At a glance: The 1910s gave Scottsdale the three things every western town prayed for — water, statehood, and a cash crop. Roosevelt Dam was dedicated in 1911, Arizona joined the union in 1912, and World War I turned Pima cotton into white gold. The precinct’s census count went from 267 to 1,047 over the decade, though its lines were redrawn between the two counts; the boom brought the Mexican-American families who would build much of its future, and set up the crash that opens the next chapter.
1911: the water arrives for good
On March 18, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the dam that bore his name and declared it one of the achievements he was proudest to be associated with. For Scottsdale, 80 miles downstream, the speech was almost beside the point — what mattered was the reservoir filling behind the masonry. After two decades of praying over river flows, Valley farmers had guaranteed, year-round irrigation water.
The effect showed immediately in the fields and on the tax rolls. Alfalfa, grain, dates, orchards and, already by 1913, cotton spread; farmhouses got second stories; and in 1913 merchant-farmer Charles Miller built the kind of substantial home that announced the frontier was over.
Eleven months after the dedication, on February 14, 1912, Arizona entered the Union as the 48th state. Scottsdale marked statehood as an unincorporated village of a few hundred people (the 1910 census had counted 267 in the precinct outside the reservation) — it would stay unincorporated, governed by county and school board, for another 39 years. The 1910s politics chapter follows what that meant: a county, a justice precinct shared with Tempe, a school board, and a new state whose voters gave women the ballot in 1912 and voted liquor out in 1914.
The townsite for sale
In the fall of 1913 someone tried to make the village a town. The Arizona Republican reported on October 12 that a Phoenix firm, the Arizona Investment company, had let a contract to grade the townsite’s streets and had new signs made with their names. By the end of November the Arizona Investment and Land Company had taken over the townsite and was selling lots at “$175 and up,” “$10 down, $10 per month,” on the strength of a famous winter neighbor: “VICE PRESIDENT MARSHALL purchased three lots here for his future home.” Thomas Marshall’s wife was the daughter of a Scottsdale rancher, W. E. Kimsey, and the Marshalls’ house went up in 1914. The company also promised a $100,000 “Writers’ Club” that left no later trace in the papers.
The same October article reported that Scottsdale’s growers hoped for “a cotton gin installed for next year’s crop,” and by June 1914 they had joined Tempe’s in a cotton exchange that was building one at Tempe. Cotton was a main crop around Scottsdale before the war; the war made it the largest, though not the only one: in 1919 Maricopa County harvested 75,062 acres of cotton against 66,071 of alfalfa and 50,782 of cereals.
The war that planted cotton to the horizon
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the military discovered it had a fiber problem. Truck and airplane tires, balloon fabric, and aircraft wings all demanded extra-long-staple cotton, most of it previously imported from Egypt — and U-boats had opinions about that supply line. The substitute was growing 30 miles from Scottsdale: the USDA’s experimental farm at Sacaton, on the Gila River Indian Community, had perfected an American long-staple variety named Pima cotton in honor of the Akimel O’odham farmers who developed it.
Prices went vertical, and the Salt River Valley went cotton-mad. Scottsdale farmers, who already grew some, ripped out alfalfa and orchards and planted fencerow to fencerow; the Valley planted 72,000 acres in 1918 and, by 1920, 130,000 to 180,000 acres by different counts, while the census counted 75,062 acres harvested in Maricopa County in 1919. The Ledger charts the spread and the prices. Gins ran around the clock, and for two or three delirious years this quiet Baptist farm town was a boomtown in everything but saloons.
The families the boom brought
Cotton is hungry for labor, and the boom drew Mexican and Mexican-American families to Scottsdale — many recruited directly from Sonora and Chihuahua by Valley growers. They picked, ginned, ditched, and hauled; they were also systematically paid less and housed worse than Anglo workers, settling in a barrio of adobe homes south and east of the townsite.
What the growers treated as temporary labor became permanent community. Families like the Corrals and Coronados stayed through the crash, opened businesses, and within a generation had built some of Scottsdale’s most enduring institutions — including the Old Adobe Mission, raised by hand in 1933. Meanwhile Pima farmers from the Salt River community east of town were part of daily commerce, tying their wagons up on First Avenue; when businesses were later built along that street, it took the name Pima Plaza for them.
The armistice bill comes due
The guns stopped in November 1918, and wartime procurement stopped with them — though cotton prices, running on momentum and speculation, kept climbing into 1920. Every farmer in the Valley knew the smart move was to diversify back out of cotton, and almost nobody did. Scottsdale ended the decade richer than it had ever been, at roughly four times its 1910 population, with its entire economy staked on a single commodity whose price was about to fall off a cliff.
The 1920s open with that crash — and with Scottsdale’s improbable discovery that the same desert that grew cotton could grow something far more profitable: tourists.