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AGENDA
ORO VALLEY HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION
SPECIAL SESSION
January 25, 2010 Roa_moLs wall
ORO VALLEY COUNCIL CHAMBERS 1
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ROLL CALL pu_u_AKA AI5T (1 k:t. ' ',4-)(q�)'�'.�7'� \P‘Pk3's ri,l`> '`C2‘�1. Discussion and possible action on the Final Draft of the Cultural Resourcelnventory.
2. Discussion and possible action on Steam Pump Ranch Project Group.
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3. Discussion of HPC subcommittee work on Environmentally Sensitive Lands Ordinance.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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POSTED:
When possible, a packet of agenda materials as listed above is available for public inspection at
least 24 hours prior to the Commission meeting in the office of the Town Clerk between the hours
of 8:00 a.m. —5:00p.m.
The Town of Oro Valley complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If any person
with a disability needs any type of accommodation, please notify the Town Clerk's Office at least
five days prior to the Commission meeting at 229-4700.
INSTRUCTIONS TO SPEAKERS
Members of the public have the right to speak during any posted public hearing. However,
those items not listed as a public hearing are for consideration and action by
the Commission during the course of their business meeting. Members of the public may
be allowed to speak on these topics at the discretion of the Chair.
If you wish to address the Commission on any item(s)on this agenda, please complete a speaker
card located on the Agenda table at the back of the room and give it to the Recording Secretary.
Please indicate on the speaker card which item number and topic you wish to speak on, or
if you wish to speak during "Call to Audience", please specify what you wish to discuss
when completing the blue speaker card.
Please step forward to the podium when the Chair announces the item(s) on the agenda which
you are interested in addressing.
1. Please state your name and whether or not you are a Town resident.
2. Speak only on the issue currently being discussed by Commission. Please organize your
speech, you will only be allowed to address the Commission once
regarding the topic being discussed.
3. Please limit your comments to 3 minutes.
4. During "Call to Audience" you may address the Commission on any issue you wish.
5. Any member of the public speaking must speak in a courteous and respectful manner to those
present.
Thank you for your cooperation.
"Notice of Possible Quorum of the Oro Valley Town Council, Boards, Commissions and
Committees: In accordance with Chapter 3, Title 38, Arizona Revised Statutes and Section 2-4-2
of the Oro Valley Town Code, a majority of the Town Council, Historic Preservation Commission,
Development Review Board, Planning &Zoning Commission and Parks and Recreation Advisory
Board may attend the above referenced meeting as a member of the audience only."
Page 1 of 1
Molinar, Suzanne
From: Molinar, Suzanne
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 2:46 PM
Subject: Additional HPC information
Attachments: Text For Title Page.pdf; Final Executive Summary.pdf; Final Text With Chapter Shifts.pdf; Revised
Figure 3.pdf; Revised list of tables.pdf; Revised Text With Tracked Changes Before Chapter
Shifts.pdf; Table of HPC comments & resolutions.pdf; SPR work plan 2009_final_draft.pdf
The attached files are for the revised Cultural Resource Inventory and Steam Pump Ranch.
The Inventory has been revised in response to HPC comments and discussion at the December meeting.
Title Content
Final Executive Summary revised text
Revised Text with Tracked Changes
before Chapter Shifts
Full Text with Chapter Shifts revised text including rearranged chapters
Text for Title Page Council and HPC members
Revised Figure 3
Revised List of Tables
Table of Resolutions table of HPC comments and resolutions
Paul R Popelka, RLA/ ICP
Acting Planning&Zoning Director
Town of Oro Valley
11000 N La Canada
Oro Valley,AZ 85653
P 520.229.4896
Attached is the work plan for archaeological data recovery of the Steam Pump building. After consulting with Poster Frost
and Town staff it has been determined that this work can be completed under the original SPR design phase contract
and budget.
Scott L. Nelson
Special Projects Coordinator
Town of Oro Valley
Direct line - 520-229-4809
Please call if you have any questions.
