t-shaped pipe on the top of it in a welding class in Greeley, Colorado in Weld County. He holds the welder in his right hand and wears a welding mask and heavy gloves that protect his hands and forearms.

Women and an African American man can food probably for school lunch programs in Denver, Colorado. Shows cans, large pots and pressure cookers.

Two women skiers in Aspen, Colorado stand at the top of the ski hill facing downwards. Both women wear trousers, light jackets and scarves on their head. Trees are on either side of the ski slope, and the town is at the base of the hill.

A boy eats noodles probably part of a hot lunch program at an unidentified school in Denver, Colorado.

Arching bridge over Lake Clara at Mineral Palace Park in Pueblo, Colorado, is of random, pale stone with dark grout. Arches underneath provide support, and all is reflected in the rippled water in the foreground.

View of a Moderne style house in Denver, Colorado. The one-story brick masonry house has art deco accents with ornate brick work.

Interior view of toddler eating area, Pueblo Day Care Center (day nursery), Pueblo, Colorado, shows a woman spoon-feeding three toddlers in high chairs. There are children wearing bibs, and glasses of milk and plates of food on trays.

An eighth grade girl's gym class forms a human pyramid at the Central School in Alamosa, Colorado. The girls wear white, short sleeved blouses, belted dark shorts, socks and white tennis shoes. Four girls are on their hands and knees in the center. Another girl is on her hands and knees on the top center of the four girls. Another stands on her back, with others standing, holding hands with outstretched arms, to form a large arch that spreads across the room.

A Hispanic American man and woman work on traditional wooden treadle looms probably in Southern Colorado. The woman works on a Rio Grande style weaving.

A man stands near a crank well hoist. Two buckets are attached to the rope.

A man works with a clay nude sculpture of a male probably in Colorado.

View of Waldorf, Clear Creek County, Colorado; shows buildings including (l to r): power house, stable, Post Office, and cables of the bucket line from Santiago to Waldorf.

A miner poses outdoors on a trunk on the porch of his cabin probably in Colorado. He wears a cap with a miner's light.

A man and woman examine an exhibit at the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver, Colorado. A diorama features a covered wagon, people, horses, and an adobe building with vigas and a balcony.

View of artifacts found at Fort Caspar in Casper (Natrona County), Wyoming. Shows harness and farrier's tools including a fish plate (from a freighter wagon), a hame and short tug, an axe, a coupling iron, a spoon, a glue pot, a yoke iron, part of a musket, a bolster iron, a telegraph insulator, a wagon hub, and horse, mule and oxen shoes.

Interior view of a Great Western Sugar processing facility in Colorado; men work by vats and pipes.

View of abandoned miner's cabins in Colorado.

Interior view of a Great Western Sugar processing facility in Brighton (Adams County), Colorado; a man works with a wheel valve by a sign: "Danger - Bring Centrifugal To A Complete Stop Before Putting Discharger Into The Sugar."

A two-door sedan approaches amid blowing dust. Telephone poles are to the sides.

Photo of Creede

Teenage girls pose at the Beulah resort near Pueblo, Colorado, on the log railing of an open porch fronting a frame, one-story dormitory. The walks at the bottom of the steps are concrete with curved 'grout' lines.

A woman and a young girl pose near a log cabin on a snow dusted landscape as a man driving a wagon approaches in the background, Colorado. The cabin has a plank front with timber walls and roof.

Men examine a panoramic mountain index at Cranmer Park in the Hilltop Neighborhood of Denver, Colorado; mountain names and elevations are rendered in stone tile.

View of Colorado College, Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Colorado, from the Lennox house roof; shows Shove Memorial Chapel (gift of Eugene P. Shove). John Gray's design includes a square belltower, turret, and rosette window. Cars line Nevada Avenue; Palmer Hall edges lawn.

Men work to assemble the fossil bones of a Diplodocus gastralia for a paleontology exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History in Denver, Colorado. The men include Phillip H. Reinheimer, chief preparer, in the coveralls and R.L. Landberg, crouched on a scaffold beneath the skeleton.

View of a dedication ceremony with men in military uniforms, or suits and overcoats, at Lowry Army Air Force Base in the Lowry Field neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. The men watch an officer hammer a spike into railroad tracks constructed by the Work Projects Administration (WPA) The men wear caps and fedoras. The tracks were constructed to connect Lowry to the Union Pacific Railroad line.