The decade opened without a headline. Winfield Scott’s 640 acres — filed in 1888 at $2.50 an acre, bounded by today’s Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School, and Chaparral Roads — were two years into cultivation, and their owner was still a serving Army chaplain, farming by furlough and correspondence. The Arizona Canal, finished in 1885, delivered the water; the first recruited families delivered the labor.
What existed in 1890 was not yet a town, or even a village — a scatter of farmhouses on irrigated desert, promoted under the citrus-scented name Orangedale. The hard freezes that would kill that name were coming, and so was the Chicago banker whose 40-acre plat would give the settlement its permanent one. For the ground the colony stood on, start with the 1880s chapter.