What was the Scottsdale cotton gin?
Before Scottsdale sold the West, it sold cotton. In 1917, with Egyptian cotton cut off by the war and the Army buying long-staple fiber for tires and airplane fabric, the farms around the town turned to Pima cotton (our Pima cotton entry tells that story). By 1920 there was enough of it that E.O. Brown, the merchant who owned the general store and much of the town’s credit, opened a gin with partners on the south side of Second Street at Brown Avenue: the Scottsdale Ginning Company.
It opened at the top of a bubble. Pima prices collapsed in 1920–21, and Valley plantings fell by more than half in a year. The gin survived the crash anyway. It baled 1,525 bales of long-staple cotton between January and October 1923, and a receipt from 1926 shows it still buying. It ran for about three decades, into the early 1950s, when downtown had become a place for shops, artists and tourists rather than wagons of cotton.
The buildings outlived the ginning by forty years. Joan Fudala lists them as an auto-body shop, a trolley barn, the Scottsdale Farmers Market and, from 1992 to 1997, the Works nightclub. The last galvanized-steel gin building came down in the 1990s. HonorHealth’s Osborn campus covers the block today.
What the gin did to the town
It brought the families. The cotton had to be picked by hand, and Scottsdale’s farmers sponsored Mexican families to come north and do it. The Scottsdale Historical Society dates the first of them to 1917. They settled in the barrio south and east of the Little Red Schoolhouse. By 1918 the school needed two annexes, and in 1933 the same families built the Old Adobe Mission a block from the gin. Our Corral family profile and the note on the barrio under the Civic Center follow them.
It built Main Street. The Historical Society counts three downtown businesses before the boom and nine in 1920: Brown’s store, the pool hall, the barbershop, Sterling Drug, Eckley’s soda fountain, two dry-goods merchants, McComb Brothers and the town’s first bank, the Farmer’s State Bank, which opened in January 1921 with Brown as its primary investor. The gin and the bank were the same man’s bet on the same crop.
It was the blacksmith’s neighbor. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop sits across Second Street from the gin’s block. It shod the horses and fixed the wagons of the cotton economy, and it’s still working.
It held on after the town changed. By the late 1940s Scottsdale was dressing its storefronts as the Old West and calling itself “The West’s Most Western Town”, and in 1947, the year the slogan was coined, the town of about 2,000 still had its cotton gin. The ginning ended in the early 1950s, around the time the Scottsdale Community Gin opened on Pima Road south of Thomas in 1953. That one lasted until the 1970s, when it was razed for townhouses.
What came after
The gin’s buildings were sturdy, cheap and central, so the town kept finding uses for them. Joan Fudala, writing in 2024, lists Bill Ferguson’s auto-body shop, a trolley barn (Scottsdale’s downtown trolley started in 1980, so that use came late), and the Scottsdale Farmers Market, an earlier market than the one that has run on First Street and Brown Avenue since 2009. A theater company, Actors Lab Arizona, had its home on the block in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1991 two club operators leased that 14,000-square-foot building, and from 1992 to the fall of 1997 it was the Works, a warehouse dance club that booked Moby and the Prodigy. When the lease ran out, the landowner wanted the ground for parking. The last gin building was razed in the 1990s.
See it now
Nothing marks the gin. Stand at Second Street and Brown Avenue: the hospital buildings to the south are on its block, Cavalliere’s is behind you, and the Old Adobe Mission is a block north on Brown. Together they give you most of the cotton town in three buildings.
The sources, and the gaps
What is solid. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s key-events timeline: “Brown’s Scottsdale Ginning Company begins operating on Second Street south of Brown Avenue,” 1920. Joan Fudala’s “Remember When: Cotton was the fabric of Scottsdale’s economy” (Scottsdale Progress, October 13, 2024) adds Brown’s partners, the 1923 bale count from the Arizona Republic, a 1926 receipt, the closing in the early 1950s and the later uses. A Scottsdale Public Library photograph on the Arizona Memory Project places the gin on “the south side of Second Street just east of Scottsdale Road.”
What is unresolved.
- When it stopped ginning. “Early 1950s” (Fudala’s text), “1953” (her photo caption), “the 1920’s to the 1950’s” (the Western Spirit museum), and “until the 1930s” (the library’s photo record). The 1953 date may be borrowed from the opening of the Community Gin. We say early 1950s and flag it.
- Brown’s partners. No source we found names them.
- The tenants and their dates. The auto-body shop, the trolley barn and the farmers market come only from Fudala, with no dates. The New Times accounts of the Works call its building the old home of Actors Lab Arizona and never mention cotton. Fudala’s two columns tie the Works to the gin, and the address is on the gin’s block. But no source we found traces one building through all of those uses.
- The demolition. “Razed in the 1990s” is as precise as the record gets. It fits the Works’ lease ending in 1997 and a parking lot after it.
- What covers the footprint. Fudala says the site “now hosts HonorHealth Oncology Center.” The New Times places the Works where the Greenbaum Surgical Specialty Hospital stands (3535 N. Scottsdale Road). The building just south of Greenbaum, at 3501, houses HonorHealth’s cancer-care offices. Both are on the gin’s block; which one sits on the gin itself, we can’t say.
Where the answers are. Sanborn fire-insurance maps of Scottsdale, which draw gins building by building; the city’s building and demolition permits for the Second Street block; the Maricopa County deed chain for the parcels HonorHealth assembled; the Scottsdale Heritage Connection at the Civic Center Library for the Schlueter photographs; and the Arizona Republic’s ginning reports, which listed every Valley gin’s bale count each season.
Why it matters
Scottsdale tells its story as a sequence: farm town, Western town, resort town, city. Most of the farm town is gone without a trace, and the gin was its biggest building. It’s also the clearest link between the crop and the people. The cotton brought the families who built the mission, and the money paid for the bank. The gin’s buildings then hung on through every later version of downtown, as a garage, a market and a nightclub, until a hospital replaced them.