At a glance: The cotton boom broke in 1920, and Scottsdale answered by building institutions. In the space of a year its farmers and merchants chartered a bank, organized a chamber of commerce and talked the county into giving the town a justice of the peace and a constable of its own, the first public offices with only Scottsdale’s name on them. Then its voters went to the schoolhouse three times in seven weeks and gave themselves a high school. The town still had no mayor, no council and no police. The same few men ran the bank, the farm bureau, the school board and the court, and the Mexican and Yaqui families who did the town’s heaviest work appear in the record mostly as box scores, crime items and a rented classroom.
The bust
Long-staple Pima cotton had touched $1.35 a pound in the war, and land in the Salt River Valley had sold for $900 an acre. In February 1921 a Washington columnist reported that there were 60,000 bales in and around Phoenix and “it would be hard to sell any considerable quantity of it for 40 cents a pound”; Congressman Carl Hayden told the House there was “absolutely no market.” By December the Arizona Republican was quoting Pima at 30 to 40 cents. A federal bulletin counted about 180,000 acres of Pima in the Valley in 1920 and about 76,000 in 1921.
The bust fell hardest on the people who picked. In February 1921 the paper reported that a labor contract had left “between 7,000 and 8,000 Mexican cotton pickers stranded in the Salt River valley,” and the growers’ association agreed with the Mexican consul to send them home. No item found says how many of them had picked around Scottsdale. That July, after “discussing the price of picking with a number of farmers,” growers west of town settled on 1½ cents a pound.
A bank as an act of faith
In the middle of it, on December 21, 1920, W. E. Kimsey, Y. C. White and R. A. Chestnut filed articles of incorporation for the Farmers’ State Bank of Scottsdale, with $20,000 in capital. “That their faith in Arizona is not disturbed by the unrest throughout the country,” the Republican wrote, “is demonstrated by their launching a banking institution at this time.” The state licensed it on December 30. It opened on Monday, January 17, 1921 (the day has its own page), with W. E. Kimsey as president, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and Charles Miller as vice presidents, and Y. C. White, a Texas banker, as cashier. The Scottsdale Historical Society calls E. O. Brown the primary investor, but the paper’s lists of incorporators, directors and officers do not name him. By July the column counted nine places of business in town, against three a year earlier.
The boosters organize
Three days before the bank opened, on Friday, January 14, 1921, “a meeting of the citizens of Scottsdale was held … at the school house to discuss plans for organizing a chamber of commerce,” with Walter Smith chairing the by-laws committee. By February the paper reported a “board of trade … completely organized with directors and officers”: Dr. Bishop president, Mr. Mahoney vice president, Mrs. Jim Stout secretary and Walter P. Smith treasurer. A Mrs. Stout had also been the first secretary of the Farm Improvement Association in 1915. Through 1921 and 1922 the chamber met in the bank building, aired “the road question,” put up the town’s first street lights at four corners, voted funds for a pound for stray stock, and in May 1922 appointed Walter Donn to find out whether water piped from a well in Paradise Valley “would be the best thing to do.” Salt River Stories says the chamber closed after the bank failed in 1933, so the Chamber of Commerce incorporated in 1947 was the town’s second.
The farmers had their own body. By February 1921 the Scottsdale Farm Bureau was one of six community locals in the county federation, and by July Charles Miller was its president, with a room in the bank building where the high school’s agriculture teacher kept office hours for it. When it met with the chamber in August, sixty members came.
The town gets a court
Until the end of 1921 Scottsdale shared a justice of the peace and a constable with Tempe. A Farm Bureau committee of Charles Miller, a Mr. Smith and Dr. Bishop set out to change that, and on December 16 it reported success. “The board of supervisors has created a Scottsdale precinct,” the column wrote, running east to “a point three miles east of the Verde river, north of Scottsdale 15 miles, south to Salt river, and west to the road just west of the old cross cut canal. … The committee is to be complimented on their work, for the officers have been badly needed in this district.” On January 4, 1922, the paper reported, the supervisors appointed W. E. Kimsey justice of the peace and A. F. Fredericks constable. It is the subject of its own day page.
It was the first unit of government that belonged to Scottsdale alone, thirty years before the town incorporated. “Judge Kimsey” was soon conferring with the supervisor of the reservation about Indian ponies breaking into ranchers’ fields, and “Constable Al Fredericks” posted notices that loose stock would go to the chamber’s new pound. A city history newsletter of 2022 is reported to say that Fredericks was elected to the office and held it until his death in 1950, which would make him the longest-serving officeholder in Scottsdale before incorporation; that could not be confirmed.
