At a glance: Scottsdale’s economy began with a desert-land claim and a sale. Winfield Scott paid the government $1,520 for 600 acres in 1888 and 1889 and paid more than twice that for the water rights; within fifteen months he had sold 400 of the acres for $10,200. For two decades the place tried to live on what the water could grow, first citrus and grapes, then alfalfa and milk, and on what the air could sell, winter rooms and tents for people with weak lungs. The canal company that sold the water failed in 1897. The landowners pledged their land for a federal dam in 1903, and by the 1910 census the county’s farm land was worth more than three times an acre what it had been in 1900. In October 1909 the townsite’s owner cleared away the tents to sell lots to people who would stay. That is where the town’s real estate market starts.
The founding arithmetic
The sources agree on the transaction to the dollar. Scott’s biographer, Richard Lynch, writing for the city in 1978 from the land office and county records, gives the day: on July 2, 1888, at the United States land office in Tucson, “an unknown agent for Scott made a down payment of fifty cents per acre” on Section 23, the square mile now bounded by Scottsdale, Indian School, Hayden and Chaparral roads. On 640 acres that was $320. The price was the General Land Office’s desert-land price of 1887, 50 cents at entry and $2 at final proof, which the opening chapter explains; the Desert Land Act entry tells the law.
Scott never paid for the whole section. The Arizona Canal crossed its northwest corner, and the forty acres north of the canal could not be watered from it, so he gave them back to the government. In September 1889 he made the final payment at the Tucson office, “$1,200, representing $2 an acre for 600 acres.” The land cost him $1,520 in all, a figure Patricia Myers McElfresh’s history of the city also gives, and the Historical Society’s timeline records the return of the land north of the canal.
The water cost more. By February 1889 Scott had transferred seven Arizona Canal water rights to his land, one right for each 80 acres, enough for 560 acres. At the company’s price of $500 a right, that is about $3,500, and Lynch writes that the rights “probably cost him three times the amount of his final payment; it is likely he borrowed money to pay for them, and they only guaranteed him the right to buy water from the canal company.” The yearly water rental came on top.
Then he sold. In February 1889, seven months after filing, he sold 40 acres and half a water right to Mary Brown White of Rochester, New York, at $30 an acre. On October 30, 1889, he sold 360 acres to W. J. Murphy, the canal’s builder, at $25 an acre. Within fifteen months of the down payment Scott had taken in $10,200 for 400 acres. Lynch is plain that it was not profit: “bills for fruit trees, barley seed, grapevines, water, supplies, and three miles of fence needed payment.” Scott kept 200 acres in two parcels and farmed them until 1908. The chart below lays the payments and the sales side by side.
The pattern repeated to the south. In June 1890 Albert G. Utley bought Section 26, the square mile below Scott’s, from his niece Nannie C. Utley Fulwiler for $1,000, about $1.56 an acre. She had filed on it under the same act; what Utley bought was her claim, not watered farmland, and Lynch gives the price in a footnote.
Citrus, the cash crop that did not last
Scott’s bet was oranges. He planted 1,500 seedlings in October 1889, and when the thermometer fell to twelve degrees in Phoenix on Christmas Eve that year, the trees in the “orange belt” along Camelback Mountain survived. By the autumn of 1891 he was advertising orange and lemon trees in the Phoenix Herald in lots of a hundred at seventy cents a tree and a thousand at sixty cents, 5,000 trees and then 25,000 more. Lynch writes that the valley had fifteen hundred acres of oranges, lemons and limes by 1894, and the engineering record’s history of the canal counts more than 150,000 citrus trees on 1,500 acres by the middle of the decade.
The ranch also tried grapes, at $30 a ton or about $250 an acre, and peanuts, at five cents a pound: one wagonload to Charles Donofrio of Phoenix brought $100. None of it lasted. The record cold of 1891–92 showed where citrus could not go, and in the late 1890s came, in Lynch’s words, “a severe drought, and prices for fruit which did not even pay the freight charges.” In December 1897 Scott plowed five acres of vines under for alfalfa. Campaigning for the territorial House in 1898, he told a Phoenix rally: “I was compelled to grub out eighty acres of orchard at my ranch because there was not sufficient water.” Alfalfa fed the valley’s dairy herds, which took five or six cuttings a year, and by 1905 Scott was running about a hundred head of dairy cattle and selling spare cuttings at $12 a ton.
