Why he matters
Scottsdale’s founder bought land. William J. Murphy made land worth buying. In 1883 the Arizona Canal Company hired the railroad contractor to do something nobody had managed: run a canal along the high line of the north Salt River Valley, above the old Hohokam alignments and the pioneer ditches that had reused them. Murphy took the contract largely on credit, paid his crews partly in company paper, and spent two years moving earth with mules and scrapers across country with no road, no rail spur and no water until the canal itself arrived.
It was finished in May 1885, 41 miles long, and the map changed overnight. Desert nobody would take for free became farmland, and buyers came, among them Winfield Scott in 1888. Murphy then spent the next quarter-century doing what the canal had made possible: selling the land around it.
Where to find his mark today
The Arizona Canal Path. The canal still runs its 1885 course on a diagonal across the city, with a path on its banks.
The Waterfront. The Scottsdale Waterfront turned its patios toward his ditch, and the Soleri Bridge spans it.
The Ingleside district. The Ingleside Inn is gone, but its name survives on the neighborhood where Murphy planted his citrus colony.
The resort he got half-credit for
The Ingleside story needs care, because it gets told two ways. The decade chapters, including the 1900s, say the Ingleside Inn opened in 1909 with the area’s first golf course, built by “W.J. Murphy’s circle.” The detailed Ingleside page is more precise: in 1909 Murphy and his son Ralph opened the private Ingleside Club amid their citrus groves south of Camelback, a showroom for their land with golf, cottages and formal dinners. It became the public Ingleside Inn in the 1920s. The better-documented version is the second one.
Either way, the idea was Murphy’s: infrastructure, then agriculture, then hospitality, then real estate. That sequence built the Biltmore district, McCormick Ranch and every master-planned resort community since. The winter-resort trade died with the war; the inn closed in 1942 and the land went to a girls’ school and then houses.
The full story
William J. Murphy came to the Salt River Valley as a railroad contractor, which is to say a man used to moving a great deal of earth on borrowed money. In the 1880s the valley’s farming ran on canals that followed the old Hohokam lines low along the river. The Arizona Canal Company wanted something bolder: a diversion near present-day Granite Reef and a ditch swinging west and northwest around the north side of the valley, through desert that had never been watered.
Murphy took the contract in 1883, largely on credit. His crews worked with mules, scrapers and hand tools, and he paid them partly in company paper. In May 1885 the canal was done, better than forty miles long. It was the first Valley canal to ignore the ancient alignments entirely, and it opened a new tier of benchland to irrigation. Among the parcels it made farmable was a square mile of creosote that Winfield Scott put $80 down on in July 1888.
The canal was not invulnerable. In February 1891 the largest flood on record washed out its wooden diversion dam, and the ditch ran dry until it could be rebuilt. The drought that followed made storage the valley’s obsession, and the canal eventually became one artery of the Salt River Project’s 131-mile system.
Murphy, by the fuller Ingleside account, was paid substantially in the desert acreage his canal would irrigate, which made him both a great landholder and the Valley’s most motivated promoter. His answer to the promoter’s problem, how to convince cold, rich Midwesterners that a cactus flat was paradise, was the Ingleside Club of 1909, opened with his son Ralph amid their citrus colony. By the 1920s it was the public Ingleside Inn, the first resort in the Valley to package sunshine, sport and society as a season. It closed in 1942, hosted the Brownmoor School for Girls from 1945, and disappeared under Brownmoor Estates in 1962.
Nothing of the club survives. The ditch does. Every November, Canal Convergence floats light art on the water Murphy’s crews first let in, and the founding era of Scottsdale is, at bottom, a story about what his canal made possible.