What was Judson School?
From the late 1920s into the 1950s, the desert around Camelback Mountain held a cluster of boarding schools for the children of winter money. Judson was the first and the one that lasted, for 72 years.
George Judson, a former school superintendent and, in Henry Wick’s description, “a great, big man, about 6-4, had a booming voice,” decided “that what Arizona needed was a good private school for boys.” He opened it in 1928 with seven or eight pupils, horses and tennis courts in the open desert north of Camelback. Henry C. Wick III, a Yale graduate who joined the faculty in 1938, bought the school in 1945, and the Wick family ran it until it closed.
Under the Wicks, Judson became something unusual: a Western ranch school with an international student body. It began teaching English as a second language in the late 1940s and drew students from as many as thirty countries at a time. It admitted girls in 1956. Every student rode, and the equestrian program was what Judson was known for.
The campus ended up at 6704 N. Mockingbird Lane in Paradise Valley, on 55 acres at the foot of Mummy Mountain. In November 1999 the board announced that the school would close at the end of the year, and Cachet Homes bought the land. Judson closed in 2000, and the campus was cleared for a gated subdivision of about three dozen estate lots called Judson.
Inside the school
The early years. The best witness is David Lincoln, son of the industrialist John C. Lincoln, who started as a day student in the fall of 1931 and gave the Town of Paradise Valley an oral history in 2016. He remembered about 21 students in grades one through twelve, nearly all boarders, and “40 or 50” by the time he left after eighth grade. The school was “built facing what is now Mockingbird,” because the plan was to make Mockingbird a major street. Afternoons were for “horses and tennis”; he rode a horse named Nickel, and the boys rode into Scottsdale for popsicles. The Judsons were “a tennis family” with two courts. The boarding tuition, he said, “was pretty high for that time,” and the students came from the East, from South America, and from families who had come to Arizona for their health.
Polo and the other ranch schools. Judson fielded a polo team that played the ranch schools around Tucson. The City of Scottsdale’s historic context on the area’s tourism credits the ranch schools as a group with “championship tennis and polo teams of national repute.” Judson’s social counterpart was the Jokake Inn’s school for girls. “The Jokake School for Girls and Judson had dances together,” Wick recalled. “All the leading families in Arizona either went to Judsons or the Jokakes.”
The girls’ school that became a restaurant. In about 1934, Lincoln and Judson started a separate Judson School for Girls on Lincoln’s land for their daughters and a few classmates. It lasted a year or two, and by 1937 its building was El Chorro Lodge, which still serves dinner on Lincoln Drive. Our note on the ranch schools of Camelback untangles this. The often-repeated version that the boys’ school began at El Chorro doesn’t fit what either Wick or Lincoln said.
The Wick years. Wick came from two years at another ranch school, where his brother was headmaster. Once he owned Judson, he made the changes that kept it alive after the other ranch schools closed: ESL, then coeducation in 1956, and a summer program in Alpine, in the White Mountains, for international students who couldn’t go home and for the horses. In 1997 his wife Barbara counted 138 students, more than half from abroad, mainly Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand, with groups from Brazil and Canada. Earlier there had been students from Saudi Arabia, and about twenty from Iran before 1979. Its best-known graduate is Michael Reagan, class of 1964.
Paradise Valley. When Paradise Valley incorporated in 1961, the Wicks brought the school into the new town, and Henry Wick helped with the incorporation. One of their sons, Kent, later served as the town’s mayor.
How it ended
On November 30, 1999 the board announced that Judson would close its Mockingbird Lane campus at the end of the 1999–2000 year: “the market for a school like Judson has changed significantly.” Writing at Henry Wick’s death in 2007, the East Valley Tribune named two more reasons: the development that had grown up around the school, and the cost of renovating aging adobe buildings, most of them without air conditioning. Cachet Homes bought the 55 acres that fall, the school’s contents were auctioned in the summer of 2000, and the buildings came down. A small structure built on the property “as a memorial to 72 years of Judson School history” is now the subdivision’s gatehouse.
The sources, and what they don’t settle
The primary record is two oral histories in the Town of Paradise Valley’s collection:
- Henry C. and Barbara Wick, July 2, 1997. Judson’s founding, George Judson, Wick’s arrival in 1938, the girls’ school, the enrollment and nationalities in 1997, the 1961 incorporation and the families who sent their children.
- David Lincoln, August 1, 2016. The school as a day student saw it from 1931: the number of students, the Mockingbird site, horses, polo, tennis, tuition, the Alpine summer camp, and the girls’ school.
Secondary sources: Wikipedia’s Judson School article, which draws on an archived Town of Paradise Valley history page we couldn’t open; the board’s closing announcement of November 30, 1999; Mark Scarp’s column on Henry Wick in the East Valley Tribune (May 2, 2007); the City of Scottsdale’s 2004 historic context; and the Scottsdale Historical Society’s history of local schools.
What we couldn’t settle:
- Seven boys or eight. Wikipedia says seven; Barbara Wick said “about 8.” The 1928 founding year is not in dispute.
- Where it began. The Historical Society says the boys’ school opened at what is now El Chorro and later moved. Wick and Lincoln both describe El Chorro as the girls’ school, and Lincoln has the boys’ school on Mockingbird by 1931. We follow the two people who were there.
- When the campus came down. Wikipedia says summer 2001. The Tribune and another copy of the town’s history say 2000.
- How many homes. Wikipedia says 34. The county plat shows 33 residential lots and five tracts.
- The sale price, tuition figures, and most of the famous names. Wick named several prominent families as Judson parents in 1997, but the transcript spells them loosely and we have not confirmed them. Patti Davis is often listed as an alumna; her own biography says she graduated from the Orme School.
Where the answers are. The Town of Paradise Valley’s oral-history collection and archived town history; Maricopa County plat and deed records for the Judson subdivision; the Arizona Republic for late 1999 and 2000–2001 (the sale and demolition); and a 1965 Arizona Days & Ways profile of the Wick brothers, held by the University of Arizona’s special collections.
Why it matters
Judson is the end of a type. The Camelback ranch schools existed because wealthy families wintered in the desert and wanted their children educated nearby: Jokake, Brownmoor in the old Ingleside Inn, the Camelback Desert School. Those closed as winter society faded. Judson survived for another half-century by finding a new market, international students, and it closed when the land under its horses became worth more than the school. That’s the same fate the area’s guest ranches met. Its name now marks a gated subdivision.