How to find the original Phoenix Settlement today


Serious history buffs know that Phoenix, Arizona did not begin at Central and Washington, it began at 40th Street. This is where men like Jack Swilling, William Hellings, and John Y.T. Smith established The Phoenix Settlement, which has been called, among other things, Mill City and Pumpkinville.

The competition between the Phoenix Townsite (the one we know today as downtown Phoenix) and The Phoenix Settlement (which has disappeared) was fierce back in 1870. And it all begins with the most important thing in the desert, water.

Jack Swilling and company, after pondering the gigantic abandoned canals that they saw around the Salt River Valley in the late 1860s, decided to try it for themselves. The first canal was called "Swilling's Ditch", and it was an immediate success. By 1870, many more canals were being dug by various companies around the valley, including the one by Charles Trumball Hayden in Tempe.

Finding the original canals that went through Mill City (or the Phoenix Settlement) is difficult, but not impossible. The City of Phoenix has placed no plaques or monuments anywhere, proclaiming "the birthplace of Phoenix". There was a marker indicating the original home of Jack Swilling, somewhere along Washington, but it was knocked down in 2004 and has been lost, and no one at the City of Phoenix quite knows exactly where it was.

To find Mill City, look for The Maricopa Canal. No, the canal itself has been gone for years, but you can still clearly see its path in Google Satellite View. In fact, Randolph Road is still there, which ran next to it, and you can still see it continue on north of the Celebrity Theater. To find Swilling's Ditch, look slightly southwest. These old canals have become storm drains, so they are still there, underground. In the dirt lot just west of 32nd Street south of Van Buren, the outline of Swilling's Ditch is still very visible.

So, to find the original Phoenix Settlement, just follow Swilling's Ditch north by northwest. Look for the Arizona State Hospital at 24th Street and Van Buren. William Helling's Mill was just east of it, which would be the center of Mill City, or Pumpkinville, the original Phoenix Settlement.
History Adventuring on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more