Europe went to war in August 1914; in Scottsdale, the news would take three years to mean anything. The village was two years into statehood and three into the security of Roosevelt Dam — its first stretch of genuinely reliable farming after the drought decade — with irrigated alfalfa, grain, orchards and cotton, a brick schoolhouse, churches, and a population of a few hundred. Cotton was already a main crop: in June the Arizona Republican reported that Scottsdale growers had joined Tempe’s in the sixty-member Tempe Cotton Exchange, which was building a gin at Tempe for about 2,500 acres, an eighth of them next to Scottsdale.
The year’s politics happened in the schoolhouse. On October 10 the Progressive Party’s county candidates held a meeting there before a crowded room, and the Rev. Daines of Tempe explained “the dry amendment.” On November 3 Arizona voted for prohibition, 25,887 to 22,743, carried by Maricopa County; it took effect at midnight on January 1, 1915. The 1910s politics chapter has both stories. Out on Scottsdale Road, a house was going up that fall for Vice President Thomas Marshall.
If anything was fading, it was the Valley’s strangest sideline. The 1910s were the decade fashion killed the ostrich-plume market that early Scottsdale-area farms had ridden, done in by changing hat styles and the automobile’s open cockpit.
The war already remaking Europe would reach these fields in 1917, when long-staple cotton became a strategic material — the turn that dominates the 1910s chapter.