A townsite sold for health
In February 1894 Utley and George A. Williams, “a prominent citizen of Chicago” who owned the 40 acres to the west, announced a townsite called Orangedale on the northwest 40 acres of Section 26. Their plans, as Lynch summarizes the announcement, included a street railway, a daily bus to Phoenix in the meantime, a sanatorium, small cottages for winter visitors and a resort hotel. Between February and August the name became Scottsdale, and lots went on sale in 1895. The townsite entry has the plat.
What the lots cost is not in any source read. One line in the Arizona Republican’s list of county transfers for October 30, 1894, records “lot 9, Orangedale tract, $1,200,” without saying whether that was a town lot or an acreage tract; at that price it was probably farmland. McElfresh quotes the March 1895 “Scottsdale Fruit Lands” advertisement as offering land at $100 to $250 an acre. The advertisement itself, which Lynch also quotes, sold “undeveloped acreage or orchards nearing maturity” on easy terms, with a certificate from the territory’s surgeon general that Scottsdale was “the Best Location for Sanitary purposes of any part of the valley.”
That was the market. Lynch writes that “the great majority of these families had one or more members with some respiratory ailment,” and the first winter guests of 1894, a railway man from Kansas City and a grain merchant from Chicago, came to hunt and regain their health. By November 1897 townsite families were adding rooms or pitching extra tents on their lots for winter boarders. The store lot came with a deed restriction against liquor, the colony’s terms of sale written into the title. The health-seeker entry follows the trade.
When the water company failed
The water rights Scott had paid for only guaranteed the right to buy water, and the drought showed what that was worth. On November 15, 1897, the Glendale Fruit Company and other water users sued the Arizona Canal Company: the canal was not cleaned, it could not deliver what the rights promised, and “money paid for water rights and rentals was not utilized.” The Merchants Loan and Trust Company petitioned against both companies the next day, and on December 16 a receiver took over the canal, more than 100 miles of ditches and laterals and 5,000 acres of land. Irrigation Age blamed land “priced too high so that few buyers purchased acreage under the Arizona Canal.” In 1898 the bondholders’ new Arizona Water Company bought each company at foreclosure for $100,000, according to the engineering record.
The new owner did no better in a dry year. In November 1905 the Republican’s Scottsdale column reported ranchers planting anyway, “despite the fact that the water company refuse to sell water.” By then the valley’s landowners had chosen another way. In February 1903 about 4,800 of them formed the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association and pledged more than 200,000 acres as security for a federal storage dam. The June 1904 agreement estimated the dam at $2.7 million, or $15 an acre on the 180,000 acres then covered, the cost “equally divided among the members… regardless of the use or nonuse of the water,” in one history of the project’s account. In April 1906 the government bought the Arizona Canal for $235,168 and four other north-side canals for $78,993, $314,161 in all, and in 1908 finished the Granite Reef Diversion Dam as their new headworks. A pledged acre now carried a share of a public debt instead of a private water right.
Winter air for sale
Through the 1900s the village’s other crop was its visitors. Lynch estimates that in the winter of 1900–01 Scottsdale held fewer than two hundred people, visitors included, while Phoenix and its suburbs held about fifteen thousand; some visitors camped in their own tents and took meals with families who kept table boarders. In October 1905, as the health seekers arrived, the population “almost doubled,” and two stage operators added runs to Phoenix. The Republican headed its Scottsdale column that November “SCOTTSDALE’S SEASON: That Famous Winter Resort in its Glory.” By November 1907 the chaplain himself was advertising “two good tent houses for light housekeeping at Scottsdale.”
No rent for a Scottsdale tent house survives in the sources read. Nor does the trade appear in any count: the census never separated winter residents, and the 1910 count was taken on April 15, after many had gone.
What the land was worth
Two kinds of evidence show land values climbing as the dam went up, and they should not be read as the same thing. The first is a land agent’s advertising. In September 1907 Francis Frazier, “land and stock agent, Scottsdale, Arizona,” asked $35 an acre for 120 acres. In March 1909 he asked $150 an acre for 160 acres, and the same for 20 acres of “fine orange land, old water right.” Those are asking prices for different parcels, not sales, and the record does not show how much of the jump is the land and how much the dam.
