At a glance: From 1930 to 1951 Scottsdale had no government of its own, and for most of those years it hardly needed to say so. The county ran the roads and the courts, a school board ran the schools, and the water users’ association ran the water. The Depression closed the town’s only bank and sent federal relief crews to its schools. A war put a flying school on its northern edge and a prisoner-of-war camp on its southern one. Then, in 1947, the merchants formed a chamber of commerce that did a town council’s work, from charity to street lights, until it asked the county to make Scottsdale a town. The people who did the town’s heaviest work, Mexican American, Yaqui and O’odham, were mostly outside that conversation, and they appear here largely through their own newspapers and churches.
The bank closes
Scottsdale went into the 1930s with a bank, a high school, two grammar schools and a winter-visitor trade, and about 2,761 people in its census precinct by the Historical Society’s count. On Thursday, March 2, 1933, as bank runs spread across the country, Governor B. B. Moeur proclaimed a three-day holiday for Arizona’s banks. It was optional, and a few border-town banks stayed open, but nearly all closed, and the Farmer’s State Bank, the one the town had chartered in the cotton bust of 1920, closed that day and never reopened. Salt River Stories adds that “the chamber of commerce closed as well,” which would mean the end of the booster body organized in 1921; no second source has been found. Scottsdale had no bank again until 1952. The day page for March 2, 1933 has the story.
Relief and its stigma
The Valley’s numbers were grim. Salt River Stories, the regional history project, estimates that one Valley resident in five, and half of the poorest Latino and Black residents, received public aid. In Scottsdale the money arrived as work. By the middle of the decade, that account says, the federal government was Maricopa County’s largest employer, and relief programs paid for “additions to Scottsdale Grammar School #2 and Scottsdale High School, improvements to the canal, and new roads.” The city’s register report on the grammar school confirms that its south wing was enlarged in the mid-1930s and that a cafeteria opened in 1936, though not who paid. The Living New Deal project records a WPA road, the Papago Highway, between Tempe and Scottsdale. The WPA handed out food from the old McComb Brothers store, and a photograph of Wilmouth’s Grocery from those years shows an NRA Blue Eagle in the window.
Taking it was not simple. “For many, accepting aid engendered a fundamental identity crisis,” Salt River Stories says, drawing on the recollections of Paul Messinger, who grew up in the town; “some citizens simply refused aid.” The stigma faded “as the struggles of the 1930s continued.”
The artists’ New Deal
Federal money reached the arts too. The WPA’s Federal Art Project chose Phoenix for an art center, and Philip Curtis came to found it (in 1936 by the city’s account, 1937 by the Phoenix Art Museum’s). Among its teachers was the painter Lew Davis, who had come home to Arizona in 1935, and in 1937 he and the sculptor Mathilde Schaefer, who had set up a studio and kiln at Scottsdale, were founding members and officers of Arizona Painters and Sculptors, formed, in the words the city’s arts-colony history quotes, “to advance economic and cultural interests of state artists and art.” Their profile follows them to the Arizona Craftsmen of 1947 and the Pink Pony.
A modern town or the Old West
The decade’s argument about what Scottsdale was for began in print. In 1933 a newspaper boasted that the town’s business district held “many modern, fire proof buildings housing up-to-date stores, far above the average found in the smaller towns,” and that its schools were among the best in the state. In 1937 a visiting Montgomery Ward executive told the Arizona Republic that Arizona should go further in “playing up its western atmosphere,” with western dress all season long. Both are known from the city’s arts-colony history, which observes that the rest of the Valley chose modernity and that Scottsdale “was the only local community to formally embrace the western atmosphere.” The choice was made in 1947.
War on both edges
Thunderbird Field No. 2 was activated north of town in June 1942 (the city gives June 22), a civilian contract flying school run by Southwest Airways, the company the Hollywood agent Leland Hayward and the pilot John Connelly founded with movie-industry investors. Its first class trained at Thunderbird I in Glendale because the Scottsdale field was not ready; the staff moved up on July 22. It peaked at 615 cadets in November 1943, employed 508 people in January 1944, graduated about 5,500 cadets and closed on October 16, 1944. The historian Joan Fudala calls it the area’s largest employer and says it “was primarily for U.S. Aviation cadets”; Southwest Airways’ Chinese cadets trained at Glendale and British cadets at Falcon Field in Mesa.
To the south, Camp Papago Park held Italian prisoners from late 1943 and German prisoners, most of them navy men, from January 1944, about 3,000 at the peak by most counts. Almost half the camp lay in what is now south Scottsdale, and its officers’ club still stands at 64th Street and Oak as the Scottsdale Elks Lodge. Prisoners worked the Valley’s cotton fields and canals; no source names a Scottsdale farm. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five Germans left through a 178-foot tunnel to the Crosscut Canal; that night has its own page.