Suzy Molinar
Town of Oro Valley
Planning & Zoning
520-229-4815
In order to ensure compliance with the Open Meeting Law, recipients of this message or any message that is sent to
Board and Commission Members should not forward to other Board of Commission Members and Members should not
"reply to all". Please email me directly.
01/11/2010
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This
report presents the results of an inventory of cultural resources in the Town of Oro Valley
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and its
larger planning area, prepared through a combination of archival research, historic
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context development, limited field survey, and evaluation. The inventory will be used by the
town in future efforts to document and evaluate cultural resources in the community, and in
the development of an overall historic preservation plan.
The inventory showed that about 35 percent of the Town of Oro Valley and its larger planning
area (a total area of about 49,500 acres; referred to here as the study area) has been formally
surveyed for cultural resources. Beginning in 1976, 157 surveys of various sizes have identified
185 archaeological sites in the study area. Of the 185 sites, 160 are exclusively prehistoric in
date, 17 are exclusively historic, and 8 have both prehistoric and historic components. Only a
small percentage of these sites have been evaluated for National Register of Historic Places
eligibility, and only two sites are currently listed on the National Register. The current condition
of many of these sites, some first recorded decades ago, is unknown. Three large prehistoric
village sites—Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village, and Romero Ruin—have been the
focus of almost all of the archaeological excavations in the study area; all three have yielded
important information on the Hohokam culture of the Tucson Basin.
One of the National Register–listed properties in the study area, the Steam Pump Ranch, is
notable both for its important association with the early historic period along the Canada del
Oro and for its preservation of examples of early ranching-related architecture, including the
original residence of the ranch owner, George Pusch. The Steam Pump Ranch is also an
archaeological site and may preserve significant buried features associated with its early
history.
The inventory also showed that the study area holds two important examples of architect-
designed residences from the first half of the twentieth century, and at least four post–World
War II subdivisions that may be eligible for the National Register as residential historic districts.
Although the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated in 1974, just 35 years ago, a significant
number of the subdivisions that were developed during the two decades before incorporation
are now approaching 50 years of age, the generally accepted minimum age for National
Register eligibility. The four early subdivisions that are already probable National Register
candidates are an indication of the steadily increasing historic significance of an area that is
often considered simply a recent addition to the landscape of metropolitan Tucson.
The inventory concludes with general recommendations for long-term planning by the Town of
Oro Valley, and specific recommendations for a second phase of the inventory. The second
phase will include the preparation of a preservation plan based on the inventory, and the
expansion of public outreach to more fully engage the Oro Valley community in the
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identification and protection of its many cultural resources.
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CHAPTER 1
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In July 2009, William Self Associates, Inc. (WSA), was hired by the Town of Oro Valley to prepare
an inventory of cultural resources within the limits of the town and its larger planning area. The
purpose of the inventory was to identify potentially significant cultural resources—including
prehistoric and historic archaeological sites, individual historic buildings, and historic
architectural districts—using a combination of archival research, historic context development,
limited field survey, and evaluation. This report presents the results of the inventory, which was
carried out by the WSA team in July–October 2009. The inventory has shown that the Town of
Oro Valley and its planning area have a long and rich history and hold a wealth of cultural
resources, ranging from prehistoric archaeological sites to post–World War II residential
subdivisions. Most of these resources have not been fully evaluated for their historic or
scientific significance, and many resources recorded within the last few decades have already
been destroyed. Many other resources, as yet unrecorded, likely exist within the town and its
planning area in locations not yet surveyed for cultural resources.
The cultural resources inventory is viewed by the Town of Oro Valley as Phase One in a two-
phase effort to document and evaluate the cultural resources in its jurisdiction. Based on the
results of the inventory the town also plans to carry out a Phase Two, which will focus on the
development of a preservation plan that defines policies, procedures, and strategies for
maintaining and preserving significant cultural resources. An effective preservation plan will
help the town make the most of Oro Valley's heritage and help it avoid the complications that
arise when development projects unexpectedly impact significant resources.
