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Landmark day • Friday, April 6, 1917

April 6, 1917: America Goes to War, and Cotton Goes Strategic

A declaration of war in Washington turns a desert farm village into a cotton boomtown — and brings the Mexican and Mexican-American families who would build the town for the next century.

Illustration of Pima cotton fields at harvest in 1910s Scottsdale, with pickers, cotton sacks, and a gin building on the horizon
Pima cotton at harvest: the crop the war made strategic. Illustration: Scottsdale.tips.

What happened

Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Military demand for extra-long-staple cotton — for truck and aircraft tires, balloon fabric, and airplane wings — exploded just as Egyptian supplies were cut off by U-boats, and the substitute had been perfected at the USDA farm near Sacaton: Pima cotton. Prices went vertical. Scottsdale's farmers pulled out orchards and alfalfa and planted cotton to the fencerows; Valley growers recruited Mexican and Mexican-American farmworker families by the hundreds, many of whom put down permanent roots south and east of the townsite.

Why it matters

The war made Scottsdale a commodity town for three years, tripled its population to 1,047 by 1920, and — most durably — brought the families whose hands would raise the Old Adobe Mission and whose descendants still shape the city. It also set up the crash of 1920–21 that forced the town's reinvention around Main Street and winter guests.

A fiber shortage, thirty miles away

Modern war ran on cotton in ways the public never saw. Truck and aircraft tires needed cord made from extra-long-staple fiber; so did observation-balloon fabric and the doped linen of airplane wings. Before 1917 nearly all of that fiber came from Egypt, and by 1917 Egyptian cotton had to cross an Atlantic full of U-boats. Goodyear had already come to the Salt River Valley the year before to grow its own. When Congress declared war on April 6, the government’s procurement machine did the rest.

The substitute was ready. At the USDA experimental farm near Sacaton, on the Gila River Indian Community, plant breeders working with Akimel O’odham farmers had spent a decade perfecting an American long-staple variety, named Pima in their honor. It grew beautifully in the Valley’s irrigated heat, and after the dam filled in 1915 there was water to spare. Prices went from a normal year’s fraction of a dollar toward more than a dollar a pound, and Scottsdale’s farmers did what farmers do when a crop pays four times what any other crop pays: they planted nothing else. Orchards came out. Alfalfa came out. By the decade’s end the Valley had something like 180,000 acres in cotton and the gins ran around the clock.

The families who stayed

Cotton is hungry for hands, and the boom’s most lasting effect on Scottsdale was human. Valley growers recruited Mexican and Mexican-American farmworkers by the hundreds, many directly from Sonora and Chihuahua. In Scottsdale they picked, ginned, ditched, and hauled, and were paid less and housed worse than Anglo workers; they settled in a barrio of adobe homes south and east of the townsite. The growers believed they were importing seasonal labor. They were wrong in the best way. Families like the Corrals and Coronados stayed through the crash, opened businesses, raised the town’s churches, and became permanent builders of the community — the hands that made the bricks of the Old Adobe Mission in 1933 belonged to them.

The boom had about three years to run. Its clock started with the armistice of November 1918; the crash came in 1920–21, and what Scottsdale built out of the wreckage is the 1920s chapter. The rest of this year is at 1917.