The oldest continuously occupied home in Scottsdale dates from this year. Frank Titus, an industrialist, built a fine ranch house north of the settlement in 1892 — a notably solid piece of construction for a colony that was otherwise a scatter of farmhouses on irrigated desert. The house survives today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which makes it the earliest built thing in town you can still stand next to, apart from the canal itself.
Titus was an unusual arrival. Scott’s recruiting pitch — cheap irrigated land, a dry climate, and a pointedly dry town — was aimed at sober farm families from the Midwest and East, and mostly that is who came. An industrialist with the means to build well suggests the pitch was traveling further than church newsletters. The settlement had no school, no store, no post office of its own, and no permanent name; what it had was water, cheap land, and a famous chaplain telling everyone who would listen that the desert was the future.
That chaplain was still technically in the Army in 1892, running the colony from a distance. The next year fixed that: his retirement in 1893 put the founder on his ranch for good, and the settlement’s busiest run of firsts — name, school, store — followed in quick order.