Why he matters
A land filing is not a settlement. When Winfield Scott put his money down on a square mile of desert in 1888, he was still an Army chaplain with a posting to keep. Somebody else had to go and live on the claim, and that somebody was his brother, George Washington Scott.
George was a Union veteran who had lost a leg at Chickamauga, which makes what he did next more impressive. In 1889 he arrived at a section with nothing on it but creosote, mesquite and jackrabbits, pitched camp, and started turning a paper claim into a farm. Population of the future city: one man.
Where to find his mark today
The Arizona Canal. The canal path follows the ditch whose laterals George opened onto the Scott fields. It still carries water across the city.
Old Town. The blocks of Old Town sit inside the section he cleared first. Nothing there carries his name, but the ground is the ground he broke.
The job he took on
George’s work was the unglamorous kind that decides whether a colony exists: grub out the brush, level the ground, and get water from the Arizona Canal’s laterals onto the fields. The Desert Land Act, under which Winfield had filed, required proof that the land could be watered, so the ditches were not a detail. They were the deal.
The brothers planted with an optimist’s portfolio, chasing Winfield’s citrus-colony dream. The desert graded the experiment quickly, and the lesson every Scottsdale farmer would relearn for half a century was already on the table by the end of the first season, as the 1880s chapter tells it.
The full story
George Washington Scott is one of those founders the record knows mostly by what he did in a single year. He was Winfield’s brother and, like him, a Civil War veteran; at Chickamauga in 1863 he lost a leg. What he did between the war and 1889 is not recorded in the sources this site draws on, nor are his birth and death years.
In 1889 he came to the Salt River Valley to take up the claim Winfield had bought the previous July: 640 acres bounded by today’s Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School and Chaparral Roads, beside the four-year-old Arizona Canal that William J. Murphy’s crews had dug. He camped on the bare section, cleared creosote and mesquite, and got water moving from the canal’s lateral ditches onto the fields. That made him the first year-round resident of what would become Scottsdale.
The brothers planted citrus, figs, almonds, grapes, peanuts and barley. Hard freezes killed much of the citrus, and the sandy bench soil drank water faster than anyone expected; barley and the tougher orchard crops carried the farm. Winfield joined him on the land for good in 1893, with his wife Helen Scott, and the next year the settlement took the family name. The 1890s belong to the town. The founding era began with George and a tent.