A Brief History of Scottsdale, AZ

The history of habitation in Scottsdale, Arizona is much more than just the story of the arrival of European peoples and the ladies pants stores that they opened up when they got there. It stretches back thousands of years to a time when Native American tribes were building startlingly advanced engineering projects and can be seen in Scottsdale's fossil records and museums in the present day. To give you an idea of what you'll be hearing about should you decide to visit any of these museums, we've created this article to give you a brief overview of Scottsdale's history.

What most modern people associate with early Native American culture is little more than a few vague mental images of stone arrowheads, headdresses made of feathers, and wall lettering done in caves using pictograms. What they don't think of are complicated systems of irrigation canals stretching more than 125 miles, but that's what the Hohokam, the earliest inhabitants of the region, constructed between 800 and 1400 AD. Later the Hohokam disappeared and were succeeded by the Pima. After Europeans arrived, the Pima were priced out of Scottsdale proper and moved to the nearby Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community.

Europeans arrived not just with farming tools and house plans but the technological means to expand and update the Hohokum's canals. Jack Swilling's irrigation company did so in 1868 and in 1888 Winfield Scott and his brother George bought the 640 acres of land that would become Scottsdale. Their town was first named Orangedale, after their agricultural efforts, but the name was changed to Scottsdale in 1894 to honor the town's founders. The city's development occurred slowly due to the lack of discoveries such as oil or gold that would have caused a boom in population.

Frank Lloyd Wright's arrival in 1937 was the next occurrence of note, as he decided to make his winter home here. It was named Taliesin West and from this base he designed many well-known buildings in the town. Businesses in town tended to be small. No conglomerates dominated the cloth diapers market and no financial firms filled the downtown with glittering monuments to their success and the city quietly incorporated in 1951. Manufacturing did effect Scottsdale, however, just not in a positive way. In 1950-1970 several manufacturers in Scottsdale and Tempe polluted Scottsdale's water with trichloroethylene, an environmental disaster that would take 30 years to clean up.

The real estate boom that Scottsdale currently enjoys dates back to the city's solution for dealing with flooding from the Indian Bend Wash. Instead of creating an ugly concrete canal with bridges over it like you see all over Los Angeles, as was the option favored by the Army Corps of Engineers, the city elected to turn the whole floodplain into a series of parks and golf courses. This project took money from the downtown, which subsequently decayed, but the greenery attracted new families and tourists ranging from Mississauga lawyers to oil barons and turned the city into an elite suburban destination.