The Depression’s worst year hit Scottsdale twice, and the town answered it once, in adobe. First the blow: the Farmer’s State Bank, opened on Main Street in the hopeful days of 1921, closed its doors — the town’s only bank, gone in the same national convulsion that shuttered thousands of others. Cash all but vanished from the farm economy. What kept money moving at all was the guest-ranch season and the winter visitors who could still afford it.
The answer came from the town’s Mexican-American families, many of them rooted in Scottsdale since the cotton boom of the 1910s. They had long worshipped without a proper church, and in 1933 there was no money to have one built. So they built it themselves: parishioners molded and sun-dried thousands of adobe bricks on site, then raised Our Lady of Perpetual Help — the Old Adobe Mission — at First Street and Brown Avenue.
The white mission with its stepped facade served the parish for decades, survived years of neglect, and was lovingly restored in the 2000s. It stands today as Old Town’s oldest church — built by the families whose labor had already built the town once in the cotton fields, and who built it a second time in the year nobody had anything, out of the one material the desert gives away free. The rest of the decade’s story is in the 1930s chapter.