What was the Adobe House?
Most towns’ first buildings have one job. Scottsdale’s Adobe House had about six over seventy years, and three of them were firsts.
George and Alza Blount came from Illinois for Alza’s health and built an adobe home in the new settlement in the mid-1890s, just south of today’s Civic Center Plaza. When the settlers organized School District No. 48 on July 13, 1896, the first classes met in the Blounts’ front room, with Alza teaching eight to ten pupils for $40 a month. That fall the families raised a frame schoolhouse and the school moved out. (Our Little Red Schoolhouse guide picks up the school’s story from there.)
The house went on without them. According to the Arizona State Library’s records, it was a cheese factory, then the home of the playwright Roy George, and from the 1920s to the 1940s a guest ranch run by Mildred Barthalow under the name it kept for the rest of its life: the Adobe House.
In the 1950s a civic group, the Scottsdale Civic Coordinating Council, made it the town’s community center. Volunteers opened Scottsdale’s first public library there in 1955, the Scottsdale Community Players staged early productions in the original Stagebrush Theatre on its grounds, and the city’s new Parks Department had its first office there.
It was gone by 1970, as the Civic Center went up around it: the city says it burned. The Civic Center Library’s parking garage covers the site today.
Seventy years, six jobs
A classroom, 1896. Scottsdale got a school district before it had a store, a post office or a settled name; the petition spelled it “Scotts-Dale.” The first school board was Winfield Scott, John Tait and Frank Titus. Alza Blount taught in the house through the summer of 1896, and by fall the settlers had built a sixteen-by-eighteen-foot frame room on donated land, where Hattie Green took over with fourteen pupils. For a few months, Scottsdale’s whole public sector was an adobe front room.
A cheese factory and a writer’s house. The state library’s record lists both after the Blounts left, with no dates. If the playwright Roy George is the same Roy George the Scottsdale Historical Society credits with publishing the town’s first newspaper, the Scottsdale Bulletin, in 1922, the house was briefly the home of the town’s first press as well as its first school. We haven’t confirmed that they are the same man.
A guest ranch, 1920s–1940s. Scottsdale’s winter trade was moving from health seekers to “dudes,” and the Adobe House joined in at the small end: a promotional brochure in the state library’s collection sold “relaxation among orange and olive trees.” It was a neighbor, in spirit and in clientele, to the Graves Guest Ranch a few blocks north.
A community center, 1950s–1960s. The Scottsdale Civic Coordinating Council took over the house and grounds and ran them as the town’s community and recreation center. Joan Fudala’s list of lost Scottsdale places adds a school for the blind and a scout house on the grounds in the 1950s and 1960s, and the original Stagebrush Theatre. The Stagebrush Theatre moved to its own building on Second Street in 1968.
The first library, 1955. Lou Ann Noel and Beth Fielder started it in the summer of 1955: about 300 donated books in a house with no air conditioning, open two hours a morning, two mornings a week. The city took it over in 1960 and hired its first professional librarian, and the city’s 2012 context says the library then moved into the Little Red Schoolhouse; Fudala dates its years in the house to 1955–63. Bennie Gonzales’s Civic Center Library opened in 1968, and that’s the building whose garage now sits on the house’s site.
The first Parks Department office. Fudala lists that too. It fits: the community center was the town’s recreation program before the town had a parks system.
How to see what’s left
Nothing of the house survives, and the garage gives no hint of it. The best way to see it is through the buildings that inherited its jobs, all a few minutes apart on the Civic Center: the Little Red Schoolhouse, the Civic Center Library and the Stagebrush Theatre. Ask at the library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection to see photographs of the house.
The sources, and the gaps
The Adobe House is remembered mainly in lists, and the lists don’t always agree.
- The City of Scottsdale’s Historic Context: A Modern Dynamic City, 1961–1979 (2012) gives the address, 315 E. Second Street under the old numbering, the 1955 library, its 1960 move to the Little Red Schoolhouse, and one more fact: “the house burned down later.”
- Joan Fudala’s “Local Legends: Do you remember these Scottsdale places and programs?” (2025) gives the dates 1897–1970, calls it “the Blount and George family residence, Adobe House Guest Ranch,” and lists the library (1955–63), the first Parks Department offices, the original Stagebrush, a school for the blind and a scout house. It places the site “where the Civic Center Library parking garage is today.”
- The Arizona State Library’s Arizona Memory Project has two records from the Scottsdale Public Library’s photograph collection. One dates the Blounts’ house to 1896, the other to 1897. They supply the cheese factory, Roy George, Mildred Barthalow’s guest ranch “from the 1920s to the 1940s,” the “orange and olive trees” brochure, and the Civic Coordinating Council’s community center.
- The school district’s founding (July 13, 1896) and Alza Blount’s teaching come from the district’s history as told on our day page and 1896 summary. If the first classes met in the house in the summer of 1896, the house stood by then, which favors the 1896 date. We use “circa 1896.”
- The library’s start is documented by the library itself: Lou Ann Noel and Beth Fielder, summer 1955, 300 books, the un-air-conditioned Adobe House. The city’s Old Town walking tour repeats it.
What we couldn’t settle. The date the Civic Coordinating Council took the house over; whether it bought the property or leased it; how long the library stayed after the city took it over (the city says it moved in 1960, Fudala says 1963); when the house burned, and whether the fire or the Civic Center ended it; whether Roy George the playwright and Roy George the newspaperman were one person; and whether anyone argued for keeping the house when the Civic Center was built. The city’s 2012 context says only that after the 1966 vote, “existing homes or other prior development on the 20-acre site were demolished.” Our note on the barrio under the Civic Center tells the larger story of what that sentence covers.
Where the answers are. The Scottsdale Heritage Connection at the Civic Center Library (the house’s photographs and the Civic Coordinating Council’s papers, if they survive); the Scottsdale Historical Society at the Little Red Schoolhouse; the Scottsdale Progress for 1955 (the library’s opening) and 1970 (the demolition); and the city’s 1960s Civic Center land-acquisition files.
Why it matters
The Adobe House is the clearest case of something Scottsdale did over and over: it started its institutions in borrowed rooms and moved them into purpose-built ones when the town could pay for it. The school went from the Blounts’ front room to the frame schoolhouse to the brick Little Red Schoolhouse. The library went from the Adobe House to the Civic Center. The theater went from the yard to Second Street. The borrowed room was always this house, and the Civic Center that replaced it is built on its site.