The decade wound down with the fuse already lit. By 1949 the town had acquired, in quick succession, a chamber of commerce, a craft colony, a private fire department, and a newspaper — everything a real town needed except the legal part. Veterans and their families kept arriving; the Chamber kept polishing “The West’s Most Western Town”; and the artisans of the Arizona Craft Center kept at their benches, one year short of the fire that would scatter them so productively along Fifth Avenue and Main Street.
No single event from 1949 made the record, which is fitting for a year spent waiting on paperwork. The 1950 census would count 2,032 people, incorporation was becoming a question of when rather than whether, and in July 1951 the crossroads would at last become a legal town. What that unleashed is the story of the 1950s.