The WSA team for the cultural resources inventory was led by John Ravesloot, Ph.D., principal
of the Tucson office of WSA, who served as principal investigator for the inventory. Scott
O'Mack, M.A., served as project director. Subconsultants for historic architecture were Ralph
Comey Architects and Janet H. Strittmatter, Inc., Associated Architects, of Tucson.
Subconsultant for public outreach and planning was Poster Frost Associates, also of Tucson. Dr.
Ravesloot and Mr. O'Mack were assisted in various aspects of the research and report
preparation by WSA staff members Michael Boley, Brandon Gabler, Melanie Medeiros, and
Trevor Self.
Project Overview
The Town of Oro Valley, incorporated in 1974, encompasses an area with deep historical roots.
Centered on the Canada del Oro drainage in the northern portion of the Tucson Basin, the town
occupies part of the western foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains (Figure 1). Pusch Ridge
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forms a dramatic backdrop to the east, the picturesque Tortolita Mountains rise close by to the
north, and metropolitan Tucson flanks the town to the south and west. The distinctive natural
setting of Oro Valley, its location along a riparian strip that was a focus of human settlement in
prehistoric times, and its proximity to the historic core of southern Arizona at Tucson have
given the area a significant role in nearly every aspect of the region's cultural history. Ancient
rock art and Hohokam villages, historic trails and roads, nineteenth-century homesteads and
ranches, and post—World War II residential subdivisions have all helped to shape the modern
community of Oro Valley. All of these resources can contribute to an understanding and
appreciation of Oro Valley and its history, but all present notable challenges to town planning.
Archaeological sites are by their nature the most difficult of cultural resources to identify,
document, and evaluate, and the oldest archaeological sites are typically the most difficult of
all. At the same time, archaeological sites often yield uniquely valuable information about
cultures and ways of life that have otherwise gone unrecorded. Major prehistoric
archaeological sites in the Oro Valley vicinity include Sleeping Snake Village, Romero Ruin, and
Honey Bee Village. All three are extensive Hohokam village sites dating to the period A.D. 450-
1450. Archaeological investigations at the three sites have revealed a wide variety of features,
including the remains of houses (in the case of Honey Bee Village, nearly 800 pit houses),
storage pits, ball courts, and terrace gardens. The information from these sites has allowed a
significant expansion in our understanding of prehistoric Native American life in southern
Arizona, and archaeological sites of similar age and importance are likely preserved elsewhere
in the Canada del Oro drainage, including within Oro Valley. This inventory of cultural resources
includes an up-to-date list of known archaeological sites within the Town of Oro Valley planning
area, a list of archaeological surveys carried out to date in the planning area, and a discussion of
the culture history of the area useful in evaluating the significance of archaeological sites either
already known or yet to be recorded.
Historic-period cultural resources, which include standing architecture, early roads, ranching
and farming features (such as corrals and irrigation ditches), and even archaeological sites, can
be valuable both as sources of information about the past and as irreplaceable visual reminders
of a community's heritage. In the Canada del Oro drainage, the earliest known settlers of the
historic period came a decade or so after the Gadsden Purchase made southern Arizona a part
of the United States. In the late 1860s, Francisco Romero, a man of Mexican descent whose
family had a long presence in the Tucson area, established a cattle ranch in what is now
Catalina State Park, centering his spread on the former Hohokam village later called Romero
Ruin. Romero's tenure on his ranch was short-lived because of the constant threat of Apache
attacks, but other settlers eventually followed him to the area. In the 1870s, German
immigrants George Pusch and his Swiss colleague John Zellweger established the Steam Pump
Ranch along what is now Oracle Road, south of the Canada del Oro. Pusch later became sole
owner of the ranch, which received its name from the early use of a steam pump to raise well
water.Today, the Steam Pump Ranch, recently listed on the National Register of Historic Places,
is one of Oro Valley's most important historic properties and the center of a commercial
development that has accommodated the surviving portion of the ranch.
Other early residents of the Oro Valley area included William Henry Sutherland, whose ranch
can still be seen along the banks of the wash bearing his name, and William Neal, who ran a
stage coach line from Tucson to the mines at Mammoth, with a stop at the Steam Pump Ranch.
