A year after the cotton market detonated, Scottsdale did something mildly audacious: it opened a bank. On Monday, January 17, 1921 the Farmers’ State Bank opened its doors in a new brick building on Main Street, with W. E. Kimsey, the Vice President’s father-in-law, as president, and Thomas R. Marshall and Charles Miller as vice presidents. In the middle of the worst agricultural bust in the Valley’s short memory, an institution was wagering that Scottsdale would still need credit — and for a dozen years it did, carrying the town’s accounts until Governor Moeur’s bank holiday of March 1933 closed it for good. The building outlived the bank by a century: the Rusty Spur has poured drinks in it since 1951, with the vault as a beer cooler. The bank’s opening day has its own page.
The town organized around it. Three days before the bank opened, citizens met at the schoolhouse to form a chamber of commerce, and by summer it and the Farm Bureau were meeting in the bank building. In December, at the Farm Bureau committee’s request, the county supervisors gave Scottsdale its own justice precinct, and the bank’s president became its first judge on January 4, 1922. The 1920s politics chapter tells that story.
The county also put Scottsdale Road first in line for paving from the road bonds voted at the end of 1920. Until then the road that ran north past the townsite to the Arizona Canal was a graded dirt track; Salt River Stories says a narrow strip of pavement carried a 30-mile-an-hour limit by 1922, and by the Second World War it would be paved end to end from Curry Road to Thunderbird Field — the town’s first and, for a long time, only fully paved road.
Together the bank and the pavement mark the moment Scottsdale’s center of gravity began shifting from the fields to the storefronts. The merchant row that grew along Main and Brown — E.O. Brown’s general store, Cavalliere’s blacksmith shop, Sterling Drug in its own new 1921 building (the one Saba’s would later occupy), and soon a pool hall and a newspaper — was quietly diverse for a small Arizona town, with Anglo, Syrian, Mexican-American and Chinese-American businesses trading side by side. The build-out continued the next year with the town’s first paper, in 1922.