In 1913 somebody tried to turn the village into a town. On October 12 the Arizona Republican reported, under the headline “MAKING TOWN OF SCOTTSDALE,” that a Phoenix firm had let a contract to grade the townsite’s streets west of the post office 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.” Its advertisement leaned on a famous winter neighbor: “VICE PRESIDENT MARSHALL purchased three lots here for his future home.” Thomas Marshall had taken office that March, and his wife’s parents, the W. E. Kimseys, farmed at Scottsdale. The company also promised a “Writers Club” of “men of letters and affairs,” of which no later trace has been found. With no town government, the land company named the streets. The 1910s politics chapter has the story and its sources.
The same October article noted that Scottsdale’s growers hoped “to have a cotton gin installed for next year’s crop.” Cotton was already a main crop here, four years before the war made it nearly the only one. Two years of water from Roosevelt Dam were showing up in the fields: alfalfa, grain, orchards and cotton.
On the 80 acres of Winfield Scott’s orchard and vineyard he had bought from the family, Charles Miller built a small Craftsman bungalow, the Charles Miller House, moved twice since and still standing. The village now had a brick schoolhouse, a general store, churches and a state government instead of a territorial one. It had no bank, no newspaper and no high school; those waited for the 1920s. The war that would turn its fields over to cotton arrives in 1917.