Archival research for the cultural resources inventory has expanded the list of known residents
of the Canada del Oro area in the historic period, and the list of surviving features associated
with their homesteads, ranches, and businesses. In some cases, historic features visible on the
ground are associated with significant buried archaeological features. A case in point is the
Steam Pump Ranch, where a 2007 evaluation concluded that subsurface archaeological
resources, at least 50 years old, were likely preserved on the property. And it is important to
note that subsurface archaeological features from the historic period may be present in places
where no surface features survive.
History in the Canada del Oro area did not end with the ranching and homesteading period of
Romero, Pusch, and other early settlers. A period of greater importance to the development of
modern Oro Valley came after World War II, when the population boom affecting nearby
Tucson pushed people beyond the city limits into the surrounding rural areas. Some of the
earliest residential development in the Oro Valley area during this period included well-
appointed homes, like the residence designed by noted Tucson architect Josias Joesler for
Joseph McAdams (1940), and the Countess of Suffolk's Forest Lodge Mansion (1937), now the
Immaculate Heart Convent, as well as the distinctive planning of the Campo Bello subdivision
(platted in 1946), with its baroque-inspired radial street plan. In 1958, Louis Landon, a frequent
visitor to Tucson and a golf aficionado, transformed 375 acres of land at the former Canada del
Oro Ranch into a resort golfing community with luxury homes. Sixteen years later, Landon's Oro
Valley Estates would be the center of a newly incorporated town.
By the late 1960s, the Canada del Oro area was becoming a residential hub and the City of
Tucson started planning to annex it. Residents of the area were alarmed at the prospect of
annexation and began to work toward the incorporation of an independent town. Despite a
lengthy court case that made its way to the Arizona Supreme Court, the Town of Oro Valley was
finally incorporated on April 15, 1974. At the time of incorporation, Oro Valley encompassed
2.5 square miles and was home to just 800 residents. Today the town encompasses more than
34 square miles and has a population of around 44,000.
Method of Approach
For Phase One of the cultural resources inventory, we have used the Town of Oro Valley
Planning Area, established in the Town of Oro Valley General Plan Update 2020, as the limits of
our study area (Figure 2).Throughout the report, we refer to this area as the Oro Valley cultural
resources inventory study area, or simply the study area. Because Oro Valley and its vicinity are
a part of southern Arizona, a region recognized by archaeologists and historians as a more or
less discrete entity, we often refer to this larger area, especially in the culture-historical
discussions, but the inventory itself did not extend beyond the planning area.
Our approach to Phase One of the inventory has been to: (1) collect detailed information about
the number, variety, and historical background of cultural resources in the study area through
archival research; (2) use the results of the archival research to prepare a narrative discussion
of prehistory and history in the study area; (3) conduct an initial field survey of potentially
significant cultural resources in the study area, also based on the archival research; and (4) use
the narrative discussion to define specific historic contexts for the study area. Each of these
four steps in the approach is briefly discussed here, with fuller discussions in the corresponding
chapters of the report.
In addition to the steps outlined here, Phase One also included a series of public meetings and
an open house, all designed to allow the Town of Oro Valley staff, the Oro Valley Historic
Preservation Commission, and the general public to evaluate the progress of the inventory and
to contribute their knowledge and expertise to the project.
Archival Research
The archival research consisted of a review of relevant published and unpublished materials on
the prehistory and history of the Canada del Oro drainage, including several electronic
databases. The following repositories were checked for relevant materials (in a few cases, our
search was limited to consulting an online catalog with negative results):
Arizona Historical Society,Tucson
Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records, Phoenix
Arizona State Museum Library and Archives,Tucson
Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records
Immaculate Heart Convent, Oro Valley
Oro Valley Historical Society, Oro Valley
Pima County Assessor's Office, Tucson
Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation Office
Pima County Recorder's Office, Tucson
Pima County Public Library,Tucson
Town of Oro Valley, Planning and GIS Departments
University of Arizona, College of Architecture, Arizona Architectural Archive,Tucson
University of Arizona Library, Special Collections,Tucson
The relevant materials kept at these repositories include books, newspaper and magazine
articles, maps, General Land Office (GLO) records, property and tax records, photographs, aerial
photographs, oral history interviews, and miscellaneous published and unpublished materials.
