Some years a town simply upgrades everything at once. After a decade of drought, land-pledging, and waiting on a dam, Scottsdale’s accumulated optimism cashed out in 1909 — three changes in a single year that between them sketched the next century.
The most durable was the Little Red Schoolhouse: a handsome brick building, put up on a $4,526 contract, under a $5,000 bond voters approved in May, to replace the wooden one-room school of 1896. It would go on to serve as town hall, library, and justice court, and since 1991 it has housed the Scottsdale Historical Museum — the single most important surviving building in Old Town. The most consequential for daily life was at the store, where rancher-merchant E.O. Brown took over the general store; the Brown family would anchor Scottsdale commerce for decades, and Brown Avenue still carries the name.
The resort next door
The third change looked, at the time, like somebody else’s news. Just west of the settlement, promoter W.J. Murphy and his son Ralph readied the Ingleside Club, later the Ingleside Inn, to open on December 1 — a refined winter resort that would add a golf course, catering to wealthy easterners down for the season. It proved the desert climate could be sold as a luxury product, and in doing so it invented the industry that would one day define Scottsdale: selling warm winters to cold people.
The founder saw all of it. Winfield Scott died in October 1910, months after the census counted 267 people in the precinct around the town carrying his name, outside the reservation, and months before Roosevelt Dam’s dedication guaranteed that town a future — living exactly long enough to watch the bet pay off. With 1909, the founding era closes; the 1910s bring statehood, the finished dam, and a cotton boom.