The men who built the Arizona Canal in Phoenix, Arizona


If you live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, anywhere from the northwest valley, past the Biltmore, south of Camelback Mountain, or near Indian Bend Road in Scottsdale, you have crossed over the Arizona Canal. Or you may have biked, or walked along it. To me, it's amazing that it starts way up north of Apache Junction and ends west of me, in Peoria. And what's even more astonishing to me is that it was built in 1885, dug by hand, and privately financed.

I have a pretty good imagination for time traveling, but it's hard to imagine anyone building a canal that long way out in the middle of the desert like that. And in addition to the back-breaking work, I am amazed that anyone would finance something like this.

I don't have the names of the men who actually dug the canal, but I have the names of the men who financed it. Or, to be more precise, raised the money to finance it. These guys must have been incredible at sales! Whether you would call them "founding fathers of Phoenix" or just "get rich quick guys", they had vision. Here they are:

William Hancock

William Christy, Valley Bank

Moses Sherman. Californians will recognize him as the founder of Sherman Oaks.

William John Murphy. His house was (and is) at 10 W. Orangewood.

John Y.T. (Yours Truly) Smith. Yes, he legally changed his middle name to Yours Truly.

Clark Churchill. His mansion on 5th Street and Polk was used as the first Phoenix high school.

So the next time you walk or bike along the Arizona Canal, think of these guys. They must have been crazy! But I'm glad they were.
The Arizona Canal in the 1930s.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!



Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 15, 2016 at 9:47 PM

    I know of one man that was largely responsible for building the canal, because I live in his house: John Ruddle Norton, Murphy's construction foreman from the days they built much of the ATSF railroad through northern Arizona. Murphy started as a grading contractor. The canal was not exactly dug "by hand" so much as by mule. Canal construction was largely an animal labor operation and many of the men were hired to wrangle, feed, and otherwise look after the muke teams.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 15, 2016 at 9:48 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

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