We cite particular sources of information at appropriate places throughout the report.
For information on prehistoric and historic archaeological sites, we consulted the AZSITE
database maintained by the Arizona State Museum. AZSITE combines the archaeological site
records of the Arizona State Museum, Arizona State University, the Bureau of Land
Management, and other agencies and is the principal database for archaeological site
information in Arizona. The Arizona State Museum is also the state's central repository for
archaeological survey and excavation reports and other site-related materials, and we have
relied heavily on its files for these materials. We have also checked the National Register of
Historic Places and the Arizona State Register of Historic Places for properties within the study
area.
An important component of the archival research has been the creation of maps of the study
area depicting archaeological survey coverage, archaeological sensitivity zones, and
archaeological site locations (Appendixes A—C). These oversize maps, accompanied by GIS
shape files, have been delivered on CD to the Town of Oro Valley.
Narrative of Prehistory and History
Using the results of the archival research, we have prepared a narrative that traces the culture
history of the study area from prehistoric times through the incorporation of the Town of Oro
Valley in 1974. Among the topics considered in the narrative are: the history of archaeological
and historical research in the area; the role of the natural environment in prehistory and
history; economic pursuits in prehistoric and historic times; ranching, mining, and
homesteading in the historic period; the influence and growth of the Tucson metropolitan area
after World War II; historic-period settlement patterns in Oro Valley; and the origins of the
current town configuration as conditioned by growth, transportation, subdivisions, and
annexation.
Historic Contexts
Our narrative of prehistory and history has served in turn for the definition of specific historic
contexts for the Oro Valley study area. As defined by the National Register of Historic Places, a
historic context is a statement about the "patterns or trends in history by which a specific
occurrence, property, or site is understood and its meaning (and ultimately its significance)
within history or prehistory is made clear" (National Register of Historic Places [NRNP] 1997:7).
Thus, a historic context provides a basis for evaluating the significance of a cultural resource,
whether an archaeological site, a historic building, or a traditional cultural property. Because
the Oro Valley study area includes diverse cultural resources from a long span of prehistory and
history, we provide multiple historic contexts to cover the range of resources.
Initial Survey of Cultural Resources
In our initial survey of cultural resources in the study area, we relied on early maps, aerial
photographs, and information gathered in our archival research to define areas of particular
historic interest. Because of the size of the study area and the constraints of the project, our
actual field survey was limited to the residential architecture of seven potentially historic early
subdivisions within the Town of Oro Valley. The information gathered in the initial survey is the
basis for our recommendations for additional documentation of these neighborhoods, which
will ideally include nomination of each neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places
as a residential historic district.
Organization of the Report
The report has seven chapters. This introduction is followed by two chapters that together
constitute the narrative of prehistory and history for the study area. A fourth chapter provides
the historic contexts defined for the study area. A fifth chapter reviews the results of the
archival and records research, presents lists of previously recorded archaeological sites and
previously conducted archaeological surveys in the study area, and describes in detail the most
important sites and surveys. A sixth chapter describes important individual examples of historic
architecture in the study area and discusses the results of our initial survey of residential
subdivisions. A seventh and final chapter provides our recommendations for further work on
the cultural resources of Oro Valley.