The war also drew a line through the Valley. In 1942 the Army’s exclusion zone divided Japanese American families, by most accounts along Grand Avenue and Van Buren Street: those south of it were removed to Gila River or Poston. No source found places a Japanese American household in the Scottsdale precinct. In March 1943, at the request of the War Manpower Commission and, as a War Department official later wrote, “the earnest solicitation of most of the politicians in Arizona,” the Army moved the line about sixty miles south so Japanese American labor could pick long-staple cotton.
Scottsdale’s own servicemen were counted in two places. The American Legion post, formed by World War I veterans on May 13, 1935, took the names of two of the town’s war dead, Travis Sipe and Clayton Peterson, and the VFW post chartered in 1946 that of Stanley Crews. Phoenix’s Spanish-language weekly El Sol kept its own honor roll: in 1944 it named Private Juan V. Herrera of Scottsdale, the son of the barrio leader Bernabé Herrera, and Sergeant Raúl V. Noriega, missing in France and then reported a prisoner of the Germans, and it announced a Mass “para los muchachos de Scottsdale” in the army, arranged by Herrera.
A club for a council
When the veterans came home the town had about 2,000 people, by the city’s arts-colony history, and no government. In 1947 its merchants incorporated the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce. By the Chamber’s own list, its first presidents were the silversmith Wesley Segner (1947), Robert E. Yount (1948) and Cliff Carpenter (1949–52). The city’s arts-colony history records what it did in its first year, a “Hi Neighbor Day,” aid to the 4-H Club, a Scottsdale Community Chest for welfare and civic programs and a bus shelter, and what it discussed: a guardrail by the canal at Camelback and Paradise roads, street lights, oiling the streets against the dust and a fire department. It also adopted a Western design theme for downtown and proclaimed Scottsdale “The West’s Most Western Town,” a phrase Fudala credits to Malcolm White. Merchants put up the knotty pine and hitching posts voluntarily. In 1949 a Chamber meeting urged the town to “give preference to the horseback rider over the automobile.” The Chamber’s guide has the rest.
Private enterprise filled the other gaps. On February 2, 1948, by its own account, the newspaperman Lou Witzeman’s Rural Fire Protection Company put one truck in service, selling fire protection by subscription (the day page tells it). James H. Boyd started the weekly Scottsdale Progress that May. And in 1948, by the city water department’s timeline, the City of Phoenix bought the Brown Water Company that served the unincorporated town, which put Scottsdale’s water in a rival city’s hands three years before Scottsdale had a government; the Historical Society says E. O. Brown had owned the downtown water system. Phoenix served south Scottsdale until the city bought that system back in 1987.
The neighbors
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, on Scottsdale’s eastern border, governed itself under a constitution its voters ratified on May 15, 1940, 171 to 127. In 1935 the Bartlett Dam Agreement between the United States and the water users secured water for the Community from the Verde. On July 15, 1948, in a suit brought by two Fort McDowell Yavapai men turned away by the Maricopa County recorder, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans could vote; the state’s literacy test kept many from the polls until 1970.
The Yaqui canal workers lived in the water users’ company camps, two of them in Scottsdale, by the city’s historic context, and by 1949, the parish says, Sisters of Charity from Chandler were coming weekly to teach the children of the Yaqui village on 64th Street. The Mexican American barrio south and east of the schoolhouse built its own institutions: the Old Adobe Mission, finished in 1933, became the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in 1949, and Miguel and Guadalupe Domínguez, whom the Chamber later honored as among the mission’s founders, gave it a statue (in 1945 or the early 1950s; the accounts differ). In November 1950 Jesús Corral, president of the barrio’s Los Latinos club, told El Sol that “now there is no discrimination in Scottsdale; everyone dances together,” while his club and Cliff Carpenter’s Chamber put on a street fiesta for a boys’ club. The 1909 schoolhouse was still the Coronado School for the barrio’s youngest children.
The petition
By 1949, Fudala writes, residents “were beginning to chafe at the lack of paved streets, fire and police protection, street signs, building inspections and business licensing.” The Chamber held public meetings at the old Scottsdale High School on whether to incorporate. Its case was infrastructure and fending off annexation by Phoenix; the other side said “things had been just fine for 70 years” and feared taxes, and Malcolm White himself thought it might be “too soon.” Between January and May 1951, Fudala’s account continues, more than 300 taxpayers of fewer than 400 eligible signed the Chamber’s petitions, while a second group filed 80 signatures asking for an election. On June 25, 1951, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors declared the Town of Scottsdale incorporated without one.
The new town was small: about half a square mile by most city sources, 0.6 by the city’s 2012 historic context, from 68th Street to Miller Road and Osborn to Camelback. The city counts 2,032 residents; the Historical Society says that was the area’s 1950 census count and that the town held about 1,200. The five councilmen the supervisors appointed were seated on July 2 and chose White as mayor the next day. The day page for June 25, 1951 and the 1950s chapter carry the story on. The 1930s and 1940s chapters tell the decades’ wider story.