What it means
Territorial style is the Southwest’s adobe box with a haircut. Take a flat-roofed mud-brick house, run a neat course of fired brick along the top of the parapet, frame the doors and windows in milled wood painted white, stand the porch on square posts with the corners chamfered, and you have it. The brick was practical first: a cap of hard brick kept rain from melting the adobe wall below it. The trim was fashion, the Greek Revival that every American carpenter of the 1850s carried in his head.
In Scottsdale the word does two jobs. Realtors use it for any flat-roofed house with brick coping and clean lines. Historians use it for a 1960s and 1970s townhouse type the city’s preservation office formally calls Popular Territorial, built in slump block rather than adobe. What you will not find here is much of the original: when Arizona was a territory, Scottsdale was a village of a few hundred farmers, and its builders of means used brick outright.
Where you’ll meet it
On the townhouse blocks of South Scottsdale, in listings, in the name of the Territorial Indian Arts gallery on Main Street, and in any conversation about Santa Fe. The 1892 Titus House on Hayden Road and the 1909 Little Red Schoolhouse are the town’s real territorial-era survivors, and neither is Territorial style.
Where the word came from
The style is a New Mexico story. When General Stephen Kearny’s army marched into Santa Fe in 1846, the soldiers found an adobe town that looked nothing like home. The Anglo builders who followed brought what the Santa Fe Trail could carry: window glass, sawn lumber, nails and, once local kilns were running, fired brick. They did not abandon adobe, which was cheap and cool. They dressed it. Brick coping went on the parapets, Greek Revival pediments over the windows, squared posts replaced tree-trunk columns, and sometimes a pitched metal roof went over the whole thing. Historians date the style to the territorial decades, roughly 1821 to 1912, hence the name.
It fell out of fashion around 1900. From about 1930 Santa Fe’s revivalists brought it back as Territorial Revival, the sober alternative to the romantic Pueblo Revival that was selling the “Santa Fe look” to the rest of the country.
Arizona shares the label by chronology. Arizona Territory was carved from New Mexico Territory on February 24, 1863, and became a state on February 14, 1912. But Scottsdale’s territorial years produced a different architecture. Frank Titus, a railroad investor, hired the Phoenix architect James Miller Creighton to build his house on Hayden Road in 1892, in brick fired from clay dug on the property, with a hipped roof and a Victorian porch. The city’s register report calls it the only remaining Victorian residence in Scottsdale and reads its brick as “the transition away from traditional adobe construction.” The 1909 schoolhouse was brick too. Adobe survived in the Mexican families’ houses and in the Old Adobe Mission of 1933, which is Spanish Colonial Revival rather than Territorial.
The Scottsdale version arrived with the postwar boom. Builders of the 1960s and 1970s wanted Southwestern flavor without adobe, and the material at hand was slump block, a concrete block cast to sag slightly so it reads as adobe from the street. The city’s postwar multifamily survey found it on more than nine in ten complexes, most from the Phoenix-based Superlite Block Company. Capped with a line of brick and given a shed roof over the entry, a slump-block townhouse became Popular Territorial.
What it is not
It is not Pueblo Revival, which rounds every corner and pushes beams through the wall. It is not Spanish Colonial Revival, which has a pitched red-tile roof and arches. And “territorial” on a historical marker usually means the period, not the style.
The fine print
The city’s style guide for postwar townhouses defines Popular Territorial in one dense sentence: a flat roof with parapet, possibly at varied levels; brick or slump block walls; a flat or shed roof over the entry or the windows; a front with more than one wall plane; rectilinear or arched openings; and “possible brick coping along top of parapet and occasionally corbelling.” The same document is frank that these postwar “popular revival” styles are visual references, not faithful copies, and that builders chose elements by what would sell.
That honesty matters for how you use the word. A Scottsdale “Territorial” has never been adobe and was never meant to be; the brick along the parapet is a quotation of a quotation. The genuine article, in which the coping is doing a job, is in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. In Scottsdale the honest territorial-era buildings are the brick ones, and the honest adobe is the Mission.
The record has gaps. No local survey has counted the Popular Territorial houses, as opposed to townhouses, and nobody has traced when “Territorial” entered the Phoenix real estate vocabulary. The Scottsdale Historical Society keeps the Titus House file and the schoolhouse: in the territory itself, Scottsdale built in brick.