CHAPTER 2
NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE HISTORY IN THE ORO VALLEY STUDY AREA
Throughout the prehistoric period, the Native American peoples who lived in or visited the
Canada del Oro area participated in cultural traditions documented more fully by archaeologists
elsewhere in southern Arizona, most notably in the greater Tucson Basin. An understanding of
the prehistory of the Canada del Oro area is possible only with reference to these wider
traditions. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of Native American culture history in
southern Arizona, with an emphasis on the Tucson Basin. We begin with the earliest known
evidence for human occupation of the region and end with the period just before the earliest
contacts with Europeans (Figure 3). The discussion draws on earlier syntheses of southern
Arizona prehistory by Chenault and Tucker (2003), Craig (1989), Ezzo (2007a), O'Mack and
others (2004), Whittlesey (2003), and Whittlesey and others (1994). Other sources are cited
when the discussion touches on particular aspects of prehistory in the region. At the end of the
chapter, we briefly summarize Native American culture history in the period after Europeans
settled in southern Arizona.
Paleoindian Period
Archaeologists call the earliest documented Native American occupation of the Americas the
Paleoindian period, which began at least as early as 12,000 years ago—many recent studies
place its beginning thousands of years earlier—and lasted until around 10,000 years ago
(Meltzer 2009). The Paleoindian period was characterized by small, highly mobile bands of
people and a hunting-and-gathering way of life adapted to a climate that was generally cooler
and wetter than today. Archaeological sites dating to the early part of the Paleoindian period
are often associated with the remains of extinct large mammals such as mammoth, bison, and
camel, which has long been interpreted as reflecting a heavy reliance on hunting big game
(Waguespack and Surovell 2003) using spears tipped with the distinctive fluted Clovis and
Folsom stone points found at Paleoindian sites. Little evidence for the Paleoindian period has
been found in southern Arizona as a whole, but the Naco, Lehner, and Murray Springs sites, all
located in the upper San Pedro valley, were particularly important to the definition and
formulation of the Clovis culture (Haury 1953; Haury et al. 1959; Haynes and Huckell 2007).
Essentially no Paleoindian material has been recovered in the Tucson Basin, including the
Canada del Oro area.
Archaic and Early Agricultural Periods
The Archaic period, which in southern Arizona began around 10,000 years ago and ended about
4,000 years ago, was also characterized by a hunting-and-gathering way of life, but Archaic
peoples exploited a much greater diversity of plant and animal species than their Paleoindian
predecessors. Little evidence of an Early Archaic occupation (10,500 to 6,800 years ago) has
been found in the region, but archaeologists have recently excavated sites in the Santa Cruz
River floodplain that have shown an intensive Middle Archaic presence (6,800 to 4,000 years
ago) (Gregory 1999). Additionally, evidence of domesticated maize has been found in southern
Arizona dating to the Middle-to-Late Archaic transition (Ezzo 2007a:35-38; Ezzo and Deaver
1998), and evidence for the practice of agriculture is now abundant for the Late Archaic period,
which archaeologists have begun to call the Early Agricultural period (3,500 years ago to A.D.
350). About 4,000 years ago, the Archaic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle began to give way to a
more sedentary existence, made possible in no small part by the introduction of maize and
other cultigens and the techniques needed to grow these crops in different environments. This
period, formerly known as the Late Archaic period, is increasingly referred to as the Early
A gr i c u I t u r a I p e r i o d .
Intensive use of the Santa Cruz River floodplain in the Early Agricultural period, from about
4,000 years ago to A.D. 150, is indicated by the recent excavation of surprisingly large
settlements, which have included evidence for generally increased sedentism, the repeated use
of specific locations, and ritual practices, particularly during the San Pedro phase (3,200 to
2,800 years ago) and Cienega phase (2,800 years ago to A.D. 150) (Diehl, ed. 2005; Mabry 2008;
Mabry, ed. 2008; Sliva, ed. 2005). The evidence for sedentism includes specialized storage pits,
a reliance on maize and other tropical cultigens, and the production and use of pottery for
storage (Ezzo 2007a:37; Mabry 1998; Mabry and Clark 1994). Other evidence from the Early
Agricultural period points to the beginnings of transitions that are better known for the
subsequent Formative period: from informal "houses in pits" to true pit houses, and from
round to rectangular and better-made structures. Evidence for long-distance exchange
networks in the Early Agricultural period has been discovered at the Santa Cruz Bend site
(Mabry 1998; Thiel 1998), and the site of Las Capas has recently yielded evidence for fairly
complex agricultural practices during the period, notably irrigation ditches (Hesse and Foster
2005; Mabry 2008). Pit houses at Las Capas were also ahead of their time: large circular and
oval structures during the San Pedro phase are like the ones previously known only at Cienega
phase sites.
