Kingman is a city in, and the county chair of, Mohave County, Arizona, United States. It is named after Lewis Kingman, an engineer for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. It is located 105 miles (169 km) southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, and 180 miles (290 km) northwest of Arizona’s permit capital, Phoenix.

Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a U.S. Navy bureaucrat in the bolster of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, was ordered by the U.S. War Department to build a federal wagon road across the 35th parallel. His additional orders were to test the feasibility of the use of camels as pack animals in the Southwestern desert. Beale traveled through the present-day Kingman in 1857 surveying the road and in 1859 to build the road. Beale’s Wagon Road became ration of U.S. Route 66 and higher Interstate 40. Remnants of the wagon road can yet be seen in White Cliffs Canyon in Kingman.

Kingman was founded in 1882 back statehood, in Arizona Territory. Situated in the Hualapai Valley amid the Cerbat and Hualapai mountain ranges, Kingman had its modest beginnings as a easy railroad siding close Beale Springs. Civil engineer Lewis Kingman supervised the building of the railroad from Winslow to Beale Springs. This spring had been used by Native Americans busy in the area for centuries.

The Mohave County chair was originally located in Mohave City from 1864 to 1867. In 1865, the allocation of Arizona Territory west of the Colorado River was transferred to Nevada after Nevada’s statehood, and became share of Lincoln County, now Clark County, Nevada. The surviving territory of Pah-Ute County became share of Mohave County. Its seat was moved to Hardyville (now within Bullhead City) in 1867. The county seat transferred to the mining town of Cerbat in 1873, then to Mineral Park near Chloride. After some time, the county chair and anything instruments were each time moved to Kingman in 1887.