Why he matters
Old Town sells the West. George Cavalliere was part of the real one. He was an Italian-immigrant blacksmith who came to the Salt River Valley for the reason almost everyone came in the years before statehood, which was the water, and he stayed to shoe the horses of the farm town that the water made. The business he opened in 1910 is still open, run by his great-grandchildren, in the adobe building he put up in 1920. Nothing else in Scottsdale can say that.
That continuity is the whole argument for him. The 1950s dressed downtown in false fronts and hitching posts to sell a frontier story. Cavalliere’s was already there, doing frontier work, and it never had to pretend. When the horses left, the shop moved to ornamental and architectural iron, and it kept going.
He is also the root of one of the city’s great family lines. His son Doc Cavalliere ran the forge for four decades, sat on the first Town Council and carried the family name to the far-north desert.
Where to find his mark today
The forge on Brown Avenue. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop is a working trade shop, not a museum. Look from the sidewalk, and if you have a commission, go in.
The corner he walked into. A block south, the J.L. Davis general store site at Brown and Main marks the commercial district he joined in 1909, when it was a store, a post office and not much else.
The family name in the north. George “Doc” Cavalliere Park below Pinnacle Peak is named for his son, and the park’s own story of the name starts with the blacksmith.
The town he walked into
When Cavalliere settled here in 1909, Scottsdale was a canal settlement of a few dozen families: a general store that E.O. Brown had just taken over, a brand-new brick schoolhouse, and farms in every direction. The 1910s brought Roosevelt Dam water and then the cotton boom, and a farm economy runs on horses, wagons, plows and ditch gates, all of which break. A blacksmith in that town was infrastructure.
By the 1920s the town had a real Main Street, and the adobe forge was part of the row with Saba’s, the Farmer’s State Bank and E.O. Brown’s store. Of all of them, only Cavalliere’s is still doing what it opened to do, in the building it opened in. The shop sits in the Old Town Western blocks, and the Old Town on foot route covers the Brown Avenue storefronts around it.
The full story
George Cavalliere came to Arizona to work on a canal. The deepening of the Arizona Canal, the waterway that made Winfield Scott’s desert claim farmable, needed iron work, and when the job wrapped up he did not leave. In 1909 he settled in the tiny Scottsdale townsite. The local record does not keep his birth year, his home town in Italy or the date he reached the United States, and there is no point guessing.
In 1910 he opened his blacksmith shop. The 1910s were Scottsdale’s statehood-and-cotton decade, and a town booming on Pima cotton needed someone to shoe its horses and mend its wagons and implements. He was that man. A decade later, in 1920, the family built the adobe shop on Brown Avenue, a block north of the J.L. Davis store corner where Scottsdale’s commerce had started in 1897. It went up just as the town’s first merchant row was forming around Saba’s and the Farmer’s State Bank, both opened in 1921.
The business outlasted every version of the town around it. It came through the cotton crash of 1920–21, the Depression that closed the Farmer’s State Bank in 1933, and the war. In 1945 his son, George “Doc” Cavalliere, came home from repairing B-24 Liberators in North Africa and Italy and took over the forge, running it into the late 1980s. When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, Doc sat on the first Town Council, which meant the family that shod the town’s horses helped write its first ordinances.
The trade changed the way a smart smith’s trade does. Horses gave way to cars, horseshoes gave way to gates, railings and fire screens for the ranch houses and resorts the boom kept building, and the shop became an architectural-iron studio. Four generations of the family have now run it. Scottsdale has plenty of places that tell the pioneer story. Cavalliere’s is one of the very few still living it, on the same lot, with the same anvil trade, a century and more after an Italian canal worker decided to stay.