The second is the census. In 1900 the Bureau valued Maricopa County’s farm land at $5,216,696 on 170,716 acres in farms, $30.56 an acre; in 1910, $25,945,339 on 248,271 acres, $104.50. The number of farms in the county rose from 1,089 to 2,229. Across Arizona the value of an acre of farm land rose from $5.90 to $33.97, and the Bureau gave the reason in a sentence: “Due to the building of Roosevelt and Laguna reservoirs.” Most of the county’s 2,229 farms in 1910 were family-sized, 20 to 174 acres, the farms the canals had been selling since 1885.
What work paid
Farm wages were the economy’s floor, and Arizona’s were high. The Department of Agriculture’s survey of farm wages, compiled by G. K. Holmes in 1912, put a hired man by the year in Arizona at $25 a month without board in 1888, $33 in 1890 and $44.95 in 1909, against a national average of $25.46 in 1909. Arizona farms paid $1,152,670 for labor in 1899 and $2,504,984 in 1909, by the census. In 1896 School District No. 48 hired Alza Blount as its first teacher at $40 a month, and her daughter Bertha took a Scottsdale teaching job in 1904 at $50, according to the district’s history.
The work in the village itself was a farm town’s. The Republican’s columns of 1908 to 1910 advertise for “a man capable and equipped to work ranch of 120 acres on shares or money rent,” and for men to clear land; they report beef cattle sold to a Tempe butcher, barley disced into alfalfa, a threshing outfit moving in for the season, and a man who “started a wagon dispensing fruit and vegetables.” Scott leased his grain fields and pasture to the Butts brothers for five years and in the winter of 1909 sold his dairy herd. The store traded with Fort McDowell and the Salt River reservation as well as the townsite.
1909: the village decides to be a town
Within a few months of 1909 the record shows the place spending on permanence. On May 1 the school district’s voters approved a $5,000 bond without a contrary vote, and in the summer the trustees let a contract for $4,526 to C. H. Kunselman for a brick schoolhouse, today’s Little Red Schoolhouse; most accounts round the price to $4,500. That autumn E. O. Brown was laying cement blocks for a new store, and the Haydens were building a cement-block house. In October Albert Utley “decided not to rent any more space for tent houses on the Scottsdale townsite,” the Republican reported, so that he could “clean up his property in the townsite and make it attractive to those who will want to build permanent residences.” Health seekers would have to pitch their tents east of town.
Capital tried to follow. In February 1909 half of the $125,000 needed for a motor line from Phoenix was pledged, and in March Scott formed the Orange Belt and Scottsdale Railroad, capitalized at $150,000. He and ten others subscribed $11,300, which Lynch calculates at “little more than $1,000 per mile for the ten-mile line” against the $15,000 a mile needed to build it. The line died with Scott in 1910. Two miles west, Murphy and his son Ralph built the Ingleside Club in the old company orange grove, to open to patrons on December 1, 1909, with stables, tennis and lots for sale to “buyers who will improve property.” Its pitch, in the Republican that August, turned the village’s trade around: “not a sanitarium colony. It is Ingleside’s ambition, rather, to keep well people well.” The Ingleside Inn guide follows the resort into the 1920s.
What these years set in motion
- The founder made his money selling, not farming. The first transactions on record are a $1,520 claim resold at ten to twelve times the price within fifteen months, the first case of the land-sale economy that ran on through the townsite, the postwar subdivisions and the master-planned communities.
- Water was a debt before it was an asset. The rights Scott bought failed with their company; what made the land valuable in the end was the dam the landowners pledged it to pay for. Roosevelt Dam was dedicated on March 18, 1911, and the 1910s chapter of the history tells what its water grew.
- Visitors were an industry before there was a resort. The tents, the boarders and the stage runs of the 1900s were the trade the Ingleside Club set out to change from health to leisure; the Ingleside Inn guide follows it into the resort era of the 1920s.
- The town’s first count is a precinct. The 267 that every history repeats is a subtraction from a precinct total, and no count of the village alone exists for these years. This chapter prints each figure with what it counted.