No Archaic or Early Agricultural period sites have been recorded within the limits of the Oro
Valley study area, but given the abundance of evidence for these occupations on the Santa Cruz
River floodplain, this is probably because a substantial portion of the study area has never been
systematically surveyed for archaeological sites. At least one small Archaic site has been
documented in Catalina State Park,just outside the study area (Huckell 1980a:36).
Formative Period
In the Formative period, typically defined as the period A.D. 150-1450, many of the important
adaptations of the Early Agricultural period continued to develop: increased sedentism, true pit
houses, pottery production, and long-distance exchange. The defining characteristic of the
Formative period has traditionally been a reliance on maize agriculture as the dominant form of
subsistence (Ezzo 2007a:38). A distinction is usually made between the pre-Hohokam cultures
of the Early Ceramic period and the Hohokam cultures of the successive Pioneer, Colonial,
Sedentary, and Classic periods.
Early Ceramic Period
The Early Ceramic period, comprised entirely by the Agua Caliente phase (A.D. 150-450) in the
Tucson Basin, is primarily defined by the presence of an early plain ware horizon and ends with
the appearance of a red ware horizon (Wallace 2003). This period witnessed an increase in the
diversity of pottery vessel forms and the proficiency of ceramic manufacturing techniques. Seed
jars and hemispherical bowls, both used mostly for food storage, were the most common vessel
forms in this period, which is similar in this way to the early Mogollon cultures to the north and
east of the Tucson Basin (Burton 1991; Whittlesey 1998). Agriculture intensified through the
period. The increase in ceramics for storage coincided with a decrease in the number of
subsurface storage pits found at Early Ceramic sites. Architecture during the period was more
formalized than before: square and rectangular pit structures were the rule, with plastered
hearths centered on the entry and the occasional flanking of entries by adobe pillars. The
distribution of these structures within communities became increasingly organized through
time, as discrete courtyard groups, open plazas, and communal houses appeared, anticipating
later developments along these lines (Wilcox et al. 1981). The cultural affiliation for Early
Ceramic period sites is unresolved, but three hypotheses exist: Haury's (1978) idea that these
groups were, basically, Hohokam; Huckell (1987) and Di Peso's (1956, 1979) proposition of a
Mogollon influence; and Deaver and Ciolek-Torrello's (1995) notion that the Hohokam culture
emerged from these Early Ceramic period farmers.
Hohokam Culture
By around A.D. 450, the Hohokam culture was taking root in the Tucson Basin, as evidenced by
a "consolidation of patterns in artifact styles, architecture, and economics" (Fish and Fish
2007:8). The distribution of red-on-buff ceramics and ball courts (Wilcox 1991) reached its
greatest areal extent during the Colonial and Sedentary periods, or A.D. 700-1150. Around the
end of the Sedentary period, a major reorganization took place, marked by changes in both
domestic and ritual life that would characterize the ensuing Classic period. Archaeological
evidence of the Hohokam disappears at about A.D. 1450. Reasons for the sudden decline
remain contested, but external environmental changes, internal political changes, and the
introduction of Old World diseases all may have played a role. Throughout the "Hohokam
Millennium" (Fish and Fish, eds. 2007), the Hohokam were most notable for their abilities as
farmers, using a combination of ditch irrigation, dry farming, and storm water runoff diversion,
elaborating many of the traditions first established in the Early Agricultural period.
