What it means
McCormick Ranch is the stretch of central Scottsdale between Indian Bend Road and Shea Boulevard, from Scottsdale Road east to the 101, where the streets curve, the lakes are man-made and the mailboxes match. Locals shorten it to the Ranch, and when they do they mean this one; DC Ranch, Gainey Ranch, Scottsdale Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch all came later and all have to be named in full. “She lives on the Ranch” places someone in 85258, probably near a lake, probably on a bicycle on Sunday.
The word also stands for an idea. McCormick Ranch was the first big master-planned community in Scottsdale and one of the first in the country to be designed as a single piece, with homes, offices, schools, golf and open space laid out together in 1971. Everything north of Shea that calls itself a ranch, a village or a community is following its plan. The McCormick Ranch neighborhood guide covers living there; this page is about the name and why it carries so much weight.
Where you’ll meet it
On the monument signs along Hayden Road and McCormick Parkway; at the Railroad Park, which sits at the Ranch’s southern gate and carries half the name; on the lakes and paths that connect to the Greenbelt; and in the 1970s chapter, where the sale remakes the city.
Where the word came from
The name is a family’s, and the family was very rich. Fowler McCormick was a grandson of Cyrus McCormick, the reaper inventor whose company became International Harvester, and of John D. Rockefeller; his wife Anne had money of her own. In April 1944 they bought a 7,000-square-foot adobe house and the 160-acre R.P. Ranch at Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend, where the Jolly family had ranched since 1921, and over the next decade they bought up the land around it until they owned about seven square miles of Scottsdale. Fowler and Anne McCormick ran Angus cattle, and Anne bred Arabian horses: her first stallion, Mustafa, came in 1948, and in 1963 she imported Naborr, a sire whose line runs through the breed. The Arabian Horse Show found its home on her Paradise Park.
Anne McCormick died on May 25, 1969, at 89. The next summer the estate sold 4,236 acres to Kaiser-Aetna, a partnership of the Kaiser industrial family and the insurer, for $12.1 million. It was, the developer liked to say, the largest single parcel ever sold for a planned community inside a city’s limits. Kaiser-Aetna kept the McCormick name, a choice so obvious it set the pattern: the next fifty years of Scottsdale development would be named for the ranchers it displaced.
What made the name mean something was the plan. Kaiser-Aetna hired George Fretz, Scottsdale’s own city planner, to draw the master plan, and the city approved the first phase, south of Via de Ventura, in 1971. The plan put houses, apartments, offices, shopping, schools, two golf courses, lakes and a path system on paper at once, with the lakes doubling as flood control. The McCormick Ranch Property Owners’ Association incorporated on September 21, 1972 to enforce it. The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch opened in 1976 as the first purpose-built conference resort in the country. Fowler died in 1973 and never saw most of it.
What it is not
McCormick Ranch is not DC Ranch, the 1990s community against the McDowells that borrowed the suffix; nor Gainey Ranch, its smaller gated neighbor to the north; nor Scottsdale Ranch, east across the 101. It is also not the Railroad Park’s full name: that is McCormick-Stillman, honoring Anne’s son Guy Stillman, whose railroad it was.
The fine print
The numbers come from the property owners’ association and the Progress. The 1970 sale: 4,236 acres, $12.1 million. The Ranch today: more than 3,100 acres under the POA, about 8,900 homes, condominiums and apartments, roughly 27,000 residents; the gap between the two acreages is land outside the association. Richard Boultinghouse was the developer’s general manager through the build-out; Fretz’s plan was unusual in giving a city planner, rather than a landscape firm, the drawing.
The horses are the part of the record locals get wrong. The Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show was first held in 1955 at the Arizona Biltmore, not on the Ranch; it moved to Anne McCormick’s Paradise Park and stayed until WestWorld took it in 1989. After Anne’s death Naborr was sold to Tom Chauncey and Wayne Newton for $150,000, a price that made the papers; by the POA’s count he sired 435 foals in Russia, Poland and the United States, 21 of them bred by Mrs. McCormick.
Two things the record does not hold. The name of whoever at Kaiser-Aetna decided to keep “McCormick” is unrecorded; it was a marketing decision that nobody signed. And the original master plan’s acreage north of Via de Ventura, approved in phases later in the 1970s, is not broken out in any source we could open. The HOA entry explains the association structure the Ranch pioneered, and the Greenbelt entry explains the flood-control logic its lakes share with Indian Bend Wash.