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Landmark day • Monday, January 17, 1921

January 17, 1921: The Farmers' State Bank Opens Its Doors

With cotton in free fall, a farm town of a thousand opens its first bank, and twelve years later loses it.

Illustrated plaque for January 17, 1921 in Scottsdale history SCOTTSDALE JANUARY 17 1921 STATEHOOD & THE FARM TOWN

What happened

The Farmers' State Bank of Scottsdale, incorporated on December 21, 1920 and licensed on December 30, opened for business on Monday morning, January 17, 1921, in a new brick building at what is now 7245 East Main Street. The Arizona Republican named W. E. Kimsey president, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and Charles Miller vice presidents, and Y. C. White cashier. It closed on March 2, 1933, in Governor Moeur's bank holiday, and never reopened.

Why it matters

The bank was the first of the town-making institutions of the early 1920s, followed within a year by a chamber of commerce that met in its building and a justice court whose first judge was its president. Its failure was the Depression's clearest local wound, and its building outlived it by a century as the Rusty Spur Saloon.

A bank in the bust

The timing looked terrible. Pima cotton, which had touched $1.35 a pound in the war, would hardly sell at 40 cents by early 1921, and farmers who had torn out orchards for it were sitting on unsold bales and debt. Yet a month earlier, on December 21, 1920, three Scottsdale men, W. E. Kimsey, Y. C. White and R. A. Chestnut, had filed articles of incorporation for the Farmers’ State Bank of Scottsdale with $20,000 in capital. “That their faith in Arizona is not disturbed by the unrest throughout the country,” the Arizona Republican wrote, “is demonstrated by their launching a banking institution at this time, and if the permit is granted Scottsdale will have the first bank in its history.” The state superintendent of banks granted the license on December 30.

On Monday morning, January 17, 1921, the bank opened in a new brick building on Main Street. “W. E. Kinsey [Kimsey], father-in-law of Vice President Marshall, is president of the bank,” the Scottsdale column reported. “Vice President Marshall and Charles Miller of Scottsdale are vice presidents and Y. C. White, former cashier of the Citizens Guaranty State bank of Lufkin, Texas, is the cashier.” The directors included Clyde Sharp, J. L. Conrad and Collyer Hearne. The Scottsdale Historical Society calls E. O. Brown, the merchant and gin owner, the bank’s primary investor; the newspaper’s lists of its incorporators, directors and officers do not name him.

What followed

The bank became the town’s meeting room. The chamber of commerce, organized at the schoolhouse three days before the bank opened, was meeting “at the bank building” by August, and the Farm Bureau kept a room there. In December 1921 the county gave Scottsdale its own justice court, and on January 4, 1922 the bank’s president became its first judge. By July 1921 the Scottsdale column counted nine places of business in town, against three a year before.

For twelve years the bank carried the town’s accounts. Then the Depression caught up. On March 2, 1933, Governor Benjamin Moeur declared a bank holiday, the Farmers’ State Bank closed its doors and it never reopened. Scottsdale did not have a bank again until the Bank of Douglas opened in 1952.

The vault becomes a beer cooler

The building did better than the bank. It housed currency-exchange, insurance and real-estate offices, a lending library at one time, the Scottsdale Coffee Shop and, in 1947, the first office of the newly incorporated Chamber of Commerce. In the early 1950s (1951, by the saloon’s own count) it became the Rusty Spur. The city’s register report dates the saloon to 1958 and the Historical Society to 1953; the sources don’t agree. The vault is the walk-in cooler. The Farmers’ State Bank guide has the bank’s whole record, the Rusty Spur guide the bar’s, and the 1920s politics chapter the town the bank helped organize.