Winter resorts had a problem with children. A family from Chicago or Cleveland that wanted to spend January through April under Camelback Mountain had to take its children out of school, leave them home, or find a school in the desert. From the late 1920s on, Scottsdale and the land that became Paradise Valley supplied the third option. A handful of private ranch schools grew up beside the inns, with classes outdoors, horses for every student, and, by the city’s own historic account, “championship tennis and polo teams of national repute.” The same account says they drew “students from socially prominent families including the Swifts, Morrells, Armours, Reagans, and Goldwaters.”
None of them survives. Here is what each was, as far as the record goes, and what you can still see.
Judson School (1928–2000): the one that lasted
George Judson opened the Judson School in 1928 with seven boys. It became the longest-lived of the ranch schools and, by its own description, the state’s oldest independent college-preparatory school. Henry Wick, a Yale graduate who had taught at another ranch school for two years, joined the faculty in 1938 and bought the school from Judson in 1945. His family ran it for the rest of its life.
Wick made two changes that set Judson apart. In the late 1940s he began teaching English as a second language, which brought in students from as many as 30 countries at a time. In 1956 he admitted girls. In a 1997 oral history for the Town of Paradise Valley, Wick remembered washboard dirt roads and a town of “nearer to 200” people, where “everybody would go to Town to get the latest news.” His wife Barbara remembered that “they had classes outdoors at Judson,” a school set “in the middle of this beautiful, pristine desert that nobody had ever heard of.” Its best-known alumnus is Michael Reagan, class of 1964. His half-sister Patti Davis is also often listed among Judson’s alumni, though the listing we found is uncited.
The campus ended up at 6704 N. Mockingbird Lane in Paradise Valley, on 55 acres. In the fall of 1999 Henry Wick sold the land to Cachet Homes. The school closed in 2000, and in the summer of 2001 the buildings were demolished for a gated community of 34 luxury homes. A small building on the property was put up as a memorial to the school’s 72 years. By the most recent account we found, it serves as the gatehouse.
Judson School for Girls (1934–1937): the one that became El Chorro
This is where the record tangles, and it’s worth untangling, because the story is often told wrong.
The city’s 2004 historic context on Scottsdale as an arts colony and tourist destination lists three separate schools: the Judson School for Boys, “founded nearby in 1928”; the Jokake School for Girls, opened in 1933; and, “the following year,” the Judson School for Girls. The same document says that “in 1937 the Judson School for Girls was converted to the El Chorro Lodge.”
The Scottsdale Historical Society’s history of local schools says something different: that George Judson “opened Judson School for boys in 1928 in what is now El Chorro Lodge,” and that the school later “moved to a larger campus.” Online summaries have repeated that version, and it has the El Chorro connection attached to the wrong school.
The best witness is Henry Wick, who taught at Judson from 1938. Asked in 1997 about the school once having “two different campuses, the girls on one campus and the boys on another,” he said: “Yes, that was very brief. Mr. Judson started that school for Lillian Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln wanted her to have a special education, so he recruited another girl or two, they were over at El Chorro for a short time. He built the school. Mark Gruber was the man who started it, along with Mr. Judson.” The arrangement, he said, “really didn’t last,” and “after the school, it became a restaurant.”
Put together, the record supports this version. El Chorro’s buildings began as the short-lived Judson School for Girls of 1934, started for Lillian Lincoln and a few classmates. Wick calls her father only “Mr. Lincoln,” but in the same interview he credits “Mr. Lincoln” with paving the road from the Camelback Inn, which points to the industrialist John C. Lincoln. The buildings became El Chorro Lodge in 1937. The 1928 boys’ school is a separate institution. Where the boys’ school held its very first classes before the Mockingbird Lane campus is the one point still open; the Historical Society’s “moved to a larger campus” may be a garbled memory of the brief two-campus period. Our 1934 page and our El Chorro guide follow the girls’-school version, which is the one the evidence backs. You can still eat in the old school’s buildings at 5550 E. Lincoln Drive. El Chorro says it has been welcoming guests since 1937.
Jokake School for Girls (1933–1945): the one beside the inn
The Jokake School for Girls opened in 1933 on the grounds of the Jokake Inn on Camelback Road, the adobe resort the Evans family built below the mountain. It closed in 1945 and enrolled about 40 girls a year, according to old Arizona Interscholastic Association records. The Historical Society records that both inn guests and the school’s students took overnight horseback trips to the Jokake Desert Camp in the McDowell foothills.
Wick remembered it as the boys’ social counterpart. “The Jokake School for Girls and Judson had dances together,” he said. “All the leading families in Arizona either went to Judsons or the Jokakes.” He named its head as “George Ashcourt,” though the spelling comes from the interview transcript and we have not confirmed it. The inn’s 1936 bell towers still stand on the lawn of the Phoenician. That’s the closest you can get to the school.
Brownmoor School for Girls (1945–1958): the one in the old resort
The war ended the leisured winter trade, and by 1945 the Ingleside Inn, the 1909 resort near 64th Street and Indian School Road, had closed. That year the Brownmoor School for Girls moved into its buildings, between Indian School and Thomas roads along the Crosscut Canal. It ran there as a boarding and day school through 1958. The campus later gave way to houses, and nothing of it survives except the canal that runs past.
Camelback Desert School (1950) and the end of the era
The Camelback Desert School opened in 1950. That is nearly everything the sources we found say about it: no location, no founder, no closing date. It belongs to the last generation of the type.
By the 1950s the private schools around Scottsdale were changing character. In 1953 the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists moved its Thunderbird Adventist Academy, a day and boarding high school, onto the former Thunderbird Field II flight school north of town. In 1956 Our Lady of Perpetual Help opened its parish school on Miller Road. In 1960 Mae Sue and Franz Talley founded Talley Academy, later Phoenix Country Day School. These were schools for families who lived here year-round. The postwar town was filling with them, and the public district was opening a school nearly every year. The ranch school, built for the children of winter visitors, was a creature of the resort economy, and it faded along with the winter-resort trade. Judson outlasted the rest by turning international and coeducational.
What’s left, and where the rest of the story is
You can visit two sites. El Chorro, at 5550 E. Lincoln Drive, still operates in the former Judson School for Girls. The Jokake Inn’s bell towers stand at the Phoenician. The Judson campus is a gated subdivision, and Brownmoor is a neighborhood of houses.
The archive is better than the landscape. The Town of Paradise Valley’s oral-history collection includes the 1997 interview with Henry and Barbara Wick quoted here. The school catalogs and brochures that survive are scattered among university special collections and the Scottsdale Historical Society. The Scottsdale Progress at the library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection covered the schools from 1948 on. And the families who sent their children here kept the letters. If you have a Judson yearbook, a Jokake brochure or a Brownmoor diploma, both the Historical Society and we would like to see it.