The 1934 headline is a school that became a restaurant. John C. Lincoln — the Cleveland electrical-industrialist who had come to the desert for his wife’s health and was, that year, bankrolling Jack Stewart’s Camelback Inn on Mummy Mountain — opened the Judson School for Girls on 22 acres off Lincoln Drive at the foot of Camelback, a boarding school for eastern daughters whose parents wintered at the inns. It lasted three years. In 1937 Jan and Mark Gruber bought the campus and reopened it as El Chorro Lodge, the guest ranch and restaurant that fed the Camelback corridor for the next eighty years and is still serving sticky buns on the same ground.
The dude business kept widening. Alongside the Jokake Inn, guest houses like the Graves Guest Ranch and the dude ranches beyond town took paying guests for weeks of riding, cookouts, and desert life, and the mythology — horses, sunsets, the open West — was hardening into an industry. Phoenix gave it a name that year: an advertising agency coined “Valley of the Sun,” the slogan that sold January to the rest of the country, and Scottsdale’s ranches rode it as hard as anyone.
The Depression ground on beneath the postcards. Cotton was cheap, the bank on Main Street had closed the year before, and the Mexican-American families who had just finished their adobe church were the town’s steadiest labor. But the pattern that would carry Scottsdale out of the decade was set: sunshine was the crop, and the harvest came in winter. The 1930s chapter tells the rest.