What it means
The townsite, or the original townsite, is the oldest piece of Scottsdale on paper: the small grid of streets Albert Utley laid out in 1894 and recorded under the name Scottsdale, which is why the city has a founding year and not just a founding farm. Locals use it two ways. Preservationists and planners mean the plat itself, the blocks along Brown Avenue, Main Street and First Street that fall under the city’s historic-district rules. Everyone else means the little square-mile town of 1951, the one that incorporated to keep Phoenix from swallowing it and then spent fifty years swallowing the desert instead.
Old Town sits on the townsite and the Old Town versus Downtown entry sorts out the modern names. This page is about the ground underneath them and how little of it there was.
Where you’ll meet it
In the city’s annexation history, where every later square mile is measured against the first one. On the brass plaques along Main Street. In the 1890s chapter and the day pages for July 1, 1888 and June 25, 1951. And in zoning cases, where “original townsite” is a term of art.
Where the word came from
The town has two founders and they did different things. Winfield Scott, a Civil War chaplain with a battlefield limp and a gift for promotion, visited the Salt River Valley in February 1888 and in July filed on a full section, 640 acres, under the Desert Land Act, at $2.50 an acre with 50 cents an acre down, roughly $320 to claim a square mile bounded by today’s Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School and Chaparral roads. His brother George Washington Scott cleared the brush and planted the first crops while the chaplain finished his Army service, and Scott spent the rest of his life telling the East how good the climate was.
Albert G. Utley, a retired banker, did the paperwork. In 1894 he bought the section directly south of Scott’s and platted 40 acres at its northwest corner, the corner nearest Scott’s ranch, as a townsite. The promotional name in circulation was Orangedale, for the citrus colony Scott had promised, but hard freezes had killed most of the trees, and when the plat was recorded it carried the name of the settlement’s best-known resident. One account credits the Arizona Republican with calling the place Scottsdale in print first; Utley adopted it. The grid he drew, with Brown Avenue down the middle, is still the grid.
The townsite filled slowly. The first school district formed in 1896 and its one-room schoolhouse went up east of where the Historical Museum stands; J.L. Davis’s general store held the first post office in 1897; the brick Little Red Schoolhouse replaced the wooden one in 1909 at a cost of $4,500. By the 1920 census the whole settlement counted 1,047 people.
What it is not
The townsite is not Scott’s ranch. Scott’s section is north of Indian School Road; Utley’s plat and Old Town are south of it. And the townsite is not the city. The square mile of 1951 is less than one percent of today’s 184.
The fine print
Incorporation turned the townsite into a legal person. For sixty years the settlement had no government of its own: Maricopa County provided what little there was, and a private company, Rural/Metro, sold fire protection from 1948. Phoenix was annexing toward it. In the spring of 1951 residents petitioned to incorporate roughly one square mile around the old townsite, and support was so lopsided that the county supervisors approved the incorporation on June 25, 1951 without holding an election, appointing the first five-man council the same day and Malcolm White as mayor. The population was about 2,000 by the usual count; the Historical Society’s timeline puts it lower, at 1,200, which is one of the record’s unresolved figures.
The square mile did not stay square for long. Incorporation brought zoning and the power to annex, and the town used both, growing from about 2,000 to 10,000 people in the 1950s and to nearly 68,000 by 1970 as it leapfrogged north and east to claim the desert before Phoenix could. The 1961 charter made it a home-rule city; the Preserve purchases of the 1990s and 2000s pushed the boundary to the McDowells. The result is a city of about 184 square miles whose original townsite you can cross in a ten-minute walk.
Two figures are argued over. Scott’s price appears as $2.50 an acre in most accounts and $3.50 in Wikipedia, and the Historical Society gives the 50-cent down payment as if it were the price. This site uses $2.50 with 50 cents down. And no source names the surveyor who drew Utley’s forty acres. The grid is his monument, and nobody has claimed it.