Why they matter
Drive Scottsdale Road north of Indian Bend and you are crossing the McCormicks’ fence line. For a quarter century Fowler and Anne McCormick ran cattle and Arabian horses on roughly 4,200 acres, about seven square miles, of what is now central Scottsdale. When the ranch sold in 1970, the buyers had one of the largest blank canvases in Arizona, and what they drew on it became the template for north Scottsdale.
The McCormicks shaped the city in three ways that still show. Anne’s Arabians helped make Scottsdale the breed’s winter capital. Their 1967 gift of 100 acres became the city’s most beloved park. And the ranch itself, lakes and all, became McCormick Ranch.
Where to find their mark today
The lakes and paths. The McCormick Ranch lakes and paths: 25-plus miles of public path around seven man-made lakes, some dug from the ranch’s stock ponds.
The Railroad Park. McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park sits on 30 acres of the land they donated, with Anne’s son’s railroad looping it.
The Arabian show. The Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show traces its home-grown years to Anne’s Paradise Park arena.
The resort. The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch opened on the old ranch in September 1976 as America’s first purpose-built conference resort.
What the records disagree on
The McCormick story is told on many of the city’s pages, and they do not all agree. This profile follows the most detailed account, the lakes-and-paths history: purchase of the 160-acre core in April 1944, a ranch of roughly 4,200 acres (4,236 in some tellings), a 1970 sale to Kaiser-Aetna for about $12 million, and Fowler’s death in 1973. Other pages start the land assembly in 1942 or 1943, put the price at $12.1 million or $12.2 million, and one credits the park gift to Anne alone. A couple of history summaries say the land was sold after Fowler’s death; the dates say otherwise, since the sale came in 1970 and he died three years later.
What is not in dispute is the sequence that matters: annexation by Scottsdale in 1967, the park gift the same year, the sale, and the incorporation of the McCormick Ranch Property Owners’ Association in 1972.
The full story
Fowler McCormick was American aristocracy squared, grandson of Cyrus McCormick, whose reaper built International Harvester, and of John D. Rockefeller. He ran International Harvester as president and then as board chairman. His wife, Anne “Fifi” Potter Stillman McCormick, was the mother of Guy Stillman from an earlier marriage, and she had her own passion: horses.
In the 1940s the couple bought into the desert between the Indian Bend Wash and the McDowell foothills. The core was the 160-acre ranch where the Jolly family had run cattle in the 1920s, bought in April 1944 by the lakes-page account, and over the next decade the McCormicks assembled parcel after parcel around it. Fowler ran cattle. Anne ran Arabians, seriously. She bought her first in 1948, built a breeding program that imported the stallion Naborr in 1963, and created Paradise Park, a 150-acre arena complex where the Valley’s Arabian shows were held from the mid-1950s through 1968. The ponds dug to water her stables are the ancestors of today’s lakes.
By the 1960s the city was growing toward their fences. In 1967 Scottsdale annexed the ranch, and the McCormicks donated 100 acres, then valued at $1 million, with a single condition: it had to become a park for everyone. Anne’s son supplied the railroad; see Guy Stillman for that half of the gift.
Anne died in May 1969. In 1970 the ranch was sold to Kaiser-Aetna for about $12 million, and Fowler died in 1973. The buyers’ plan, built out through the 1970s, clustered housing into villages, organized them around lakes and golf, and laid a path network down before the first house went up. It worked well enough that the rest of north Scottsdale spent the next forty years trying to copy it.