This is the year the archive starts, and it starts with paperwork. The land itself had been ready for three years — William J. Murphy’s crews finished the 42-mile Arizona Canal in 1885, the first Valley canal to cut through virgin desert rather than follow an old Hohokam alignment, and suddenly a whole tier of benchland northeast of Phoenix could be farmed. Promoters fanned out across the country to sell it. What the land was waiting for was a buyer, and in 1888 it got one.
Winfield Scott was a 51-year-old U.S. Army chaplain — Michigan-born, a Baptist pastor turned Union infantry captain, wounded at Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg and Spotsylvania — who toured the Salt River Valley that year and decided the promotional literature had, for once, undersold the product. He filed on a full section, 640 acres at $2.50 an acre with 50 cents an acre down: $320 to claim the square mile now bounded by Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School, and Chaparral Roads. He later gave back the 40 acres north of the canal and paid $1,520 in all for the 600 he kept. Old Town sits inside it. So, by market value at least, does most of the argument for calling this the best land deal in Arizona history.
Nothing else happened here in 1888, because there was no here yet — just creosote, mesquite, and jackrabbits under a new canal. Scott was still on active duty and could not stay. The claim needed a resident, and it would get one in 1889, when his brother George arrived to clear brush and open the laterals. The full story of the founding decade is in the 1880s chapter.