The record for 1925 is thin on the ground in Scottsdale and rich on the river above it. That year the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association finished Mormon Flat Dam, begun in 1923 in the canyon below Roosevelt: a concrete arch that formed Canyon Lake and, more to the point, spun turbines. It was the first of three lower-Salt hydroelectric dams — Horse Mesa followed in 1927 and Stewart Mountain in 1930 — that Charles Cragin’s power program built to sell electricity and pay down the Association’s debt to the government. Scottsdale’s fields were watered and, soon, its houses lit by the same river.
In the town the mid-decade recovery from the cotton bust went on without headlines: alfalfa, grain, citrus, dairy; Saba’s and the merchant row would follow in a couple of years; the high school on Indian School Road was two years old. Phoenix, for its part, opened a first municipal airport near Christy Road and 59th Avenue — a dirt field that was the seed of Sky Harbor and, decades on, of the winter visitor who flies in rather than rides the Southern Pacific.
What 1925 was really preparing was the following year. Painter Jessie Benton Evans had settled at the foot of Camelback and given twelve acres to her son Robert, an architect, who was designing the adobe house his wife Sylvia would open as a tearoom in 1926 — the beginning of the Jokake Inn and of the winter-visitor economy that carried the rest of the decade. A note on dates: some online lists date the George Ellis and Louise Lincoln Kerr houses to 1925; the city’s own register puts Ellis’s arrival at 1935, his first house at 1937 and Kerr’s at 1948.