Why he matters
For twenty-four years, if you bought groceries in Scottsdale, you bought them from Earl Shipp. The corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street has been the center of commercial Scottsdale for as long as there has been a Scottsdale, and from 1935 to 1959 it was Earl’s Market, a two-story grocery with his first name on it in a downtown where nothing else had a second floor.
He matters for more than the store. Shipp was a builder who became a grocer because the Depression left nothing to build, and once the boom arrived he went back to building. In the 1950s he put up a bank, three privately owned post offices, an appliance store and a drugstore downtown, so the downtown of the newly incorporated town carried a good deal of his work. He rode with the Scottsdale Sheriff’s Posse, and by 1958 he had a big indexed map of local landmarks on display at the store so newcomers to “The West’s Most Western Town” could find their way.
Where to find his mark today
The corner. The Legacy Gallery holds the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street now. Nothing on it says Earl’s.
The successor. Woolworth’s opened on the site on November 5, 1959, one of the first national chains in Scottsdale.
The corner, then and now
The Earl’s building did not survive. Woolworth’s built on the site in 1959, the Wigwam shop took that Western-style building in 1965, and the Legacy Gallery moved in during the early 1990s. The corner sits at the eastern end of the Main Street Arts District, and the Old Town on foot route crosses it.
His contemporaries are still close by. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop on Brown Avenue was forging while Shipp was clerking, the Rusty Spur Saloon pours in the 1921 bank building up Main, and the Sugar Bowl opened a block north in 1958, the year his map went up.
The full story
In the 1920s Scottsdale was a farm village on the Arizona Canal with a main corner at Scottsdale Road and Main Street and a general store on it. Byer’s General Store was where a teenage Earl Shipp learned the trade, stocking shelves and making deliveries in a town of a few hundred people. He graduated from Scottsdale High in 1928 wanting to build things. Then the Depression arrived, and there was nothing to build.
In 1935 the owner of Byer’s offered him the stock. Shipp bought the store, renamed it Earl’s Market, and ran it from a two-story building that stood out on a low downtown. The 1930s were hard years in the Salt River Valley, but a grocery on the main corner was about as safe a business as existed, and Earl’s carried the town through the Depression and the 1940s, when the wartime airfields brought the first wave of newcomers.
After the war the town he fed began to grow fast. Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, adopted its Western theme and went from about 2,000 people to around 10,000 by the end of the decade, and Shipp the builder came back. He put up a bank, three privately owned post offices, an appliance store and a drugstore downtown. By 1958 the indexed landmark map at the store had made Earl’s a kind of visitor center. Locals, by most accounts, came to call it Earl’s Shoppers Market.
In 1959 the store closed, and on November 5 F.W. Woolworth opened on the corner. The local grocer gave way to the national chain, as it did on main corners across America. The record does not keep Shipp’s birth or death years or what he did after the market closed. His corner is still the busiest crossing in Old Town.