What is the Charles Miller House?
It’s a small gabled bungalow on First Street west of Goldwater Boulevard, and it’s easy to mistake for one of the old downtown houses that got turned into offices. It isn’t from this street. It was built about 1913 on Winfield Scott’s own orchard at the corner of Scottsdale and Indian School roads, and it has been moved twice to keep it from being torn down.
The man who built it shaped more of Scottsdale than his house suggests. Charles Miller (1863–1923) came to Scottsdale in 1908 and farmed land that Winfield Scott had first irrigated. In 1913 he bought 80 acres from Scott’s family, including the ten acres of orchard and vineyard Scott had been proudest of. In 1918 he co-founded Scottsdale Light and Power, the town’s first electric company. He gave the ten acres for Scottsdale High School, and his two children were two of its three first graduates. He served three terms on the school board, won a seat in the state legislature in 1922, and died in office in 1923. Miller Road is named for him.
The house is a one-story wood-frame Craftsman bungalow, about 24 by 30 feet, with a low gable roof, exposed rafter tails, decorative brackets and a front porch on three heavy tapered piers. The city’s report calls its interior “remarkably intact”: the original built-in cabinets, window seat and leaded-glass bookcase divider are all there, never painted. The city put it on the Scottsdale Historic Register on February 16, 2010.
How to see it
From the street. The house is privately owned. The city’s 2009 report says it had been leased as an office and was vacant at the time, and we haven’t confirmed how it’s used now. It’s at 6938 E. 1st St., just west of Goldwater Boulevard, on a larger parcel known as Charles Miller Square, where other older houses have also been relocated. The register protects only a 37-by-75-foot piece of that lot with the house on it.
What to look for.
- The porch. It covers half the front, with an ornamental wooden trellis over the other half, all carried on three thick, tapering “elephantine” wood piers. Almost all of it is a reconstruction. The original porch was removed in the 1955 move, and at its second home the house had plain square posts on a concrete slab. The owner rebuilt the porch from early photographs.
- The roof. It’s a low-pitched gable with exposed rafter tails and brackets, with a smaller matching gable over part of the porch and painted decorative shingles in the gable ends. In the 2000s the owner replaced a corrugated metal roof with wood shingles at the city’s suggestion.
- The walls and windows. Narrow painted shiplap siding, some of it replaced after the move. Left of the entry is a large square window under a divided-light transom, and on the right is a set of three. The entry door is a custom period-style replacement.
- What you can’t see. The original plan has a living room, dining room and kitchen down the left side and two bedrooms and a bath down the right. The register report describes original built-in cabinetry, a dining-room window seat, a bookcase room divider with leaded-glass doors, all unpainted, plus exposed ceiling beams and a fireplace flanked by seats and bookcases.
Then go to the original corner. Drive to the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Indian School roads, where Scott planted citrus in 1889 and Miller built in 1913. The Arizona Canal crossed the northwest corner of his 80 acres. Nothing from the farm is left. The Scottsdale Historical Museum in the Little Red Schoolhouse, the 1909 school a short walk from First Street, is the best place to see the farm town he lived in.
A South Dakota family on Winfield Scott’s land
The city’s 2009 register report is the fullest account of Miller anywhere, and it’s mostly a local-history story. Charles Miller was born in Iowa in 1863. His family moved to South Dakota, where, the report says, the town of Miller was named for his father. He married Ella Bates in 1880, and they had two children, Bill and Murle. The family came to Phoenix in 1907 and the next year bought 120 acres at the northeast corner of Indian School Road and what is now Miller Road. That was the southeast quarter of Section 23 on the Arizona Canal, which Scott had acquired in 1888 under the Desert Land Act, a law that required buyers to get water onto their land within three years.
Miller and Scott were allies. Both sat on the board of the Orange Belt and Scottsdale Railroad Company in 1908, with Scott as president, a plan to run a trolley from Phoenix out to the farm colony. When Scott died in late 1910, the report says, the trolley idea died with him. In 1913 Miller bought 80 acres at the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Indian School from Scott’s family, including the ten acres of orchard and vineyard Scott had planted with his brother George beginning in 1889. Miller kept farming it and built his bungalow on the property.
The report isn’t consistent about exactly where the house stood. It says “on Indian School Road, east of Scottsdale Road” in one place and “on the corner of Scottsdale and Indian School Roads” in another. Either way it was the Scott tract, on the north side of Indian School.
Lights, a high school, and a seat in the legislature
Miller’s public life was short and productive. In 1918 he joined E.O. Brown and William E. Kimsey in founding Scottsdale Light and Power to bring electricity to the town. It bought power that the Salt River Project generated at the falls on the Arizona Canal near 56th Street and Indian School Road. Central Arizona Light and Power bought the company in 1939, and that company later became APS. (E.O. Brown and Kimsey’s son Mort Kimsey have their own pages.)
He gave ten acres on Indian School Road for Scottsdale High School, which opened for the 1922–23 school year, and served three terms on the school board. The first graduating class, in 1923, had three students: Hunter Chesnutt, Bill Miller and Murle Miller. Miller was elected to the state legislature in 1922 and died in 1923, during his first term. The family stayed in the bungalow until 1955.
Two moves
Around 1955 the family’s corner at Scottsdale and Indian School was redeveloped with a restaurant. The record we found doesn’t name it. Rather than demolish the house, someone moved it to 75th Place, north of Thomas Road. The report doesn’t say who. The move cost it its porch, and at some point it gained an enclosed sleeping porch at the back. Forty-five years later the 75th Place property was proposed for rezoning to higher-density housing. Richard Funke had the house moved to First Street at his own expense. The report dates that move to 2000 and the register listing to 2001.
Funke restored the house. He removed the later sleeping porch, rebuilt the front porch and piers from photographs, replaced the metal roof with wood shingles and had a period-style door made. The City Council rezoned the roughly 30,000-square-foot parcel around it from multifamily to downtown office use on February 24, 2009. The house went on the Scottsdale Historic Register on February 16, 2010. The register lists the designer as “likely Charles Miller.” The report itself says the plans may have come from a catalog or a mail-order kit.
Why it matters
Miller is mostly remembered for a street name. The house is the evidence of a man who connected Scottsdale’s founder to the farm town that followed him. He worked Scott’s land after Scott died, helped light the town, gave it its high school and sent his children through it. The house survived because two owners, half a century apart, moved it rather than tear it down. Scottsdale didn’t save most of its early buildings, so a twice-moved bungalow is one of the few places left to see that era.