Why he matters
Charles Miller connects Scottsdale’s founder to the farm town that came after him. He came in 1908, farmed land Winfield Scott had first irrigated, and served on Scott’s trolley company board. After Scott died he bought Scott’s own orchard. Over the next decade he helped bring the town electricity, gave it its high school, and won a seat in the legislature. He died in office in 1923. Miller Road carries his name.
Where to find his mark today
The Charles Miller House. His c. 1913 Craftsman bungalow, moved twice to save it, is at 6938 E. 1st St., just west of Goldwater Boulevard. It’s private property.
Scottsdale High School. It stood on the ten acres he gave on Indian School Road from 1922 until it was demolished between 1987 and 1992.
The farmer on Scott’s land
The city’s 2009 register report on his house is the fullest account of Miller. He was born in Iowa in 1863. His family moved to South Dakota, where the town of Miller was named for his father. He married Ella Bates, and they had two children, Bill and Murle. The family came to Phoenix in 1907 and in 1908 bought 120 acres on the Arizona Canal at the northeast corner of Indian School Road and what is now Miller Road. Scott had acquired that land in 1888 under the Desert Land Act.
Miller and Scott were allies. Both sat on the board of the Orange Belt and Scottsdale Railroad Company in 1908, with Scott as president, a plan for a trolley from Phoenix. The plan died with Scott in late 1910. In 1913 Miller bought 80 acres at the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Indian School roads from Scott’s family, including the ten acres of orchard and vineyard Scott and his brother George had planted beginning in 1889. Miller kept farming it and built a small wood-frame Craftsman bungalow there. He may have bought it from a catalog or as a set of plans; the report says nobody knows which.
Lights, a high school and the legislature
In 1918 Miller joined E.O. Brown and William E. Kimsey, father of Mort Kimsey, in founding Scottsdale Light and Power. It bought electricity that the Salt River Project generated at the falls on the Arizona Canal near 56th Street and Indian School Road. Central Arizona Light and Power bought the company in 1939, and that company later became APS.
He gave ten acres on Indian School Road for Scottsdale High School, which opened for the 1922–23 school year, and served three terms on the school board. The first graduating class, in 1923, had three students: Hunter Chesnutt and his own children, Bill and Murle Miller. Miller was elected to the state legislature in 1922 and died in 1923, during his first term.
The family stayed in the bungalow until about 1955, when the corner was redeveloped and the house was moved to 75th Place north of Thomas Road. In 2000–01 owner Richard Funke moved it again, to First Street, and restored it, and the city listed it on the Scottsdale Historic Register on February 16, 2010. The house guide has the details, and the farm-town era covers the town he helped build.