The census takers counted 2,761 people in and around Scottsdale in 1930 — nearly triple the 1,047 of 1920, which is a strange number for a town whose signature crop had collapsed a decade earlier. The cotton crash was supposed to empty the place out. Instead the fields went back to alfalfa, citrus, and dairy, the Main Street built in the 1920s kept trading, and the winter-guest business that began with the Jokake Inn kept quietly compounding. People had come anyway.
They arrived just in time for the Depression, which settled over Arizona in 1930 the way it settled over everywhere — falling farm prices, tightening credit, hard times in the copper towns. Scottsdale was still unincorporated, still run by the county and the school board, and had no cushion except the one it had accidentally built: wealthy easterners who could still afford an Arizona winter, and kept booking one.
That cushion would be tested fast. Within three years the Farmer’s State Bank — the town’s first and only, opened hopefully in 1921 — would close its doors, and the town’s Mexican-American families would answer the Depression’s worst year by building a church with their own hands. The whole arc is in the 1930s chapter.