What it is
The Tempe History Museum is the city of Tempe’s museum of itself, free and city-run, in the civic complex at the corner of Southern Avenue and Rural Road beside the main public library, about a mile south of the Arizona State campus. It is not large, and it is very good. Four permanent galleries carry the story in order. Surviving in the Desert covers the Hohokam, who dug the canals the modern town still uses, and the Salt River that made and periodically unmade the place. Building Our Community covers Charles Trumbull Hayden’s ferry and flour mill of the 1870s, the railroad, the town’s incorporation and the Mill Avenue it built. College Town covers the Territorial Normal School of 1885 that became Arizona State, the football, the student life and the Mill Avenue music scene of the 1980s and 1990s, with a case devoted to the bands. Living Together is the room the museum is proudest of and should be: who lived where in Tempe, which families were kept out of which neighborhoods, schools and pools, and how that changed.
A fifth gallery changes exhibits each year, from a 150th-anniversary show on the city’s founding to local sports, neighborhoods and music, and the museum runs a steady calendar of free evening programs, many with live music.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale’s history is told by the Scottsdale Historical Society in the Little Red Schoolhouse, which is small, and by Western Spirit, which is the whole West. Tempe’s museum is the one city-history museum in the Valley with the budget and the nerve to tell the full story, including the uncomfortable parts, and much of it is Scottsdale’s story too: the same Hohokam canals run under both towns, the same river, the same farms and the same color line, which our canals note and museums note both point to. It is also free, which Scottsdale’s museums are not, and an hour long, which is right.
The practical version
Twenty-two minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road south into Rural, to Southern Avenue. Free lot in the civic complex. Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 5. An hour, ninety minutes with children. Pair it with the Hayden Flour Mill ten minutes north, which the Building Our Community gallery explains, or with a show at the Yucca Tap Room a mile west, which the College Town gallery explains.
When to go
Weekday afternoons are empty and the staff have time. Saturday is the family day, with programs for children some weeks. The free evening events, which run through the year and often involve a historian, a film or a band, are the best way to see the place and are listed on the city’s calendar. The museum is closed Sunday and Monday, which catches visitors out; plan it for a Tuesday-to-Saturday afternoon between a lunch in Tempe and a dinner there. Summer is as good as any season; the building is cold and the parking is close.
What to see
Take the galleries in order. The canal model in Surviving in the Desert is the exhibit children remember and adults learn from: how the Hohokam moved river water across the Valley, and how the modern canals follow the same lines. In Building Our Community, the mill and ferry section explains the white building at the end of Mill Avenue better than the markers there do. In College Town, find the music case and the Sun Devil material, and the Normal School photographs of a campus that was one building on a dirt road. Living Together needs no guidance; read the maps. Then the changing gallery, which is usually the most locally specific thing in the building.
With kids
Good, and free, which matters for a museum a child may finish in forty minutes. The hands-on exhibits are real, the galleries are short, and the library next door has a children’s wing for the overflow. Kiwanis Park is five minutes west for the lake and the wave pool; our Scottsdale with kids note strings the three together as a south Tempe afternoon.
The neighborhood
Southern and Rural is the civic heart of Tempe’s residential half: the library, the museum, the city’s performing-arts offices and a community center on one corner, strip-center restaurants on the others. The Yucca Tap Room is a mile west on Southern; the campus is a mile north on Rural; Changing Hands Bookstore is ten minutes south.
The story
Tempe began collecting itself in the 1960s, when a historical society formed to save what the city’s rapid growth was clearing, and the collection outgrew a series of borrowed rooms before the city built it a home in the civic complex at Southern and Rural, beside the library, where it has been since. A substantial renovation in the 2000s produced the museum you see now, with the four thematic galleries replacing a chronological march and the Living Together gallery added as a deliberate choice to tell the town’s history of segregation, which few city museums in Arizona had done. The result won the kind of regional attention small museums rarely get and made the Tempe museum the model the Valley’s other city-history efforts measure themselves against.
The museum also keeps the city’s archive and photograph collection, which it shares online, and it has made a specialty of the recent past: the Mill Avenue music scene of the 1980s and 1990s, Sun Devil sports, mid-century neighborhoods and the lake, treated as history while the people who made it are still around to be interviewed. The 150th anniversary of the city’s founding in 2021 brought a major exhibition and a round of oral histories, and the changing gallery has kept up the pace since.
The Scottsdale connection
The two towns were founded a generation apart by similar men, Hayden at his ferry in 1870 and Winfield Scott on his homestead in 1888, on the same canal water and the same farm economy, and they grew up as neighbors who did not much resemble each other: Tempe the college town, Scottsdale the resort town. The Tempe museum tells the shared parts of that history, the Hohokam, the river, the canals and the color line, better than any institution in Scottsdale does, and our notes on the canals and on Scottsdale’s segregated classrooms lean on its research. For a Scottsdale visitor with a day of history in mind, the order is the Little Red Schoolhouse in the morning, the Tempe museum after lunch and the Hayden mill at sunset.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south from Old Town; it becomes Rural Road at the Tempe line. Continue south past the campus to Southern Avenue; the museum is on the southeast corner in the civic complex with the library, and the lot is free. About 22 minutes with no traffic. From the 101, exit Southern and go west three miles. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Southern and Mill, a mile west, and the bus along Rural stops at the door; our getting around note has the rideshare math.