Before Scottsdale sold golf, it sold air. Winfield Scott, the Army chaplain who founded the place, called the dry desert “God’s Country” for the sick, and early newspaper accounts promised relief from tuberculosis, asthma and “consumption” in a valley “where rain seldom falls and there is no cold.” That is the city’s own historic context talking, not a brochure, and it is the right place to start: the first winter visitors to Scottsdale were not golfers or dudes. Many of them were trying not to die.
This note follows that trade from the farmhouse that became a tuberculosis retreat in 1910 to the winter of 1918, when a different respiratory disease came to the same town and the newspaper columns that had been advertising the climate started listing the sick. Our 1900s chapter covers the tent cottages and sleeping porches of the “lungers.” This is what came next.
The Graves Ranch, 1910
The City of Scottsdale’s Historic Context for Scottsdale’s Development as an Arts Colony & Tourist Destination (Liz Wilson and Debbie Abele, revised 2004) gives the founding facts in one paragraph. Edward Graves came from the Midwest in 1910 and converted the Underhill home at the corner of Scottsdale and Indian School roads into the Graves Ranch, which “originally functioned as a tuberculosis recovery center.” An advertisement promised “all the comfort of a real home and in a climate that is with out a peer in the entire world.” There was an Indian curio shop on the premises, and a 1910 news item noted another large shipment of Navajo blankets “of elegant designs.”
The same report makes a point worth keeping. The people who could afford to move for their lungs “tended to be more well to do than other types of settlers,” and their arrival shaped the town’s early culture. The painter Marjorie Thomas is the best-known example: her family moved to Paradise Valley from New England in 1909 for her mother’s and brothers’ health.
The Kimseys are another. As our Kimsey Building page tells it, Elizabeth Kimsey’s health brought her and her husband, William, west around 1907–08. In November 1909 they bought five acres from the widow Ida T. Underhill near the northwest corner of Scottsdale and Indian School roads. That is the same Underhill name, at the same corner, that turns up a few months later in the Graves story.
What the ads promised
The Arizona Republican, the Phoenix daily that ran a Scottsdale column most weeks, lets you watch the Graves place change. In January 1912 the column lists guests from Texas, Detroit and Omaha (the Omaha man “reports 22 below at home”) and reports that “the Graves Curio people, who have been dealing largely in Indian craft the past five years,” were opening a branch store in Phoenix.
By the winter of 1915–16 the paper’s classified page carried a standing ad:
GRAVES’ RANCH at Scottsdale, open for guests. Delightful location, 11 miles N. E. of Phoenix. Best of table board, our own dairy and poultry produce. Screened sleeping cottages, 3 auto stages daily.
Inquiries went to the Graves Indian Shop on West Adams Street in Phoenix. The neighbors in that column tell you who the customers were. Under the same headings ran Williams’ Mesquite Camp, “everything modern and sanitary for tubercular people,” a Paradise Valley desert camp advertising to “health seekers,” and sanatoriums in Phoenix and beyond. The Graves ad never says tuberculosis. By then it did not need to: “screened sleeping cottages” was the vocabulary of the cure, and the ranch was already drifting from a sickroom toward the guest ranch that our 1930s chapter knows as the Graves Guest Ranch.
The columns also show who stayed. A man who had wintered at the ranch bought twenty acres near Arizona Falls in March 1916 to plant oranges and send for his mother and sister. A trained nurse came out from Phoenix that same month for a guest who was “quite ill at the Graves ranch.” In September 1918 carpenters were enlarging the Graves dining room “to accommodate the increased patronage.” In November two magazine writers from New York were “enjoying the quietude of the Graves ranch for a season.” And the Kimsey family rented furnished cottages to winter visitors; by February 1919 the column reported that “every available house in Scottsdale was occupied early in the fall by winter visitors.”
That was the town the flu found.
The flu comes to a health town
In Scottsdale’s column the 1918 influenza first appears sideways, on October 23, 1918: “Owing to the influenza epidemic,” a newly married couple headed home to Jerome decided to stay on with the bride’s parents in Scottsdale. Everything that follows comes from the same weekly columns, and the dates are the paper’s.
November: mild, and doubted. On November 12 word reached Scottsdale that Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, his wife and their child were ill with influenza in Washington. (Mrs. Marshall’s parents, the W. E. Kimseys, lived in Scottsdale, and the Marshalls wintered there.) A local man came home from the hospital after influenza. On November 15 the column counted five members of one family down with it and added: “Thus far the influenza has invaded but two homes in Scottsdale and the victims are loath to remain indoors, so mild is the attack. There’s a doubt in the minds of some that it is, in reality, influenza, but just the ordinary colds.”
