Why it matters
The Scottsdale Historical Society exists because, in July 1968, a group of residents refused to let the city demolish one building. Scottsdale had already lost nearly everything from its first fifty years, and the 1909 brick grammar school on Main Street was next, in the path of Bennie Gonzales’s Civic Center and the pedestrian Scottsdale Mall. The “Old Timers,” as the society still calls them, gathered more than 1,500 signatures, presented them to the City Council that fall, and won. They incorporated in December 1969 and were named the city’s official historical society in April 1970.
That founding explains the organization. It is a preservation campaign that turned into a museum: small, volunteer-run, free, housed in the building it saved, and closed all summer. It is also the city’s memory in a literal sense. The photographs on this site’s history pages and in the city’s own timelines come, more often than not, from the society’s collection. For a city that sells its past as hard as Scottsdale does, that collection is what stands between history and brochure.
Where to find it today
The museum. The Little Red Schoolhouse at 7333 E. Scottsdale Mall, on the Civic Center grounds in Old Town. Free; open roughly October through April, Wednesday to Saturday and Sunday afternoons; closed June through August. One room is a 1910 classroom.
The archive. The society’s photographs live in the Scottsdale Public Library’s digital collections, more than 40,000 images and videos, and in the library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection in the Civic Center Library next door, opened October 19, 2019.
The register. The society publishes the city’s Historic Register list and supplies text for the plaques on listed buildings, from the 1892 Titus House to the Hotel Valley Ho.
How it started
The void was total. In 1968 Scottsdale was the fastest-growing city in Arizona and had no historical society, no museum, no preservation law and no list of what was worth keeping. The old town was a nuisance to be cleared. The Civic Center plan replaced Main Street itself with a raised pedestrian mall, and the schoolhouse the town had built for $4,526 in 1909 at Winfield Scott’s urging stood squarely in the way. The building had been the Scottsdale Grammar School until 1928, the segregated Coronado School for Mexican-American children after that, then town hall, justice court, and from 1963 to 1968 the entire public library. The city planned to knock it down.
Word got out in July 1968. The people who organized were, by the society’s own description, the town’s old-timers: residents who had attended the school or whose parents had. Their names are not published. Their method was a petition, and it worked: more than 1,500 signatures, in a city the 1965 special census had counted at 54,504, went to the council that fall, and the council spared the building. The Civic Center opened around it on October 11, 1968, with the schoolhouse sitting low among Gonzales’s white walls, where it still sits.
Saving the building and keeping it were different problems. The group incorporated in December 1969 and in April 1970 accepted the city’s designation as the official Historical Society of the City of Scottsdale, which gave it standing but no money. The schoolhouse needed code upgrades it could not pay for. In 1971 the Chamber of Commerce offered to help raise the funds, selling vintage school slates with donors’ names on them, and in 1972 the Chamber signed a 25-year lease with the city at $1 a year and moved its offices and visitor center in. The society had saved the building for someone else to use. It would wait nineteen years.
The decisions that locked it in
The petition, not the lawsuit. The old-timers could have appealed quietly to the council or simply salvaged the bell. They chose a public signature drive, which meant the society was born as a popular cause with a single visible object. Everything since, from its name on the city’s plaques to its reluctance to charge admission, follows from having been a citizens’ campaign first and an institution second.
Official status, 1970. Accepting the city’s designation tied the society to the city permanently. The building is city-owned; the society runs the museum in it by agreement, free to the public, with the city’s volunteer office recruiting its greeters. An independent society with its own building and admission fees would have needed an endowment the old-timers did not have. The trade was autonomy for a roof.
Standing aside, 1972. Letting the Chamber occupy the schoolhouse saved it and delayed the society’s museum until 1991. The society’s own page says its initial fundraising “proved insufficient,” and the Chamber’s lease “helped fund restoration efforts.” A building with a tenant has a budget; a building with a plaque does not.
