At a glance: The 1910s turned water into a price. Roosevelt Dam was dedicated in 1911, and within three years new ditches had opened three sections along Scottsdale Road, valued at $100 to $150 an acre. A Phoenix company tried to sell the townsite as a suburb at $175 a lot, on the strength of the Vice President’s winter house. Then the war made long-staple cotton the Valley’s crop: about 400 acres in 1912, 72,000 in 1918, 75,062 harvested in Maricopa County in 1919, at 80 cents and more a pound. By December 1919 brokers were asking $400 an acre for farms near Scottsdale, and the precinct counted 1,047 people. Every one of those numbers rested on the price of cotton, and the next decade’s history opens with what happened to it.
The dam, and the land it opened
Roosevelt Dam was dedicated on March 18, 1911, and its lake filled for the first time in April 1915. For the land around Scottsdale the effect came through the ditches. In October 1913 the Arizona Republican’s correspondent wrote that “during the past two years the most of the land in and about the Scottsdale country, which was desert, has now been placed in cultivation.” In April 1914 the paper reported that, “with the building of ditches to secure water from the Arizona canal, three sections of new land lying on both sides of the Scottsdale road have been opened to settlement,” in tracts of 40 to 160 acres, with cotton and alfalfa the chief crops. “The tract ranges in value from one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars an acre.”
The census shows the same change across the county. Maricopa County had 2,229 farms in 1910 and 3,930 in 1920. Its improved land, cleared and watered, grew from 172,592 acres to 279,334. Land in farms as a whole more than tripled, to 802,396 acres, but most of the addition was desert range, 517,423 acres of it unimproved. That is why the census value of an acre of farm land in the county barely moved, from $104.50 in 1910 to $105.33 in 1920, while the asking price of a watered acre near Scottsdale rose two to three times: the county average was diluted by cheap range, and the chart below sets the two side by side.
The water had a debt attached. In November 1916 the Republican told landowners that each of them had “at stake the sum of $21 an acre on every acre he owns,” the overcharge the water users’ association said the government had added to the dam’s cost, $3.6 million in all. On November 1, 1917, the Water Users’ Association took over the dam and canals from the Reclamation Service.
The townsite as a suburb
In the fall of 1913 a Phoenix firm tried to sell the village as a place to live. The Arizona Investment and Land Company graded the townsite’s streets, put up signs and advertised lots: “Prices $175 and up per lot. $10 down, $10 per month. 5 per cent off for cash.” Its selling point was a winter neighbor. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall’s wife Lois was the daughter of William E. Kimsey, an Indiana merchant who had planted oranges at Scottsdale, and the advertisement reported three lots sold to the Vice President, two to F. K. Graves and one each to two other buyers. By May 1914 the company was promising “the $100,000 Writers’ Club” on the site of the Ingleside Country Club, still at $10 down and $10 a month. The club was never built. The Marshalls did build. A house was going up for them by November 1914, as the 1910s politics chapter records, and the Republican’s Scottsdale column of October 1917 reported “the vice presidential family” arriving for a short stay “at their pleasant bungalow.”
The lots sold slowly, and the two interurban lines proposed between 1911 and 1914 were abandoned. The townsite stayed a farm village’s center, with Brown’s store, the school and the Graves Ranch, whose screened sleeping cottages, “our own dairy and poultry produce” and “3 auto stages daily” were advertised to health seekers in 1915 and 1916.
Cotton
Cotton came before the war. The October 1913 column reported “a large acreage” around Scottsdale and growers hoping for “a cotton gin installed for next year’s crop.” By June 1914 the Tempe Cotton Exchange, “planned and financed by the growers of the Tempe and Scottsdale districts,” had sixty members on about 2,500 acres, about an eighth of it adjoining the Scottsdale country, and was building a gin at Tempe.
The war made cotton the crop. Long-staple fiber went into tire cord and airplane fabric, and the Egyptian supply was cut off; the day the United States entered the war tells how Pima cotton became strategic. By the City of Phoenix’s historic survey, drawing on the historian Karen Smith, the Valley went from about 400 acres in 1912 to 33,000 in 1917, 72,000 in 1918 and a record 180,000 planted in 1920. The census, taken in January 1920, counted 75,062 acres of cotton harvested in Maricopa County in 1919 and 38,669 bales. It was the county’s largest crop, ahead of alfalfa at 66,071 acres and the cereals at 50,782, and the census line that held it was worth $14.4 million of the county’s $24.1 million in crops. Cotton was not the only crop. It was worth more than all the others together.
The money per acre explains the rush. In February 1920 the Republican’s annual cotton edition profiled John M. Walthall, whose 40-acre farm lay “on the edge of this village” of Scottsdale. On a field of a little under seven acres he had picked eleven 500-pound bales in 1918, with lint at 63 cents a pound and seed at $63 a ton, for a gross of $4,016. For the 1919 crop, the article said, lint was selling at 80 to 86 cents and seed at $75. Walthall’s cotton won the sweepstakes for American-Egyptian cotton at the International Soil Products Exposition in Kansas City in September 1919.
The pickers
Cotton needs hands at harvest, and the war took the young men. The Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association won an exception to the contract-labor ban in the 1917 Immigration Act and, from the 1918 season, brought pickers north from the Mexican border by special train. By the end of the 1920–21 season, the Phoenix survey reports from a 1939 federal study, the growers had hired 35,000 Mexican pickers, most of them in the Salt River Valley, and spent about $325,000 recruiting them. In Scottsdale the first sponsored families came in 1917, by the Historical Society’s account, and the Corral family dates its arrival from Cananea, Sonora, to September 1919. What they were paid per hundred pounds is not in any source read. The families stayed when the price fell, and the barrio they built is the subject of its own history.
The village’s own children worked too. A 1917 newspaper item, as the historian Joan Fudala recounts it, describes boys as young as eleven at summer agricultural camps on a Scottsdale ranch, earning 30 cents an hour.
What the village raised
The war’s other measure of the place is what it lent. In October 1918 the Republican reported that Scottsdale had “exceeded her quota ($19,000) in the Fourth Liberty loan by several thousand dollars,” after doubling its quota in the Third. The drive was chaired by Charles Miller, with captains who included E. O. Brown and Byron Sharp of the Salt River agency. The eight teams’ printed totals add to about $26,300, one of them partly illegible in the scan. In 1919 more than a hundred residents of Scottsdale, Phoenix and Tempe subscribed $1,000 toward a graded road to Tempe, to go with $1,800 from the county.
Brown was building as well. In 1916 he and partners started running cattle at the foot of the McDowells under the DC brand, a ranch that would in time cover about 44,000 acres deeded and leased, and in 1920 he opened the village’s own cotton gin.
What these years set in motion
- Water made the land worth buying, and cotton set the price. An acre along Scottsdale Road went from $100 to $150 in 1914 to an asking price of $400 in 1919. Desert a few miles north, without water, was still offered at $24. The 1920s history tells what happened when cotton fell.
- The town was sold as a suburb forty years early. The 1913 lots on time payments, a Vice President’s name and a promised clubhouse were the first suburban pitch; the suburb arrived after incorporation in 1951.
- The labor the boom brought stayed. The families recruited for the cotton harvest built the community that raised the Old Adobe Mission and much of the town’s later history.
- The counts are still precincts. The 267 of 1910 and the 1,047 of 1920 are precinct figures whose lines moved between them, and the chapter prints each with what it counted.