What was the Graves Guest Ranch?
Scottsdale sold air before it sold anything else, and the first place that sold it by the night was a farmhouse on the corner of two dirt roads.
In 1897 the Underhill family opened their home on the northwest corner of Indian School and Scottsdale roads to boarders and called it Oasis Villa. That’s the City of Scottsdale’s own account, in its 75th-anniversary timeline, and it puts the town’s first lodging in the same year as its first store, J.L. Davis’s, a few blocks to the south. “Under new owners,” the city says, “it became the Graves Guest Ranch, and was the first guest ranch and health camp in Scottsdale.”
The new owners were Edward and Mary Graves, who bought the Underhill property around 1910. The city’s Historic Context for Scottsdale’s Development as an Arts Colony & Tourist Destination (Liz Wilson and Debbie Abele, revised 2004) says Graves “came from the Midwest in 1910 and converted the Underhill home” into the Graves Ranch, which “originally functioned as a tuberculosis recovery center.” An advertisement promised “all the comfort of a real home and in a climate that is with out a peer in the entire world.”
Guests slept in screened cottages of wood frame and canvas, ate in a dining room known for home cooking, and could buy Navajo blankets in the curio shop on the grounds. Many stayed a season, felt better, and never left. That made the ranch one of the ways Scottsdale got its early residents.
The ranch was still taking guests in the 1930s. After that the record goes quiet: we have not found a source for when it closed or what became of the house.
A health camp, then a guest ranch
The cure was the product. Doctors back East prescribed the desert for tuberculosis, and after Phoenix outlawed tent camps for the sick in 1903 the patients scattered to places like Scottsdale. (Our health seeker entry has the background.) The Graves Ranch was built for them. “Screened sleeping cottages” was the vocabulary of the cure: the patient slept as close to outdoors as a wall of screen allowed.
The newspaper ads show the shift. The Arizona Republican, the Phoenix daily, ran a Scottsdale column most weeks, and our note on health seekers and the 1918 flu follows the Graves place through it. In January 1912 the column lists guests from Texas, Detroit and Omaha. By the winter of 1915–16 a standing classified ad read: “GRAVES’ RANCH at Scottsdale, open for guests. Delightful location, 11 miles N. E. of Phoenix. Best of table board, our own dairy and poultry produce. Screened sleeping cottages, 3 auto stages daily.” The ad never says tuberculosis. By then the ranch was drifting from sickroom to holiday, and in September 1918 carpenters were enlarging the dining room “to accommodate the increased patronage.”
The curio shop was half the business. A 1910 news item, quoted in the city’s context, reports another large shipment of Navajo blankets “of elegant designs” received by Mr. Graves. In 1912 the column said “the Graves Curio people, who have been dealing largely in Indian craft the past five years” were opening a branch in Phoenix, and by 1915 inquiries about the ranch went to the Graves Indian Shop on West Adams Street. Scottsdale’s later trade in Western and Native American art has a long pedigree, and this is near the start of it.
It shaped who lived here. The city’s context makes the point plainly: health seekers “tended to be more well to do than other types of settlers,” and their arrival shaped the town’s culture. The Graves Ranch was a front door for them. Mrs. E. L. Graves turns up in the town’s women’s organizations (see the women who organized early Scottsdale), and the neighbors at the same corner, the Kimseys, rented furnished cottages to winter visitors too.
What came after. In the 1930s the ranch sat on a roster with the Jokake Inn and the new Camelback Inn as Scottsdale’s winter trade turned from patients to “dudes” (our dude ranch entry tells that story). The town that grew up around it eventually swallowed the corner. Today Scottsdale and Indian School is a busy commercial intersection on the north edge of Old Town, and nothing marks the ranch.
The sources, and what they don’t say
The Graves Guest Ranch is a good example of how thin the record of early Scottsdale is, even for a place the city itself calls a first.
What is solid. Three independent kinds of source agree on the essentials:
- The City of Scottsdale’s 75th-anniversary timeline dates Oasis Villa to 1897, names the Underhills and the corner, and calls the Graves place “the first guest ranch and health camp in Scottsdale.”
- The city’s arts-colony and tourism historic context (Wilson and Abele, revised 2004) gives Edward Graves’s arrival from the Midwest in 1910, the tuberculosis-recovery origin, the advertisement and the curio shop.
- A Scottsdale Public Library photograph of the ranch, published on the Arizona Memory Project, says Edward and Mary Graves bought the Underhill property circa 1910, that the cottages were part wood frame and part canvas, that meals were included, and that the dining room “had a great reputation for good old-fashioned home cooking.”
The Arizona Republican columns of the 1910s, on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site, add the guests, the ads and the dining-room expansion.
What is unresolved.
- The 1897 date and the Underhills. The city’s timeline is the only source we’ve found for the name Oasis Villa and the 1897 date. It fits: the widow Ida T. Underhill was selling land at the same corner in November 1909, a few months before the Graves purchase. But we haven’t seen a contemporary 1890s account of Oasis Villa itself.
- The closing. No source we have found says when the Graves Ranch stopped taking guests, who owned it last, or when the buildings came down. Our 1930s chapter lists it among the decade’s guest houses. The postwar growth that turned the corner into a commercial intersection is the obvious end, but that’s an inference, not a record.
- The Graves family. We know Edward, Mary and “Mrs. E. L. Graves” from the city, the library photograph and the newspaper columns. Whether those are two people or three, and what became of the family, we can’t say from the sources in hand.
Where the answers are. The Scottsdale Room (now the Scottsdale Heritage Connection) at the Civic Center Library holds the library’s photograph collection and the city directories. The Scottsdale Historical Society at the Little Red Schoolhouse holds family files. Maricopa County deed records for the northwest quarter of the Scottsdale and Indian School section would give the chain of ownership, and the Arizona Republic archive after 1930 should carry the ranch’s last advertisements.
Why it matters
The Ingleside Inn two miles west gets the credit for inventing the Valley resort, and it deserves it. But Ingleside sold winter to the rich. The Graves Ranch sold survival to people of ordinary means, at the scale of a farmhouse, and it was in Scottsdale itself. The town’s first lodging was a sickroom with a curio shop, and it turned itself into a guest ranch as the customers changed. That is a small-scale version of the whole industry that followed, from the 1900s to the resort corridor of today.