Three days that became forever
By the first days of March 1933 the country’s banking system was coming apart. On Thursday, March 2, Arizona’s governor, B. B. Moeur, proclaimed a three-day holiday for the state’s banks, backed by the legislature. “All Arizona banks, except those at Nogales, Bisbee and Douglas began Thursday observing a three day holiday, pursuant to a proclamation issued by Gov. Moeur,” the Nogales International reported. The Douglas Daily Dispatch explained that “a banking holiday is an optional affair with banks in Arizona,” and that the Douglas banks would “use their discretion.” Four days later President Roosevelt closed every bank in the country.
Most Arizona banks reopened once examiners cleared them. The Farmer’s State Bank of Scottsdale did not. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s timeline records that it “closes March 2 for a ‘bank holiday’ called by Governor B.B. Moeur. It never reopens,” and Salt River Stories agrees that “Scottsdale’s only bank closed during the 1933 ‘bank holiday’ and never reopened.” What happened to its depositors is not in any source found.
What the town lost
The bank had opened on January 17, 1921, chartered by local farmers in the middle of the cotton crash, with the Vice President’s father-in-law as its president. Through the 1920s its building was the town’s meeting room, where the first chamber of commerce and the Farm Bureau met. Salt River Stories says “the chamber of commerce closed as well” in 1933; no second source has been found.
Scottsdale went the rest of the Depression, the war and the first postwar years without a bank of its own, until the Bank of Douglas opened on Main Street in 1952. The building did better: it became the Rusty Spur Saloon, and the vault is the cooler. The bank’s guide has its whole record, and the 1930–1951 politics chapter the town that went on without it. The rest of the year is at 1933.