Why he matters
Until 1897, “Scottsdale” was a name without an address. J.L. Davis gave it one. He opened a general store at what is now the southwest corner of Brown Avenue and Main Street, and the first post office under the Scottsdale name went in with it, Davis as postmaster. One adobe-fronted room held the town’s entire commercial economy: dry goods, hardware, mail, gossip and credit between harvests.
A post office is a bureaucratic detail that doubles as a birth certificate. Three years after Albert G. Utley’s plat fixed the name on paper, letters could arrive addressed to Scottsdale, and the citrus-era “Orangedale” was finally buried. The corner proved as durable as the name.
Where to find his mark today
Brown and Main. The J.L. Davis general store page covers the site, now a trading post, in the middle of Old Town’s Western blocks.
Cavalliere’s. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop, forging on Brown Avenue since 1910, is the living link to the town Davis supplied.
Earl’s Market corner. Earl’s Market, which held Scottsdale Road and Main from 1935 to 1959, was the general store’s true successor as the town’s grocer.
What the store sold, and what came after
Davis sold what a farm settlement a long wagon ride from Phoenix needed: flour, sugar, coffee, canned goods, tools, cloth, kerosene for the lamps, seed and hardware for the orchards. And the mail. It was built before electricity reached the settlement, and for a while it was the only shop in town.
In 1909 rancher-merchant E.O. Brown took over Davis’s store, and the Brown family went on to anchor Scottsdale commerce for decades and give Brown Avenue its name. The Old Town on foot walk passes the corner.
The full story
By the mid-1890s Winfield Scott’s colony had a name and a school district but nowhere to buy a sack of flour or mail a letter without a trip to Phoenix. In 1897 J.L. Davis fixed both at once. He opened his general store on Utley’s new townsite, at the corner now called Brown Avenue and Main Street, one room with an adobe front, and secured the first post office designated under the name Scottsdale, with himself as postmaster.
That completed a three-year run of firsts: townsite in 1894, school in 1896, store and post office in 1897. The 1890s chapter sums it up as one room holding the town’s whole commercial economy, and for a while that was literally true.
The townsite grew around the store through the 1900s. In 1909 E.O. Brown took the business over, and a year later George Cavalliere opened his forge nearby. After that the Davis store slips out of the record. Its closing date is not documented, and neither are Davis’s life dates or what he did after 1909, in the sources this site draws on.
What survives is the corner. Scottsdale’s downtown grew outward from Brown and Main, which is why the historic Western blocks, the oldest surviving business and the most walkable part of the city all sit within a few hundred feet of where Davis opened his door. The founding era left few buildings. It left this intersection.