Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Saturday, January 22, 1921

January 22, 1921: The Farmer's State Bank Opens Its Doors

A year after the cotton crash, a farm town of a thousand gets its first bank — and, twelve years later, its most famous bar.

Illustrated plaque for January 22, 1921 in Scottsdale history SCOTTSDALE JANUARY 22 1921 STATEHOOD & THE FARM TOWN

What happened

The Farmer's State Bank opened for business on January 22, 1921, in a new brick building at what is now 7245 East Main Street, with E.O. Brown among its founders and directors. Cotton and citrus farmers who had been riding to Phoenix to bank could now do it at home. The bank closed on March 2, 1933, in Governor Moeur's bank holiday, and never reopened.

Why it matters

The bank marked Scottsdale's shift from fields to storefronts — the first of the Main Street institutions of the 1920s — and its failure was the Depression's clearest local wound. The building outlived it by a century: the Rusty Spur Saloon opened inside in 1951, Scottsdale's first bar, with the vault as a beer cooler and the walls papered in signed dollar bills.

A bank in the bust

The timing looked terrible. Pima cotton, which had sold for more than a dollar a pound during the war, had collapsed to a quarter or less in the twelve months before the bank opened; farmers who had torn out orchards for fiber were sitting on debt. Yet on January 22, 1921 the Farmer’s State Bank opened its doors in a new brick building on Main Street, and the Salt River Stories history of the building is right that the opening “signaled the promise of the burgeoning community.” The promise was E.O. Brown’s. The rancher-merchant who owned the general store, the DC cattle ranch to the north and half the town’s credit helped found the bank, and a town whose farmers had to ride to Phoenix to deposit a check now had a vault of its own.

For twelve years it worked. The bank carried the accounts of the merchant row that grew around it — Saba’s from 1927, the Bulletin, the pool hall, the blacksmith — and of the guest ranches that were beginning to sell January to easterners. Then the Depression caught up. On March 2, 1933, Governor Benjamin Moeur declared a bank holiday, the Farmer’s State Bank closed its doors, and it never reopened; the town’s first Chamber of Commerce folded the same year. 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 the second Chamber of Commerce and the town’s first lending library, then a real-estate office, and in 1951 — the year the town incorporated — it opened as the Rusty Spur Saloon, Scottsdale’s first bar. The vault is the walk-in cooler. The thousands of signed dollar bills on the walls began, by the saloon’s telling, as cowboys’ credit for lean weeks. Seventy-five years later it is still pouring, the oldest continuously operating drinking establishment in a town that has since built a great many. The Rusty Spur guide has the current state of the bar; the 1920s chapter has the Main Street the bank anchored.