What it means
Pima cotton is a fiber, a brand and a piece of local history, and most people who say it mean the first. It is extra-long-staple cotton, with fibers well past an inch long, which spins into a thread smoother and stronger than ordinary upland cotton and sells at a premium on sheets and shirts. In Scottsdale the words carry a second meaning: the crop that, for about three years after 1917, turned a quiet farm settlement into a boomtown and then, in 1920, took most of the money back.
You will hear the first meaning in every resort in town, and the second from anyone who knows why there is a Brown Avenue: E.O. Brown, storekeeper and rancher, built the gin that stood at Second Street from 1920 into the 1950s. The site’s 1910s chapter tracks the boom year by year; this page is about the word and where the plant came from.
Where you’ll meet it
On hotel linens and department-store labels. In the name of Pima Road, which runs along the reservation where the variety was bred. In the Five C’s, where cotton is the third. And in the fields of Pinal County, where it is still grown.
Where the word came from
The plant is Egyptian by descent and Arizonan by selection. The U.S. Department of Agriculture imported Mitafifi, an Egyptian long-staple, in 1900, and A.J. Chandler planted the first of it in the Salt River Valley on his south Mesa farm in 1902. Breeding began in 1907 at two cooperative stations, Bard, California, and Sacaton, the agency town of the Gila River reservation, where the Indian Service hoped to teach the Pima a cash crop. In 1908 a variety called Yuma was separated from Mitafifi. In 1910 the botanist Thomas H. Kearney spotted one outstanding plant in the Yuma rows at Sacaton, and the line bred from it became “the Pima variety,” named for its birthplace and for the farmers who grew the first small fields with government seed. By 1911 the station had 20 acres and the fiber sold for 28 cents a pound, five cents over the best imported Egyptian. By 1920 the name was official: Pima long-staple cotton.
The name needs a footnote. “Pima” is what Spanish and then American outsiders called the river-farming O’odham; the people’s own name is Akimel O’odham, river people. The variety carries the outside name because the government station did.
War turned a seed-plot curiosity into a commodity. The Mediterranean embargoes of 1914 to 1918 cut off Egyptian cotton, long-staple fiber was needed for airplane fabric, uniforms and tire cord, and Goodyear bought several thousand acres in the Valley to grow its own. Several hundred acres of Pima were planted in 1916; by 1918 practically all the Valley’s cotton was Pima; by 1920 the Valley had more than 180,000 acres. Scottsdale, by Joan Fudala’s account, tore out diversified fields for the crop, sponsored Mexican families to immigrate for the picking, and needed two school annexes by 1918 to hold the children.
What it is not
Pima is not Egyptian cotton, though it is a close relative and was bred from it, and it is not Supima, which is a trademark for American-grown Pima administered from Phoenix. Nor is it the upland cotton that fills most of the world’s T-shirts; that is a different species with shorter fiber.
The fine print
The bust came faster than the boom. When the war ended the military canceled its contracts, Egyptian cotton came back onto the market, and the price of Arizona Pima fell below the cost of growing it. Farmers who had borrowed against the 1919 price were ruined; Arizona’s farm population fell 20 percent between 1920 and 1925. Scottsdale’s gin, which E.O. Brown and partners opened in 1920 on Second Street at Brown Avenue, kept running, baling 1,525 bales between January and October 1923; cotton did not leave the valley, only the fortunes did. The Historical Society’s timeline puts the town’s population at 1,047 in 1920; it reached 2,761 by 1930 despite the crash, on health seekers, winter visitors and the farm families who stayed.
Cotton remained Scottsdale’s largest cash crop into the Second World War, when German prisoners from Camp Papago picked it; one 1944 report credited prisoners with half of Arizona’s harvest. A second gin, the Scottsdale Community Gin, opened on September 9, 1953, on Pima Road south of Thomas and turned out about six 500-pound bales an hour. Brown’s gin closed in the early 1950s and the newer one was razed in the 1970s for townhouses, a fair summary of every cotton field inside the city limits after 1951.
Two things remain. Pima stayed the only American-Egyptian variety grown in Arizona until 1933, and its descendants, under the Supima mark, still make Arizona and California the country’s long-staple growers. And the Sacaton station’s larger project, teaching the Akimel O’odham to farm cotton with water they no longer had, never got the water. The Community’s own history of the station ends on that line.