The town’s more sober institutions kept multiplying. The Methodist Church was established in 1924, joining the Baptists — organized in 1912 — in a community that took its congregations seriously. A settlement founded by a Baptist chaplain on temperance principles now had two Protestant churches for a population of perhaps 1,500, and its Mexican-American families were nine years from building the adobe Catholic church that would outlast both buildings.
Around them the winter-visitor economy was assembling itself piece by piece. Painter Jessie Benton Evans had settled at the foot of Camelback Mountain, her circle wintering nearby, and in 1926 her daughter-in-law’s Jokake tearoom would tie the threads together into an actual industry. Society horse sports were coming too, though not yet: the riding club that became the Valley Field Riding and Polo Club would not incorporate until 1929. In 1924 the pieces were still just pieces, but the pattern was forming — January sunshine, it was becoming clear, was the one commodity Scottsdale could sell that never suffered a price crash.
Down on the farms the recovery from the cotton bust continued the dull way: alfalfa, grain, citrus and dairy, and cotton again on a saner scale. The earnest dry farm town and the winter playground were learning to coexist on the same few streets, as they would for decades after.