Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Monday, July 2, 1888

July 2, 1888: Winfield Scott Puts 50 Cents an Acre Down

Three hundred twenty dollars down on a square mile of creosote, the single transaction every other page in this archive descends from.

Portrait of Winfield Scott, founder of Scottsdale, Arizona
Winfield Scott (1837–1910). Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened

On July 2, 1888, at the U.S. land office in Tucson, an agent for Winfield Scott — U.S. Army chaplain, Civil War veteran, and incorrigible optimist — made a down payment of 50 cents per acre on 640 acres east of Phoenix, at $2.50 an acre total. He gave back the 40 acres north of the canal and paid $1,520 in all for 600. The claim's boundaries survive today as Scottsdale Road, Hayden Road, Indian School Road, and Chaparral Road, with Old Town inside them.

Why it matters

This is the founding act. The Arizona Canal (1885) had made the land farmable, but it was Scott's purchase — and his decades of recruiting, preaching, and boosting afterward — that turned a canal-side section into a settlement, then a town, then a city that carries his name.

The road to the down payment

The transaction had a three-year fuse. In 1885, William J. Murphy’s crews finished the Arizona Canal, 42 miles of ditch dug clear around the north side of the Salt River Valley — the first canal routed through unbroken desert at a higher elevation than the old Hohokam alignments Phoenix had been farming on. That grade change opened a whole new tier of benchland to irrigation, and the Arizona Canal Company’s promoters fanned out across the country looking for buyers. Their literature found Winfield Scott, a Michigan-born Baptist minister then serving as an Army chaplain on the Pacific coast — a man named for the War of 1812 general (no relation) who had been wounded at Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg and Spotsylvania. He came to see the valley for himself in 1888 and concluded the promoters were, if anything, underselling it.

What he bought that July was a perfect square: Section 23, a mile on each side, with nothing on it but creosote, mesquite, and jackrabbits. Scott was in the East for a veterans’ reunion at Gettysburg, so an agent made the payment for him at the Tucson land office on July 2. The price was the land office’s desert-land rate of $2.50 an acre, 50 cents down and $2 at final proof; the down payment came to $320 on a federal land claim that required him to prove the land could be watered. Most of it could. The Arizona Canal crossed the section’s northwest corner, and the 40 acres north of it lay above the water, so Scott gave them back. His final payment in September 1889 was $1,200 for 600 acres, $1,520 in all, by his biographer Richard Lynch’s account. The water rights cost him more than the land; the Ledger chapter for 1888–1909 does the arithmetic.

What followed

Scott was still on active duty, so the claim sat empty until 1889, when his brother George Washington Scott — a Civil War veteran himself — arrived to camp on the property, clear brush, and open the ditches. The brothers planted barley, grapes, an orchard and, that October, 1,500 orange seedlings, which came through the hard frost of Christmas Eve 1889. Within fifteen months of the down payment Scott had sold 400 of his acres, 40 at $30 and 360 at $25, to pay for the water, trees and fence. In 1894 Albert Utley platted a townsite on the section to the south as “Orangedale,” and by August it was called Scottsdale. The founder spent the rest of his life recruiting sober Midwestern farm families onto and around his section, through the first school in 1896, the first store and post office in 1897, and the drought that nearly emptied the colony before the settlers pledged their farms to build Roosevelt Dam.

The purchase never stopped paying. The section’s boundaries survive as four arterial roads, Old Town sits inside them, and every page in this archive traces back to the $320 Scott put down. The rest of the founding year is at 1888, and the full decade — canal, claim, and first plantings — is in the 1880s chapter.