December: the wave. By early December a Scottsdale man was “seriously ill with pneumonia following an attack of influenza.” He spent more than two months in a Phoenix hospital and needed an operation before he came home in late January. On December 13 the column reported a death: Dora McDaniels had come from Tucson to nurse her sister-in-law through influenza, caught it, and died of pneumonia at the family’s home. She was buried in Mesa. The same item praised a Scottsdale woman’s sister who, “with a husband in France and two small children,” went from home to home nursing the sick and had worked in the emergency hospital in Mesa.
Then, under a December 17 dateline: “Spanish influenza has struck Scottsdale with a vengeance within the past week or 10 days. At least a dozen families have one or more cases. Six members of the E. O. Brown family are down with it. A trained nurse is in attendance.” That is the household of E.O. Brown, the town’s merchant, banker and postmaster. The same column carried the news that Clara Pemberton Aker, the bride who had stayed on in Scottsdale in October, had died of influenza at Jerome, a week after leaving to join her husband. They had been married less than two months.
Just after Christmas, county health officers came out “to investigate the sudden outbreak of the influenza.” A placard went up in the stores forbidding loafing and spitting. The column also passed along a report that the Indians on the McDowell reservation were being ravaged by the disease and that several had died. It was a rumor in a society column, and nobody in the column says they went to find out. Mrs. Morton Kimsey, wife of the William Kimseys’ son Mort Kimsey, the future mayor, was “the latest victim” and recovering.
January: the school fight. The Scottsdale school had been closed for weeks. The date it first closed is not in the columns we found. On December 13 the column said a reopening had been expected “but the Phoenix board of health ordered the school kept closed until further notice.” In mid-January the school was shut again “by order of the county health board, for two weeks or until there is an abatement of the influenza.” The two items name different boards, and we can’t tell from the columns which one held the authority. A reopening was announced for January 20, then postponed a week to wait for “a speedy abatement of the influenza in Phoenix.” On January 25 the paper reported that Professor M. A. Crouse, the principal, and Dr. Nichols, the county health officer, “have reached an entente cordiale with reference to the flu question,” and the school reopened the following Monday. A week later: “School opened Monday morning with only a fair attendance. As there is not a reported case of influenza in Scottsdale or vicinity at present, it is to be hoped and expected that the attendance will soon become normal.”
What the columns don’t tell us
They don’t give a death count. We found two Scottsdale-connected influenza deaths named in print: Dora McDaniels, who died in Scottsdale, and Clara Aker, who died in Jerome. Others probably went unreported, or were reported in pages our searches missed. The column also recorded, in late December, that a woman “who came to Scottsdale last fall in search of health” had died, without saying of what. The Mexican-American families who had arrived for the cotton boom barely appear in these columns at all, so whatever the epidemic did in the barrio is not in this record. Neither is anything firmer than a rumor about the Salt River and Fort McDowell communities.
Nor do the columns say how the town’s health seekers fared. The irony is plain: a place that sold itself on clean air for weak lungs spent the winter of 1918–19 with its school shut and a nurse in the Browns’ house. Whether the epidemic dented the winter trade is another open question. The Graves dining room was being enlarged in September, and by February the column said every rental house had been full since the fall.
Where the answers live
- Arizona death certificates, 1918–1919. The state’s genealogy site (genealogy.az.gov) lets you search certificates by place. A pass through Scottsdale-area deaths from October 1918 to March 1919 would give the first real count.
- The Arizona Republican, October 1918 to March 1919, on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site. Search “Scottsdale” with “influenza” and “school.” Expect OCR errors: the scans read Scottsdale as “Scotlsdale” and Phoenix as “I’hoenix.” The quotations above are from those scans, with obvious OCR errors corrected.
- School District No. 48’s board minutes for the closure dates and the dispute over who could order them, and the Maricopa County health officer’s reports.
- The Salt River and Fort McDowell agency reports to the Office of Indian Affairs, which would confirm or refute the December rumor.
- The Scottsdale Historical Society at the Little Red Schoolhouse, for anything on the Graves family and the Underhill house.
See it now
Nothing of the Graves Ranch is marked at Scottsdale and Indian School roads today, and the city’s context report doesn’t say what happened to the Underhill house. Stand at that corner and the story is in the arithmetic: a farmhouse in the middle of nothing, eleven miles from Phoenix by auto stage, sold to people for whom eleven miles of dry air was the whole point. Then walk to the Little Red Schoolhouse, the school that stood empty through that winter, for the rest of the 1910s and the town’s 1918.