The census takers arrived first, the reckoning right behind them. The count came in at 1,047 residents — roughly four times the 1910 figure — with three places of business downtown and the school district running six teachers for 410 students. On paper, the cotton boom had built a real town. And in the same year, the boom quit.
Wartime demand for Pima cotton had evaporated. Prices that had touched $1.35 a pound averaged 93 cents for the 1920 crop, and by early 1921 the fiber would hardly sell at 40 cents. Farmers who had ripped out orchards and sold off dairy herds to plant fiber watched the market simply cease to exist. The collapse of 1920–21 ruined some families outright and wounded the rest; the fields would go back to alfalfa, grain, citrus, and dairy, and the town would relearn the founding lesson about betting everything on one crop.
What the crash did not do was empty the place. The families were here, the ditches carried water, and the storefronts kept opening: by July 1921 there were nine places of business. On December 21 three local men filed articles of incorporation for a bank, which the Arizona Republican read as proof “that their faith in Arizona is not disturbed by the unrest throughout the country,” and on December 31 Maricopa County’s voters approved $4.5 million in road bonds that would put Scottsdale Road first in line for paving. The 1920s politics chapter follows both. The whole decade would be a demonstration that Scottsdale’s real asset was never the crop but the town itself. How it got to this cliff is the story of the 1910s; what it did next fills the 1920s chapter.