Wittmann, AZ

Wittmann is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 684, down from 763 in 2010. It is located along U.S. Route 60 in the central part of Arizona, 35 miles (56 km) northwest of central Phoenix, and is part of the Phoenix metropolitan area, although just outside the urban portion. A variant name was "Nadaburg"; the present name is for Joseph Wittmann and his wife Eleanor van Beuren Wittmann, a couple who attempted several times to get approvals to build a dam project in nearby Box Canyon that would have benefitted the town. This was to be a successor to the poorly engineered Walnut Grove dam that had collapsed in February 1890, less than two years after it had filled. Eleanor van Beuren's father was the nominal head of a group of East Coast investors that had funded what was then primarily a placer mining project. One of the Walnut Grove Water Storage Company's engineers (not responsible for the design) was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Oswald Brodie, who was later appointed Arizona's territorial governor. Governmental approval and adequate funding lacking, the replacement dam project plans faltered. A long-projected time for repayment of supplemental government funding killed Joseph Wittmann's project in the 1940s, leaving promises to Maricopa County families broken. The naming of nearby Morristown also refers to the Wittmann and van Beuren families, for they had residences in Morristown, New Jersey.