A dry law without police
Prohibition had been the law since 1915, and the court’s arrival made enforcing it a local matter. In March 1921 federal officers found a still on a ranch fourteen miles northeast of town. That November a special officer of Scottsdale found “one of the largest and most complete stills ever captured in the valley,” a 35-gallon copper still “still warm” in a clump of bushes a mile northeast of town; “no trace of the operators” was found. In April 1922 Constable Fredericks caught two men selling whiskey to boys near Twin Buttes. Judge Kimsey sentenced one, whom the paper identified as Mexican, to twenty days in the county jail and fined the other, a white man, $30.
Three votes for a high school
The decade’s great local argument was over schooling, and it ran through the ballot box. In December 1921 the PTA’s production of Aaron Slick from Punkin Creek turned away a hundred people and stood another hundred, and the column drew the lesson: “Scottsdale passed out as a simple country school district and Scottsdale ‘the town’ came into actual being Friday night,” proving “the need of a new high school building with an auditorium.” Former Vice President Marshall was in the audience.
On February 11, 1922, 103 voters, the largest school vote the district had seen, approved a four-year high school 90 to 13; more than twenty students had been leaving the district for high school. On February 25, 110 voters chose its site from four, the plat and price of each posted at the schoolhouse with a warning that “a site is not desirable if it is overpriced.” The tract offered by Charles Miller, president of the board, a block north of the grammar school, won with 39 votes because it “would save money”: teachers could share the two schools. On April 1, 132 voters, “the largest number that ever voted at an election in Scottsdale,” carried $73,000 in twenty-year bonds “for purchasing land for a High School site” and building on it. The day page for April 1, 1922 tells that story. The board, Miller, Walter E. Donn and G. N. Loomis, called the elections; Mrs. W. F. Smith, one of the three judges, is the first woman found serving as a Scottsdale election official. Later accounts say the Miller family gave the ten acres. The 1922 record describes a purchase.
In 1928 the district built again. By the city’s historic-register report, which cites no source for the figures, voters approved a $50,000 bond for a second grammar school on February 9, 1928, 105 to 9, and on March 22 chose the H. R. Bland tract from three. The new school opened that fall, and the 1909 schoolhouse became Coronado School.
Two communities in one school district
The school votes also show who was being counted. In January 1922 the high school’s Spanish teacher reported that “the number of Mexican children in the grades is increasing daily,” helped by a truant officer, Chris Sigala, newly appointed by the county superintendent. In February the district “rent[ed] the dance hall belonging to John Rose for a school room for some of the Mexican children.” Those families lived in a barrio south and east of the schoolhouse; the mission’s National Register nomination says E. O. Brown recruited fifteen to eighteen families from Cananea, Sonora in 1919, among them the Corrals. When the 1928 school opened, the old schoolhouse became, at some point, the school for the town’s Mexican American children, and our note on the Coronado School follows that arrangement into the 1950s.
The paper recorded the communities meeting on the ball field. The Scottsdale Blues played the “fast Mexican team,” which beat them 14 to 8 in 1921, and later the “Camelback Mexican team,” and the town’s baseball, basketball and football teams played teams from the reservation the paper called Pima. In April 1922 E. O. Brown, a director of the cotton growers’ association, proposed camps “in every district of 100 or more Mexicans” with a foreman in charge, instead of each farmer housing the pickers on his ranch, and the Farm Bureau endorsed the plan. In 1927, by the city’s historic context, the Water Users’ Association built permanent camps for its Yaqui canal workers, two of them in Scottsdale. On March 22, 1926 the Diocese of Tucson bought three lots at Brown Avenue and First Street for a church for the Catholic families, the beginning of the Old Adobe Mission.
The Klan next door
The decade’s ugliest politics passed close by. On the night of March 20, 1922, a mob took Rollin P. Jones, principal of the Lehi school near Mesa, from his home, lashed him and marked him “K.K.K.”; a letter signed by a “Camelback Klan” claimed the attack, and the next night a Black janitor in Phoenix was flogged and marked the same way. A special county grand jury investigated the order that summer, and Tempe’s chapter, Butte Klan No. 3, counted mayors, council members and bankers. No source found names a Scottsdale klavern or member. The name “Camelback” proves nothing about where its members lived, and the roster studied in the Journal of Arizona History in 1973 has not been read for this chapter.
The Vice President’s last winters
The Kimsey–Marshall connection held through the decade. In November 1921 the former Vice President returned “to his Scottsdale residence which had been remodeled since his absence,” planning to spend the winter there and to motor into an office in the state capitol once a week. W. E. Kimsey died in Phoenix in April 1924 with the Marshalls at his bedside. Marshall died on June 1, 1925, and his will left $10,000 to Morton and Clanie Kimsey of Scottsdale “for purchase of a farm.”
Into the 1930s
By 1929 Scottsdale had a judge, a constable, a chamber, a high school, two grammar schools and a mission site, and still no government. The bank and the chamber would not survive the Depression. The court, the school board and the county would carry the town for two more decades, until it incorporated in 1951. The 1920s chapter tells the decade’s economic story, and the 1910s politics chapter comes before this one.