What it’s actually like
Every town has a first business, and Scottsdale’s was a general store with a post office in the back. J.L. Davis opened it in 1897 at what is now the southwest corner of Brown Avenue and Main Street, a single room with an adobe front, built before electricity reached the settlement, in a place that was still a scattering of farms and orchards along the Arizona Canal. The post office inside was the first ever to carry the name Scottsdale, and Davis was its postmaster. That one room was the commercial district. Everything else in Old Town came after.
It is hard to see now. The corner is a trading post today, a working store on the ground where the first one stood, and the blocks around it wear the false-front Western costume the town adopted in the 1950s. But the geometry is the original: Brown Avenue and Main Street were the first streets of the townsite, and the reason the Western storefronts, Cavalliere’s forge and the Rusty Spur cluster here rather than somewhere else is that Davis chose this corner to sell flour and stamp letters more than a century and a quarter ago.
When the store closed is not documented. The townsite grew around it through the 1900s and 1910s, other stores opened, and the first business slipped out of the record the way most first businesses do, unnoticed, while the town it started got on with growing. It belongs to the founding and pioneer era of Scottsdale’s history, and it is the oldest address on this site.
What it sold
What a frontier general store sold to a farming settlement a long wagon ride from Phoenix: flour, sugar, coffee, canned goods, tools, cloth, kerosene for the lamps that were the only light, seed and hardware for the orchards and fields. And the mail. In a settlement without a town, a post office was the thing that made a place official, and the Davis store was where Scottsdale’s name first went on an envelope.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The southwest corner of Brown Avenue and Main Street, in the heart of the Western storefront blocks of Old Town, a short walk from the Old Adobe Mission and the Civic Center. The original adobe-fronted building is gone; a trading post occupies the corner now, and nothing on it marks the 1897 store. Park at the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk west along Main, or follow the Old Town on foot note, which passes the corner. For the era itself, the Scottsdale Historical Museum in the Little Red Schoolhouse on the Civic Center mall tells the founding story with the artifacts to go with it.
The Old Town Farmers Market on Saturdays brings the settlement’s original business, selling food to the people who live here, back to within a few blocks of where Davis did it.
The successors worth a visit
The living link is Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop on Brown Avenue, the oldest surviving business in Scottsdale, forging a block north of the Davis corner since 1910. Earl’s Market, the two-story grocery that held Scottsdale Road and Main from 1935 to 1959, was the general store’s true successor as the town’s provisioner, and its corner is now the Legacy Gallery. The Western outfitters of the Brown and Main blocks, Saba’s and Porter’s, sell the frontier the Davis store actually supplied. And for a meal on the block, The Mission on Brown Avenue is a few doors away, Los Olivos on Second Street has been open since 1947, and the Rusty Spur on Main pours in a 1921 bank that was itself once the newest building in town.
How it got here
Scottsdale began as farmland. In the 1880s Winfield Scott, an army chaplain, took up land along the newly dug Arizona Canal and planted the orchards and fields that drew a small community of settlers to what was then called Orangedale; the name changed to honor him, and the 1890s brought enough neighbors to need a store. The nearest real town was Phoenix, a long wagon trip away, and a settlement that had to send someone to the city for every sack of flour and every letter was not yet a place.
In 1897 J.L. Davis made it one. He opened a general store at what is now the southwest corner of Brown Avenue and Main Street, one room with an adobe front, built before electricity had reached the settlement, and he secured a post office inside it, the first ever designated under the name Scottsdale, with himself as postmaster. A post office was how the federal government recognized a community’s existence, and from that point Scottsdale had a name on the map, a place to buy goods and a place to receive mail, all under one roof. That single room was the entire commercial district.
The townsite grew around it in the 1900s and 1910s. A schoolhouse went up on the Civic Center site in 1909, the streets that became Main and Brown filled in with the first neighboring businesses, and by the time Cavalliere’s set up its forge on Brown Avenue in 1910 the Davis store had company. When the original store closed is not documented; it passes from the record as the town outgrows it, and no one thought to write down the day the first business in Scottsdale stopped trading, because by then it was simply one store among several.
What survives is the corner and the pattern. Scottsdale’s downtown grew from this intersection outward, 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. A trading post occupies the corner now, selling to visitors on the same ground where the first storekeeper sold to farmers, which is the kind of continuity a town cannot plan and Old Town, mostly by accident, has kept.