What was the Jokake School for Girls?
The Jokake Inn was a family business, and its school was the family’s next project.
In the early 1930s George Ashforth, a Yale graduate from a New York real-estate family, met Barbara Evans while he was a guest at the inn her parents, the architect Robert T. Evans and Sylvia Evans, had built below Camelback Mountain. After they married, her father wanted the couple to “get going and do something.” Barbara remembered it as “my father’s idea really.” The something was a boarding school for girls, in a low arcaded adobe building beside the inn: the Jokake School for Girls, open by 1933.
It was a ranch school, part of a small Arizona fashion for sending children of wealthy families west for sun, horses and college preparation (our ranch schools note covers the group). Each girl had her own horse, three cowboys ran the stables, and the school shared the inn’s pool and stables. The inn’s winter season was short, so outside it the school had them to itself. It became an accredited preparatory school, and its girls danced with the boys of Judson.
It closed during World War II. George Ashforth was drafted, the couple had divorced, and the private-school trade the war was ending everywhere ended here too. The buildings are gone. The Phoenician covers the ground, and the Jokake Inn’s adobe bell tower is all that stands.
Inside the school
Who ran it. George was the director. Barbara didn’t teach, and her name doesn’t appear in the school’s brochures or yearbooks. She ran the housekeeping, supervised the chefs, supplied the food and kept the books. Her mother, Sylvia, later stated plainly that “both Barbara and George started the school.” That’s the account in historian Melissa Bingmann’s Prep School Cowboys: Ranch Schools in the American West (2015), which draws on the school’s 1937, 1939 and 1940 yearbooks at Arizona State University, a school brochure and an interview with Barbara, who later went by Barbara Ferris.
Riding. The 1939 yearbook records riding on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons: an hour of drill, then an hour in the desert. The drill team performed at the Arizona State Horse Show and hosted its own meet. The Scottsdale Historical Society records overnight horseback trips, for inn guests and students alike, to the Jokake Desert Camp in the McDowell foothills.
Lessons and patrons. The school “grew quickly and became an accredited preparatory school,” Bingmann writes. Mrs. John C. Lincoln, whose daughter had been at Judson’s short-lived girls’ school across the mountain, gave Jokake chemistry equipment for a science laboratory and recorded music. When that Judson School for Girls closed, some of its students moved to Jokake. David Lincoln remembered Jokake as the competition that sank it.
The girls. In October 1938 the Arizona Republic reported twenty girls “from socially prominent families from all parts of the United States” arriving for the year. Wikipedia says enrollment averaged about forty. Some families sent daughters to Jokake and sons to Judson, and the two schools’ social calendars ran together: a spring 1938 party at the Camelback Inn hosted by the Lincolns, the Judsons’ April dinner-dance, and a formal party at the Judson home in November 1940. “All the leading families in Arizona either went to Judsons or the Jokakes,” Henry Wick of Judson said.
How it ended
The Ashforths divorced sometime before 1941, and George ran the school on his own for a short while. Then he was drafted. Bingmann counts Jokake among the ranch schools the war closed, along with Hacienda del Sol in Tucson. No source we found gives the exact year; Wikipedia says 1945. The inn went on without the school, was sold to Charles Alberding’s Alsonett Hotels in 1952 and closed in the late 1970s. From 1985 Charles Keating’s developers cleared the complex for The Phoenician, keeping the adobe double bell tower at the entrance.
The sources, and what they don’t settle
The best source is Melissa Bingmann’s Prep School Cowboys (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), the only history of the ranch-school movement. Her Jokake material comes from the school’s yearbooks (1937, 1939, 1940) in ASU’s Arizona Collection, a school brochure, “Jokake School: A Desert School for Girls,” her interview with Barbara Ferris, and Sylvia Byrnes’s memoir of the inn. Two Town of Paradise Valley oral histories add colour: Henry and Barbara Wick (1997) and David Lincoln (2016).
What we couldn’t settle:
- The opening year. 1933: the Scottsdale Historical Society, the City of Scottsdale’s 2004 historic context and Wikipedia. 1934: Bingmann’s introduction and Arizona Highways (2024). 1932: Bingmann’s own chapter on the school. We use 1933 and flag it.
- The closing year. Bingmann ties the closing to the war and Ashforth’s draft but gives no year. Wikipedia’s 1945, attributed to Arizona Interscholastic Association records, is the only year on the record, and we haven’t seen those records.
- The founder’s name. The 1997 Wick oral history transcribes him as “George Ashcourt”; our ranch-schools note repeated that. Bingmann, working from the yearbooks and the family, has Ashforth, and Wick’s recollection that “George got a divorce and disappeared” matches her account. We follow Bingmann.
- The Desert Camp. Only the Historical Society mentions it, and nobody gives its location.
- The building’s end. We know the school stood in an arcaded adobe building beside the inn and that the complex was cleared for The Phoenician. When the school building itself came down is not recorded.
Where the answers are. ASU Library’s Arizona Collection (the yearbooks); the Arizona Republic for the school’s openings each autumn from 1933 and its last years; Arizona Interscholastic Association records; a 16mm film of the school from 1938 that circulates online; and the Scottsdale Historical Society.
Why it matters
Jokake’s school shows how the winter-resort economy reached past the season. An inn that sold January to eastern families found a way to keep their daughters for the whole school year. The Lincolns supplied money, the Judsons supplied the dances, and the inn supplied the horses and the pool. The war ended the arrangement, and none of the buildings survive. Its history is in the yearbooks and in one historian’s book.