Sixty-three years without a government
The strangest fact about Incorporation Day is how long it took to arrive. Winfield Scott filed on this land in 1888, and for the next six decades the settlement that grew around his claim was run by improvisation: the county for law, the school board for civic identity, the Chamber of Commerce for ambition, and — after Lou Witzeman organized Rural Metro in 1948 — a private subscription brigade for fire. It worked, more or less, for a farm village. It could not work for what Scottsdale was becoming.
The postwar decade forced the issue from every direction. Veterans who had trained at the Valley’s wartime airfields came back with families and GI loans; the 1950 census counted 2,032 people and climbing; the artisans scattered by that year’s Craft Center fire were turning downtown into a genuine commercial district that needed zoning to protect it. And Phoenix was annexing hungrily. A community with no legal self could not say no to its neighbor, could not build sewers, could not write its own rules.
The paperwork
Arizona law let a community incorporate by petition if enough property owners signed, and in the spring of 1951 they signed in numbers that made a vote pointless. On Monday, June 25, 1951, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved the petition, declared the Town of Scottsdale incorporated on roughly a square mile (the city’s own history says “approximately half a square mile”) around the old townsite, and appointed the first council: Mort Kimsey, Bill Miller, E.G. Scott, Jack Sweeney and Malcolm White. The council then chose White — cafe owner, theater builder, and the loudest voice in the Chamber — as mayor. The first town hall was a rented room at the Rural Fire station at Brown Avenue and Second Street; Virgie Lutes Brown became the first town clerk.
A stage set, now with jurisdiction
What the new town did with its powers is the real story of the day. White and the Chamber had spent the late 1940s polishing “The West’s Most Western Town,” and the young government essentially zoned the slogan into existence — hitching posts, board sidewalks, and western storefront requirements that turned the town center into a stage set for the tourist economy. Marketing became municipal policy, and everyone was in on the joke, and it worked magnificently. That November the Chamber and the Scottsdale Riding Club rode the first Sunshine Festival parade down Scottsdale Road — the Parada del Sol under its first name.
The legal fence mattered just as much. Armed with annexation power, the one-square-mile town began racing Phoenix for the surrounding county land — a contest that ran for decades. By 1960 the population had quintupled to 10,026; in October 1961 the town traded up to a city charter and the next year celebrated by banning billboards. Everything municipal in modern Scottsdale — the council, the codes, the city limits — descends from the quiet paperwork of this Monday. The rest of the year’s story is at 1951, and the full decade in the 1950s chapter.