History of Gamboa

ffice, school, churches (five of them), railroad station, fire station and gas station. For much of the town's history, Gamboa's non-US, non-white population lived in a separate part of town called Santa Cruz. This included 50 families moved from La Boca in October 1954 when that town was depopulated and converted into a white housing area.

Not all Gamboans worked for the Dredging Division. Because of its remote location and distance from other Canal Zone towns, Gamboa was seen as less desirable than some of the other Panama Canal Company/Canal Zone Government's townships, and since housing in the Canal Zone was assigned based on seniority, many of the new arrivals to the "Zone", as it became known to its residents (Zonians), were initially assigned housing here before becoming eligible for housing in other towns. U.S. military personnel and their dependents lived in Gamboa during the 1940s due to the shortage of housing on the local military bases. U.S. personnel continued living in Gamboa until the total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Panama in 1999.

Over time as the Panama Canal Company/Canal Zone Government began to transfer operations to Panama following the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties, some of the services offered in Gamboa were shut down. The most visible closures were the commissary and movie theater, which were boarded up throughout the 1980s. The demise of the Panama Railroad in the late 1980s further cut the town off from the rest of the Canal area.

Gamboa's elementary school was built in 1937 by the Panama Canal Company/Canal Zone Government Division of Schools. It consisted of 3 classrooms, a library, and principal's office upstairs, with a kindergarten classroom underneath. The school was transferred to the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) in 1979 after the abolition of the Canal Zone and its government. That school year, its total enrollment was 115. Three U.S. grade school teachers