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Landmark day • Monday, July 13, 1896

July 13, 1896: School District No. 48 Is Born

Before a store, a post office or a town, the settlement gets a school district — seventeen children, one adobe room, and a name spelled 'Scotts-Dale.'

Scottsdale's first one-room wooden schoolhouse, built in 1896, with students gathered outside
The one-room frame schoolhouse the settlers raised in the fall of 1896, a few months after the district was organized. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened

County records for July 13, 1896 established School District No. 48, petitioned that summer by the families farming under the Arizona Canal around the Scott claim. The district's first classes met in the adobe home of Alza Blount, who was paid $40 a month to teach eight to ten pupils from seven families; by fall the settlers had raised a 16-by-18-foot frame schoolhouse, where Hattie Green taught fourteen pupils for $45 a month. The petition spelled the place 'Scotts-Dale.'

Why it matters

The district was Scottsdale's first public institution, older than its store (1897), its townsite name in common use, and its town government (1951) by fifty-five years. It is the direct ancestor of the Scottsdale Unified School District, which still carries the number 48, and its 1909 brick successor, the Little Red Schoolhouse, is the city's history museum.

Seventeen children

In the summer of 1896 the settlement beside Winfield Scott’s ranch had no name anyone agreed on, no store, no post office and no church building. It had children. Seventeen of them, by the count the families made when they petitioned the county that summer to form a school district, and the petition — which spelled the place “Scotts-Dale” — was granted on July 13, 1896. The new district was numbered 48, a number the Scottsdale Unified School District still carries.

The first classroom was a front room. Alza Blount, who had come from Illinois with her husband George for her health, taught the first eight to ten pupils in the family’s adobe house just south of today’s Civic Center Plaza, for $40 a month. The first school board was Scott himself, John Tait and Frank Titus. By fall the settlers had pooled their labor — the same neighborly labor that had rebuilt the Scott home after the fire the previous Christmas — and raised a plain frame room sixteen feet by eighteen on donated land. It opened with fourteen pupils in all eight grades, taught by Hattie Green for $45 a month, and on the days it was not a school it was the church and the meeting hall.

Why a school first

The order of Scottsdale’s firsts is a clue to the kind of place it was. The chaplain’s colony was recruited from temperance-minded, church-going families, many of them with sick relatives sent west for the dry air, and their first act of collective government was to educate their children. The store and the post office came the next year, in 1897; the townsite plat had been filed by Albert Utley in 1894 but the name was not yet fixed. The school was the first thing that made the scattering of farms a community with a boundary and a tax.

It also outgrew itself almost immediately. A twelve-foot room was added in August 1897; by 1909 the frame building was hopeless, and thirteen voters — every one of them a yes — approved a $5,000 bond for the two-room brick school that opened that fall and was dedicated on February 26, 1910. That building, the Little Red Schoolhouse, is the museum where the district’s story is told today. The rest of the founding decade is in the 1890s chapter.