Fowler McCormick — grandson of both Cyrus McCormick and John D. Rockefeller — had bred some of the world’s finest Arabian horses on 4,200 acres northeast of town. After his death the land was sold, annexed by Scottsdale in 1967, and handed to planners. In 1972 the result went on sale: McCormick Ranch, one of Arizona’s first true master-planned communities.
The pitch was startling for a desert town: man-made lakes, golf fairways as common ground, greenbelt paths knitted into the wash system, housing arranged around water. It felt revolutionary in 1972 and would be debated forever after, but it set the template — planned, amenitized, green — that Scottsdale’s later growth would follow. The ranch’s pedigree survived the subdivision, too: donated ranch land around Guy Stillman’s miniature railroad became the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, the city’s most beloved kids’ institution, and the Arabian horse legacy carried on in the show that remains the world’s largest.
Downtown, a smaller transaction mattered nearly as much. The Chamber of Commerce took the Little Red Schoolhouse on a $1-a-year lease, completing the rescue the Historical Society had launched the year before. In the same twelve months, Scottsdale committed to inventing its future and keeping its past — which is a fair summary of the whole boomtown era.