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 the business directory up from three establishments to nine 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, and prices that once topped a dollar a pound began chasing their way down toward a dime. 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 — nine businesses became a genuine Main Street within five years. 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.