Why he matters
Frank Titus left Scottsdale its oldest house. In 1892 he had Phoenix architect James Miller Creighton design a one-story brick farmhouse on his ranch. It still stands on Hayden Road and has been lived in ever since. The 1982 National Register nomination calls it the oldest extant house in Scottsdale.
He wasn’t a typical colonist. Winfield Scott recruited sober Midwestern farm families, and mostly that’s who came. Titus came from San Francisco and made his money in railroads: 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.
Where to find his mark today
The Titus House. It’s on the west side of Hayden Road, about 1,100 feet south of McDowell Road. It’s a private home, so see it from the sidewalk.
The museum. The Scottsdale Historical Museum in the Little Red Schoolhouse is the public place to see the 1890s settlement he helped organize.
What the record can tell us
The 1982 nomination and the city’s register report give the outline. In 1891 Titus settled 160 acres ten miles east of Phoenix and started a citrus farm and horse-breeding ranch. The only nearby farms were Winfield Scott’s, about three miles north on the Arizona Canal, and Wilford Hayden’s. When the settlers petitioned Maricopa County for a school district in 1896, Titus was one of the three men appointed to the first school board.
The sources don’t give his birth or death dates, when he left Scottsdale or why he sold. James Holmesley owned the house by 1909. The 1972 and 1980 Scottsdale Progress features on the house, held in the Scottsdale Heritage Connection, are the next place to look.
The full story
Titus built in 1892, two years before the townsite was platted and named. His house was not a typical colony farmhouse. Creighton was the best-known architect in the Phoenix area, and the nomination groups the Titus House with his Rosson House in Phoenix and Petersen House in Tempe as among the area’s first architect-designed homes. Titus’s is the modest one: one story, a hipped roof, a full-width veranda and a full basement, rare in the Valley. Its bricks were fired from clay dug on the property, a practice Creighton favored and a step away from adobe. The nomination also credits the new railroads, the business Titus was in, with bringing a wider range of building materials and coastal styles into the territory.
The farm went on under later owners. Holmesley raised cotton and cattle until 1919, and Frank Stevenson’s family farmed cotton from 1919 to 1950. The land was subdivided in the 1950s. The house was listed on the National Register on May 13, 1982, and on the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2001. The Titus House guide covers the building in detail, and its founding era is told in the history chapters.