Scottsdale raised its first public building in 1896, and it was a school. The settlers organized School District No. 48 and put up a one-room wooden schoolhouse with pooled labor — the same neighbor-power that had rebuilt the Scott home after the fire the winter before. The building worked a full week: schoolroom on weekdays, church and meeting hall the rest of the time. For a colony founded by a temperance-minded chaplain, a schoolhouse that doubled as a church was the perfect first civic statement.
The same year the farmers made a quieter investment: olive trees, planted as windbreaks around the citrus groves the freezes had not yet finished off. The oranges mostly died; the olives did not. Some of those 1896 windbreaks still line Second Street near the civic center — the oldest living things the settlers left us, outlasting the groves they were planted to protect.
The wooden schoolhouse served until 1909, when the brick Little Red Schoolhouse replaced it — the one that still stands in Old Town. But the district organized in 1896 made Scottsdale a community with institutions rather than merely neighbors. The next institution arrived a year later, in the form of a store with a post office window: see 1897.