Why she matters
Before Scottsdale had a store, a post office or a settled name, it had a teacher. Alza Blount taught the first settlers’ children in the front room of the adobe she and her husband George had built just south of today’s Civic Center. When the county created School District No. 48 on July 13, 1896, she became its first teacher, at $40 a month, for eight to ten pupils from seven families. That fall the settlers raised a frame schoolhouse, where Hattie Green taught.
She was also, as far as the record shows, the settlement’s first public voice. A Scottsdale correspondent signing herself “A. K. B.” wrote the town’s news for the Phoenix Weekly Herald in 1897 and 1898, and it was that column that announced, in September 1898, that “Scottsdale is coming to the front, politically,” with Winfield Scott’s nomination for the territorial legislature. The politics of 1888–1911 begins with her report.
What the record shows, and what it doesn’t
The teaching. Four sources agree that she taught first and was paid $40 a month: two pages of the school district’s history, the Historical Society’s history of the schools, and Richard Lynch’s 1978 biography of Scott. The Historical Society dates her first lessons, in her own home, to about 1894–95, before the district existed.
The board. The district’s 125th-anniversary history says she later served as the school board’s clerk and that George sat on the board. No second source confirms either, and the Historical Society’s history names only Scott, John Tait and Frank Titus as the first trustees.
The column. The Phoenix Weekly Herald’s Scottsdale column is signed “A. K. B.” in June 1897 and September 1898. The September column also reports that “Prof. Blount” had gone back to his post as principal of the Union High School in Phoenix and that his daughter Bertha had entered its sophomore class. Lynch, who read the Phoenix papers through for his biography, quotes Alza Blount writing for the Herald in 1897: “It is the determination of the first settlers of Scottsdale never to let alcohol get a foothold in this part of the valley.” No column found prints her full name, so the attribution rests on the initials and Lynch.
Her birth and death, how long the family stayed and when they left are not in the sources this site draws on, and this profile does not guess at them.
The full story
The Blounts came from Illinois for Alza’s health, with their children, among them Bertha, who would take a Scottsdale teaching job herself in 1904 at $50 a month, according to the district’s history. Their adobe, the Adobe House, outlived its first use by seventy years: after the family it was a cheese factory, a writer’s home, a guest ranch, and in the 1950s the town’s first library and the first home of the Stagebrush Theatre.
The column she wrote is the best surviving record of the settlement’s first decade. In June 1897 it told Phoenix readers that “Scottsdale has telephone connections with Phoenix and a daily mail.” In September 1898 it counted thirteen pupils at the opening of school, noted that several families of transients had moved on, carried a missionary’s report from the Pima reservation next door, and closed its politics with a hope: “The Chaplain will make a good representative and we hope he may be elected.” He was.
The words Lynch quotes from 1897, “We are on the ground first and we do not propose to be caught napping,” are the clearest statement anyone left of what the settlers meant the place to be: a dry colony, in sight of Phoenix’s saloons, with a school before a store. One local history attributes the “foothold” line to Scott himself; Lynch gives it to Blount, writing for the settlers.