A year into the Jokake era, Scottsdale was learning its second trade. The adobe tearoom at the foot of Camelback had opened in 1926, and in 1927 architect Robert Evans expanded it into a proper inn — more rooms, and by the next season overnight guests — while the winter-visitor formula of sunshine, riding, Camelback views and eastern guests who came back every season proved out. Jessie Benton Evans’ circle of wintering artists gave the place its first hint of the arts colony to come.
Downtown, the merchant row gained its most durable name. E.M. Saba, a Syrian-born merchant, opened a dry-goods store on Main Street that would dress the farmers first, then the dudes and winter visitors, and would still be selling Western wear in Old Town a century later — the family name that “Since 1927” on the storefront refers to. Around it traded E.O. Brown’s store, Cavalliere’s blacksmith shop, the Farmer’s State Bank and the Bulletin; the high school on Indian School Road filled, and growth was steady enough that the district would need another school within the year — Loloma, opened in 1928.
Upriver, the machinery that made all of it possible finished another stage. Horse Mesa Dam, the middle link of the Salt River chain between Roosevelt and Mormon Flat, was completed after three years’ work, forming Apache Lake and housing the project’s biggest power plant. And down at Chandler, a Wisconsin architect named Frank Lloyd Wright made his first Arizona trip, to draw a resort that would never be built. He would be back for the Biltmore in 1928 and, in 1937, for good. The town of a thousand-odd was quietly becoming a town of nearly three thousand, and nobody had to plant an acre of cotton to do it.