Why he matters
Every account of the Camelback Inn gives the idea to Jack Stewart, and it should. But ideas need money, and in the middle of the Depression the money for the Scottsdale area’s first great resort came from John C. Lincoln, a Cleveland welding manufacturer who had come to the desert because his wife was sick. He did not just write a check. He owned the land, the saddle of desert between Camelback and Mummy mountains, and he put that in too.
That makes him the silent partner of the whole resort economy that followed. The Camelback Inn proved a full-service hotel on empty desert could pay, and a farm town a few miles east spent the next half century building on the lesson. His name is still on the road that ties the corridor together.
Where to find his mark today
JW Marriott Camelback Inn. The inn he financed, open every season since 1936, at 5402 E Lincoln Drive.
Lincoln Steakhouse & Bar. The inn’s dinner room is named for him and its bar for the founding year, 1936.
Lincoln Drive. The resort road through the Camelback Corridor, from Scottsdale Road west past the inn, carries his name.
Industrialist or local magnate?
The site describes him two ways. The opening-day page calls him a Cleveland industrialist who came to the Valley for his wife’s health; the resort guide calls him a Phoenix electrical magnate. Both are right. He built Lincoln Electric in Ohio, then spent the last twenty-eight years of his life in Arizona, investing in land and mining and backing a Sunnyslope clinic that became a hospital. The Jack Stewart profile tells the inn’s story from the operator’s side.
His family stayed in the corridor too. His daughter, the violinist and composer Louise Lincoln Kerr, came to Arizona in 1936. Her house (1948) and studio (1959) on Scottsdale Road near McDonald Drive, left to Arizona State University when she died in 1977, are now the ASU Kerr Cultural Center, a small chamber-music venue.
The full story
John C. Lincoln was born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1866. He was an electrical tinkerer with patents to his name, and in 1895 he started the Lincoln Electric Company in Cleveland on about $200 of capital. His younger brother James joined in 1907 and ran the business side, and the company grew into one of the country’s biggest makers of arc-welding machines. Lincoln was also a committed follower of the economist Henry George, who argued that land values belong to the public, and in 1924 he ran for vice president on the small Commonwealth Land Party ticket.
In 1931 his wife Helen was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the family moved to Sunnyslope, then a scattered colony of health seekers north of Phoenix. She recovered. Lincoln stayed, and he began putting money into the Valley: the Desert Mission clinic in Sunnyslope, land, and later mining, including the Bagdad copper mine in Yavapai County, where he became half-owner and president in 1944.
Some of the land was north of Camelback Mountain. In the mid-1930s, a sportswriter and publicist from Fargo named Jack Stewart wanted to build a pueblo-style inn that would sell the Southwest itself to Eastern winter visitors, and Lincoln backed him with about $200,000 and the desert between Camelback and Mummy mountains. The site was roadless scrub with no water, power or telephone. On December 15, 1936 (1936), the Camelback Inn opened with about seventy rooms and the slogan Where Time Stands Still. Stewart ran it; Lincoln’s capital made it possible. The ranches-and-war era had its template resort.
Lincoln died in Phoenix in 1959, aged 92. The Marriott family bought the inn in 1967, and the Sunnyslope clinic opened as the John C. Lincoln hospital in 1965. The record does not show him running a hotel himself, and this page will not suggest he did. His part was the older one: the man with land and money who bet that someone else’s idea about the desert was right.