Ray Cutright Collection of Winthrop A. Davis Photographs (PH-00123)

Ray Cutright was born on August 27, 1902 in West Virginia. He married Ethel Cutright in 1929. In 1930, he migrated to Las Vegas, Nevada seeking work on the Hoover Dam project. Cutright never worked directly on the project itself, but instead worked as a boat operator along the Colorado River near the construction site. While in this position, he transported engineers and other project leaders to their work locations. During the years of construction, he helped photographer and childhood friend, Winthrop A. Davis, carry photography gear to numerous areas in and around the dam site to photograph dam construction, workers, and machinery. Cutright moved to Colorado in the 1950s and lived there until his death on August 20, 1997.

Winthrop A. Davis was born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, on September 3, 1904 to Charles Davis and Dora Fox. Davis, a freelance photographer, moved to Las Vegas in 1930 to capture photographs of the Hoover Dam project. His intention was to capture photographs of the workers and their conditions but ultimately he photographed aspects of the entire project. Davis sold his photographs to the United States Bureau of Reclamation, local magazines, and newspaper agencies in southern Nevada. He married his wife Elsie in the St. Thomas townsite in Nevada in 1930. Together they had three children while in Nevada, Bill Davis, Barbara Carson, and Adrienne Hester. Davis quit photographing the project one year before it was completed because magazines and newspapers wanted photographs of the engineers rather than images of the workers' conditions as Davis wanted to document.

Davis and his family moved to Toledo, Washington in the late 1930s and again to Akron, Ohio at the beginning of World War II. During the war he served as chief inspector of ordnance at Bridgewater Machine Company. Throughout the rest of his life, Davis had various occupations ranging from a radio operator to a school teacher in Los Angeles, California. He died July 3, 2005, in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Sources:

Genealogy files about “Ray Cutright,” Accessed December 17, 2019. Accessed from Familysearch.org.

Genealogy files about “Winthrop A. Davis,” Accessed December 17, 2019. Accessed from Ancestry.com

Cutright, Ray Interview, 1981 April 22. OH-00468. [Transcript.] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. Web.

Arrigo, Anthony J. Imaging the Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon, University of Nevada Press, Reno: 2014.