What was the Farmer’s State Bank?
Scottsdale’s first bank was a bet on cotton, placed just as cotton collapsed.
In December 1920 the Arizona Republican reported that “a group of well known Scottsdale farmers and business men” had filed articles of incorporation for the Farmer’s State Bank of Scottsdale, with $20,000 in capital stock: two hundred shares at a hundred dollars each. Its incorporators were W. E. Kimsey, Y. C. White and R. A. Chestnut. On Monday, January 17, 1921 it opened in a new one-story red-brick building on Main Street, at what is now 7245 E. Main Street, with Kimsey, the Vice President’s father-in-law, as president, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and Charles Miller as vice presidents, and White, a Texas banker, as cashier. The Scottsdale Historical Society calls E.O. Brown, who owned the general store and the town’s cotton gin, the primary investor; the newspaper’s lists of incorporators, directors and officers do not name him.
It lasted twelve years. On March 2, 1933, with bank runs spreading across the country, Governor Benjamin B. Moeur declared a state bank holiday, four days ahead of the national one. The Farmer’s State Bank closed that day and never reopened. Scottsdale went without a bank until 1952.
The building did much better. Scottsdale’s first chamber of commerce met there in 1921 and 1922, the 1947 Chamber opened its first office there, it was a lending library at one time and, from the early 1950s, the Rusty Spur Saloon, which is still pouring there. The vault is the liquor cooler. The city put the building on the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2000.
A bank for a cotton town
Why 1920. The World War I demand for long-staple Pima cotton had turned the farms around Scottsdale to cotton and brought money and people to town. In July 1921 the Arizona Republican’s Scottsdale column reported nine places of business, against three a year before: “The new additions are the Farmers’ State Bank, Mahoney’s Mercantile Co., the drug store, Walker and Herron’s barber shop and pool hall, Kaubelsky clothing store and Eckley Bros.’ soft drink emporium and stage office.” (The Historical Society files the same list under 1920.) Before the bank, depositing a check meant the trip to Phoenix.
Bad timing, then twelve years. The incorporators filed on December 21, 1920, and the paper read the timing as a statement: “That their faith in Arizona is not disturbed by the unrest throughout the country is demonstrated by their launching a banking institution at this time.” Pima prices had broken, and Valley Pima acreage fell from about 180,000 to about 76,000 in 1921, the year the bank opened. Its depositors were the farmers holding unsold crops. It survived that and the rest of the 1920s, as the town added a newspaper, the Scottsdale Bulletin (1922), and Saba’s (1927), and as winter visitors began arriving at the guest ranches.
The holiday. Arizona’s banks were failing with everyone else’s by early 1933. Governor Moeur’s proclamation of March 2 declared a three-day holiday, optional in law, that closed nearly every bank in the state (a few in Nogales, Bisbee and Douglas stayed open), and Roosevelt’s national holiday followed on March 6. The day page for March 2, 1933 has the reports. Many banks reopened after inspection. Scottsdale’s didn’t. The records we’ve found don’t say whether it was found insolvent, was liquidated by the state, or simply chose not to reopen.
The building
What you’re looking at. The city’s register report describes a small one-story red-brick building on a lot about 25 by 50 feet, set on the sidewalk line, with brick corbelling at the cornice, brick pilasters at the corners and brick piers dividing the front into three bays: a recessed entry at the east end and two large divided-light wooden windows. The wooden porch with its shake-shingle roof over the sidewalk came later. It shows up in 1950s photographs, when Main Street was putting Old West porches on everything. A block addition at the back is also later.
Twenty years between the bank and the bar. After 1933 the building housed what the city calls “various financial and real estate related businesses until after WWII, including a currency exchange and insurance agency.” It was a lending library at one time, and in 1947 the newly incorporated Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce opened its first office there. It was not the first chamber in the room: an earlier Scottsdale chamber of commerce, organized at the schoolhouse in January 1921, held its meetings “at the bank building” from 1921, and the Farm Bureau kept a room there too. That was the year the Chamber coined “The West’s Most Western Town.” Then came the Scottsdale Coffee Shop and, in the early 1950s, the Rusty Spur.
The vault. It’s still there, and the city’s report calls it “a prominently visible fixture.” The Rusty Spur uses it as a cooler. Salt River Stories records that a former owner drilled a hole in its ceiling for fear that someone might get locked in. The hole is still there too.
The listing. The city zoned the building for historic preservation on February 1, 1983, and listed it on the Scottsdale Historic Register on May 23, 2000, under the bank’s name. It is not on the National Register.
What the record shows, and what it doesn’t
The bank is better documented as a building than as a business.
The building’s record is good. The city’s register significance report (SHR-00-3) quotes the 1920 incorporation notice, gives the capital stock, describes the building and lists its later occupants. The Historical Society’s timeline, Salt River Stories and the city’s walking tour agree on the essentials.
The bank’s record is better than this guide used to say. The Arizona Republican of December 22 and 31, 1920 and January 22, 1921 names three incorporators, seven directors, a president, two vice presidents and a cashier; an earlier version of this page said only E.O. Brown was named anywhere. There are still no deposit figures. The end is a blank: no receiver, no liquidation notice, no word on depositors. The 1920s politics chapter follows the men who ran it into the town’s first court and school board.
The dates don’t all agree.
- Opening: Monday, January 17, 1921, by the only report written at the time, the Republican’s Scottsdale column dated January 19. Later sources give January 22 (city report, Salt River Stories: the date the column was printed), January 21 (the Historical Society’s marker), January 19 (a city preservation plan) and January 15 (a 2024 city newsletter). We use January 17.
- The Rusty Spur: 1951 (the saloon, a 2024 city newsletter, AZ Big Media, the Experience Scottsdale walking tour); 1953 (the Historical Society); 1958 (the city’s register report and Salt River Stories). One plausible reconciliation is a café or coffee shop first and a bar license later, but we haven’t found a record that says so.
Two corrections. This guide used to say that no source supports an earlier chamber of commerce. The Arizona Republican shows one organized in January 1921 and meeting in the bank building through 1922, and Salt River Stories says it closed after the 1933 bank failure; the 1947 Chamber was the second. The site’s day page for the opening has also moved from January 22 to January 17, 1921, the day the bank actually opened.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic from March 1933 onward (the closing); the Arizona State Banking Department’s records, held by the State Library, Archives and Public Records; Maricopa County deed records for 7245 E. Main Street; and the Scottsdale Heritage Connection at the Civic Center Library.
Why it matters
The Farmer’s State Bank is the cotton town’s institution that left the most behind. The farms are subdivisions, the gin is a hospital, and the barrio is under the Civic Center. The bank’s building is still on Main Street, with its vault, and has been a bar for more than seventy years.