What is the Titus House?
On Hayden Road south of McDowell, among postwar subdivision houses and across the road from a defense-electronics campus, stands the oldest house in Scottsdale. It’s a one-story brick Victorian from 1892.
Frank Titus built it. He came from San Francisco, was an executive of the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad, and in 1891 took up 160 acres of open desert ten miles east of Phoenix for a citrus farm and horse-breeding ranch. His only nearby neighbors were Winfield Scott, whose farm was about three miles north on the Arizona Canal, and a farmer named Wilford Hayden. He hired James Miller Creighton, the leading architect in the Phoenix area, to design the house. The bricks were fired from clay dug on the property.
The result is a modest version of what Creighton was building for the territory’s wealthier families: a hipped roof, a full-width veranda on slender chamfered posts, brick piers dividing the front into three bays, arched brick caps over every opening, and a full basement, rare in the Salt River Valley. The 1982 National Register nomination called it the oldest extant house in Scottsdale, the city’s only surviving nineteenth-century building, and one of three left from the territorial period before 1912. It is still a private home.
How to see it
From the sidewalk only. The house is privately owned, so stay on the public sidewalk. It sits on the west side of Hayden Road, about 1,100 feet south of McDowell Road, on a lot of roughly three-quarters of an acre with alleys on the north and west. The nomination describes subdivision houses to the north and west and an apartment complex to the south.
What to look for.
- The veranda. It’s flat-roofed and runs the full width of the front, with eight slender chamfered posts and a plain balustrade of square balusters. A central stair of seven steps climbs to it. The steps are there because the basement lifts the first floor about two feet above the ground. A broad brick water table marks that level on every side.
- The front. Three bays, with paired wooden entry doors under a single-pane transom in the middle and paired one-over-one windows on each side. Each opening is topped by a projecting segmental-arched brick cap. Brick piers mark each bay and corner and carry a narrow brick architrave under a molded cornice.
- The roof. It’s a steep hip with a canted, hipped dormer facing the street (and a matching one at the back), and two brick stove chimneys with recessed panels and corbelled caps.
- The changes. The brick was painted white in the 1920s. The original cedar shakes had been replaced with asphalt shingles by 1982. A clapboard addition went on the back around 1960. The nomination judged that none of this hurt the house’s integrity.
Look across the street. The 1982 nomination puts Motorola’s Government Electronics Division plant across Hayden Road. Motorola opened it in 1957, and General Dynamics took over the business in 2001. Our Motorola guide has that story. A railroad man’s 1892 farmhouse and a Cold War electronics plant built sixty-five years later face each other across one road.
Go further. For the founding-era town Titus helped organize, the Scottsdale Historical Museum in the Little Red Schoolhouse is the public place to go. It’s closed in summer, so check before you visit. The 1890s chapter tells the colony’s early years.
A railroad man’s farmhouse
Scottsdale’s founding story is usually told through Winfield Scott, the Army chaplain who recruited sober farm families to a dry colony on the Arizona Canal. Frank Titus doesn’t fit that story. He came from San Francisco, not the Midwest, and he made his money in railroads. The city’s register report calls him “a wealthy railroad investor.” The National Register nomination says he was an executive of the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad, which opened in 1887 and gave Phoenix its first direct rail link to the West Coast. It was the kind of line that brought both settlers and building materials into the Valley.
He settled in 1891 on 160 acres, about ten miles east of Phoenix, where he planted citrus and bred horses. The nomination says the only nearby farms were Scott’s and Wilford Hayden’s. When the settlement petitioned Maricopa County for a school district in 1896, which the nomination calls Scottsdale’s first official recognition, Titus was one of the three men the community appointed to the first school board. The school they oversaw opened that year in a 16-by-18-foot frame room with Hattie Green as teacher.
That’s nearly all the record holds about the man. The sources we found don’t give his birth and death dates, when he left, or why he sold. The 1972 Scottsdale Progress article “Victorian Home May Be Oldest Here” and Richard E. Lynch’s 1980 Progress feature “Two Old Homes Keep Alive Earlier Days,” both in the Scottsdale Heritage Connection, are the next places to look. The Arizona Memory Project also holds a historic photograph of the house from the Scottsdale collections.
Creighton’s smallest Victorian
James Miller Creighton designed public and residential buildings across Arizona in the late nineteenth century and was known statewide by the end of it. The nomination places the Titus House alongside two of his other houses from the same years, the Dr. Roland Rosson House in Phoenix and the Niels Petersen House in Tempe. Both are two-story Queen Anne houses on the National Register. It describes the three together as the first formal, architect-designed homes in the Phoenix area. Titus’s is the plain one. It’s one story, hip-roofed and symmetrical, a type the nomination calls “Queen Anne/Anglo-Territorial.” Similar houses went up across the territory in the 1890s as newcomers from both coasts brought national styles with them.
The material is a large part of why it matters. Using brick made from clay dug on the property, which the nomination says Creighton favored, was a move away from the adobe that had been the standard building material of the Southwest. The full basement, a rarity in the Valley, points the same way. This was built as a permanent house by people who expected to stay.
Cotton, then subdivisions
The house outlasted the farm around it. James Holmesley owned it from 1909 to 1919 and raised cotton and cattle. In 1919 it went to Frank Stevenson, a cotton farmer who had come from Texas with his father and brother during the post-World War I cotton boom. The family added 320 adjoining acres to the original 160. The National Register still lists the house’s other name as the Stevenson House. Stevenson sold the house in 1950, the farmland was sold and subdivided in the 1950s, and the nomination says the property stayed in agricultural use until the early 1960s. In 1982 the owner was Joseph Gatti, and the city’s later register report names Joseph and Frances Gatti. The City of Scottsdale Planning Division prepared the nomination, and the house was listed on May 13, 1982. It went on the city’s own register on May 1, 2001, as SHR-01-08.
Why it matters
Scottsdale lost nearly everything from its first two decades. The Scott family’s house is gone, and so are the first schoolhouse and the first store. This house survived because people kept living in it. The family that built it was richer and more connected than most early settlers, and that’s the reason its walls were brick and still stand. It’s one more sign that Scottsdale’s origins included railroad money from San Francisco as well as Midwestern farm families.