The Depression arrived in Scottsdale slowly and then all at once. Cotton prices, never recovered from 1920, fell further; local charities and relief funds ran dry, and nearby Phoenix teachers voluntarily took a 5 percent pay cut. Federal work relief would come later in the decade, and with it, as the 1930–1951 politics chapter tells, an argument over whether a self-reliant farm town should take it. The Farmer’s State Bank on Main Street, the town’s only bank since 1921, was carrying more paper than it could collect and had two years to live. The dude ranches and the Jokake Inn, selling January to easterners whose fortunes had survived, were the only businesses in town getting bigger.
Two quieter projects began that would outlast every bank. The Mexican-American families of the south side — the Corrals, the Ochoas, the Herreras — started collecting money for a church of their own: treasurer Doña Dolores Rivera de Ochoa took donations from as far away as Chicago, and the plan was to make the bricks themselves. It took two years and 14,000 fifty-pound adobes; the result, Our Lady of Perpetual Help at First Street and Brown Avenue, held its first Mass in October 1933 and is the oldest church standing in the city.
And in a one-room studio in the desert north of the townsite, the cowboy artist Lon Megargee finished fifteen murals for the Arizona State Capitol — the first public art to come out of a Scottsdale studio, a decade before the Craft Center and the arts colony it seeded. Megargee’s later hand-built house, Casa Hermosa, became the Hermosa Inn; his 1931 murals still hang in the Capitol. The 1930s chapter follows the town through the rest of the hard decade.