Why she matters
Before Scottsdale was an art town, a resort town or a brand, there was a painter on the empty flats below Camelback Mountain. Jessie Benton Evans was an acclaimed, Italian-trained landscape painter who had fallen for the desert’s light, and in the 1920s she settled on an estate at the mountain’s foot. Artists and architects followed her. From about 1924 her circle wintered nearby, and the 1920s chapter calls it what it was: the first cell of the arts colony that would define Scottsdale by the 1930s.
Then her family turned the estate into a business. On land she gave her son, an adobe house became a tearoom in 1926 and the Jokake Inn by 1928. Its formula, adobe romance, Camelback views and eastern guests who came back every winter, became the template for a century of Scottsdale hospitality. Her salon connections filled the guest list, and the inn doubled as a place to paint.
She is the rare founder who shaped two of the city’s identities at once: the art colony and the winter resort both start with her circle.
Where to find her mark today
The Jokake bell towers. The inn closed in the late 1970s, but its 1936 adobe towers stand on the lawn of The Phoenician, restored in 2019. They are the oldest resort architecture in Scottsdale.
The tearoom story. The Jokake Inn Tea Room page tells the dining side, from the first tea parties to the guest book.
Who really founded the Jokake
The histories disagree, and it is worth knowing how. Scottsdale’s decade chapters and the 1926 page say Jessie Benton Evans opened the Jokake Inn, or that she and her son built it. The inn’s own histories are more precise. Her son Robert T. Evans built the adobe house on twelve acres she gave him. His wife, Sylvia Evans, and her friend Lucy Cuthbert began serving tea there in 1926. It became a proper tearoom in 1927 and took overnight guests by 1928.
Both versions are true in part. Jessie provided the land, the name recognition and the guest list; Robert built and designed; Sylvia and Lucy Cuthbert ran the house and the business. The resort histories make the point that women ran much of early Scottsdale hospitality while the credit went elsewhere. In this case some of the credit went to a woman, just not to the one who poured the tea.
The full story
Jessie Benton Evans was born in 1866 and trained as a painter in Italy, and by the early 1920s she had made her home on a desert estate at the foot of Camelback Mountain, on land that was then empty desert flats. She painted the desert the way the next century would sell it: as light, color and space rather than as a problem to be irrigated away.
Her reputation was a magnet. From about 1924 her circle of artist and architect friends began wintering nearby, and the pattern that made Scottsdale was forming: easterners who came for the winter and came back. The 1927 page counts her wintering artists alongside the polo grounds as the threads of a new economy.
She gave her son Robert twelve acres of the estate, and in the mid-1920s he built a rambling adobe house on them. A young Hopi visitor called it Jokake, “mud house,” and the family kept the name. Robert’s wife Sylvia and Lucy Cuthbert started serving tea to desert-touring visitors, and by 1928 the guests were staying the night. The inn that grew from it ran on the American Plan from November to April and drew industrial fortunes, working artists and titled Europeans. Jessie’s art-world connections seeded that guest list, and the grounds became a plein-air campus as much as a hotel. In 1936 her son’s twin bell towers went up, and Scottsdale had its postcard.
She died in 1954. By then Sylvia had run the inn through her divorce from Robert and sold it, in the early 1950s, to Chicago hotelier Charles Alberding, who kept it going into the late 1970s. When Charles Keating assembled the land for The Phoenician in the 1980s, nearly everything went, except the towers. The story of The Phoenician’s opening in 1988 picks up from there.
Her larger legacy is harder to point at but easier to feel. Scottsdale’s artist colony, its gallery district and its winter-resort economy all start with a painter who looked at Camelback and decided to stay.