The free museum, 1991. When the Chamber moved to larger quarters on the mall in 1991, the society finally opened the Scottsdale Historical Museum: photographs, artifacts, and a classroom dressed as 1910, with volunteer staff, no admission and summer closure. The National Register listing came on June 10, 1994. When the city passed a Historic Preservation Ordinance in July 1999, the schoolhouse became the first entry on the Scottsdale Historic Register, number SHR-00-1, with the city’s own report crediting the society as the group that “led the fight to preserve the building.”
The library partnership. Rather than build its own archive, the society put its photographs into the Scottsdale Public Library’s digital collections, and the library built the Scottsdale Heritage Connection around them in 2019. The society kept the artifacts and the schoolhouse; the library got the researchers. For a volunteer organization with a basement, it was the only way the collection was ever going to be searchable from a phone.
The years it nearly ended
The society’s near-death was the gap between 1968 and 1972, when it had won the argument and could not pay for the result. The schoolhouse was spared but boarded up. Had the Chamber not raised the code-upgrade money and taken the lease, the city could have reclaimed the lot, and a historical society with no building and no collection would have had little reason to persist. What the society gave up to survive was the building itself, for nineteen years, and with it the chance to be a museum while the people who remembered the 1910 classroom were still alive to furnish it.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1968 purpose was one building. The 2025 mission is “to present, preserve, and interpret through research, exhibits, and educational programming, the prehistory, history, and cultural heritage of Scottsdale and the Southwest.” That is a large expansion for an organization with no paid staff, and it happened in stages: city designation in 1970 made the society responsible, on paper, for all of Scottsdale’s history; the 1991 museum gave it exhibits and school groups; the 1997 Historic Preservation Commission named it a partner; the library partnership made it an archive.
Who drove the expansion is less clear than what expanded, because the society publishes no annual reports. The constituency has moved as well. The old-timers were people who attended the school; today’s members are newcomers to a city of 250,000 who want to know what was here before them. A free museum and an online photo archive serve them well. They serve less well the question the old-timers were asking, which was what else deserved saving. On that question the society went quiet after the schoolhouse, and the city’s register did not arrive for thirty-one years.
Who the record leaves out
Start with the founders. The society that keeps everyone else’s names does not publish its own: no list of the 1968 petitioners, no first president, no first board. That is documented absence, not inference.
Then the building’s second life. From 1928 into the 1960s the schoolhouse was the Coronado School, where Mexican-American children in the first three grades were taught separately until they “mastered English,” in the city report’s phrasing, and it was the community center for the families who built the Old Adobe Mission and staged the Miracle of the Roses pageant on its steps in 1949. The museum’s materials now say this plainly, which took time; the founding story is still told through the Anglo old-timers who attended the grammar school before 1928, and the Coronado families’ part in saving their old community center, if they had one, is not recorded.
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose land begins a mile east and whose canal builders predate every artifact in the building, appears in the exhibits as prehistory and in the archive as subjects of other people’s photographs. The collection, as far as the public catalog shows, is a settler collection. The Huhugam Ki Museum on the Community’s own land tells that story from the other side of the line. Finally, the society’s leadership across five decades, including the women who by observation staff most of its shifts, is not documented in any source we found.
What it didn’t have to become
The society did not have to become a museum in a schoolhouse, and very nearly did not. The documented alternative was the one the city preferred in 1968: clear the lot, build the mall, and let any historical society that formed later work out of a room in the new library. Scottsdale’s is in a building that was condemned, and that fact is the society’s entire character. It explains why the museum is free, why it is volunteer-run, why it closes in summer, and why the city’s historic register begins with SHR-00-1 rather than with Taliesin West or the Valley Ho. Had the old-timers lost in 1968, Scottsdale would still have a history. It would have no place downtown where that history is older than the people telling it, and the reflex that later saved the Mission, the Valley Ho and Cavalliere’s blacksmith shop would have had to start somewhere else, later, with less to show for it.