Pioneer Period
The Pioneer period in the Tucson Basin consists of two phases: the Tortolita phase (A.D. 450-
700) and the Snaketown phase (A.D. 700-750), recently refined as the result of work at sites
like Valencia Vieja along the Santa Cruz River (Wallace ed., 2003). In the Tucson Basin, the
Pioneer period is characterized by small, dispersed villages with pit houses and some irrigation
ditches. At Snaketown, a major village site in the middle Gila River valley where the Hohokam
tradition was first defined, evidence was found of a developing ceremonial complex, including
artificial mounds, cremations, figurines, and ball courts (Doyel 1991; Gladwin et al. 1937; Haury
1976). Regional ceramic diversity began in the Pioneer period, especially during the Snaketown
phase, and some archaeologists consider the Pioneer ceramic traditions the beginning of truly
decorated pottery, like Snaketown Red-on-buff. Two of the largest prehistoric sites in the study
area, Honey Bee Village (Medrano 2008) and Romero Ruin (Elson and Doelle 1987a), were both
founded during this period.
Colonial Period
The Colonial period began around A.D. 750 and ended about A.D. 950. It consisted of the
Canada del Oro and Rillito phases, each approximately 100 years in length. In southern Arizona,
the Canada del Oro phase is not as well documented as other phases, but a handful of sites
have provided important information, including Hodges Ruin (Kelly 1978), Valencia (Wallace,
ed. 2003), Dakota Wash (Craig 1988), and the three largest prehistoric sites in the study area:
Honey Bee Village, Romero Ruin, and Sleeping Snake Village (Ezzo, ed. 2007). All of these sites
had at least one ball court (Doelle and Wallace 1991). During the subsequent Rillito phase,
there was a fourfold increase in the number of sites in the Tucson Basin (Doelle and Wallace
1991). Ezzo (2007a) discusses several of the ball court villages of this phase along the Santa Cruz
River, including Sunset Mesa (Lindeman 2000), Los Morteros (Wallace 1995), and Huntington
Ruin. The number of primary villages increases throughout the phase and there is a diversity in
pit houses, with both true pit houses and the less-formal "houses in pits." In contrast to other
changes in Hohokam culture during the period, there is little change in the ceramics apart from
some increase in the formalization of wares.
Sedentary Period
More recorded prehistoric sites date to the Sedentary period (A.D. 950-1150) (composed
entirely of the Rincon phase) than to any other prehistoric period in the Tucson Basin (Doelle
and Wallace 1991), which has made it the best-understood part of the Hohokam chronology in
the region. In general, the Sedentary period was a time of relative cultural stability and
population growth. Small, dispersed sites were located on the bajada (piedmont) slopes and
alluvial fans in the basin, while large sites were located along the Santa Cruz River and other
major drainages (Whittlesey et al. 1994). Courtyard groups, or several houses oriented around a
common courtyard or plaza, were the primary mode of organization within sites, and irrigation
systems were expanded during this time. Inhabitants used the bajada slopes for rock-pile agave
cultivation, in addition to other agricultural and wild resource uses. Ceramics of the Sedentary
period show a decrease in the quality of painted line decoration, with an overall bolder style;
vessels are also thicker and heavier. Rincon Red ware, a style of pottery coated with a red slip
before firing, entered into large-scale production. Rincon Polychrome, a style of pottery with
decoration in multiple colors, also became widespread. During the late Sedentary period,
people initiated new forms of adobe wall construction and increased their use of dry farming
and storm water runoff farming. Toward the end of the period, many villages were abandoned,
setting the stage for changes evident in the succeeding Classic period. Romero Ruin, Honey Bee
Village, and Sleeping Snake Village (Ezzo 2007a:43-44) were all still occupied during this time,
but not much beyond.
Classic Period
The tumultuous transition from the Sedentary period to the Classic period resulted in
numerous changes to the material culture of the Hohokam. In the Classic period (A.D. 1150-
1450), semi-subterranean adobe-walled pit houses and aboveground adobe and stone-masonry
structures became the principal forms of architecture, and they were typically located inside
walled compounds, as at the Marana Platform Mound site (Fish et al., eds. 1992) and the
University Indian Ruin (Hayden 1957). Ball courts were replaced by platform mounds as the
dominant form of public architecture, and local examples again include the Marana Platform
Mound site (Fish et al., eds. 1992), the University Indian Ruin (1957), and the Tom Mix mound,
located on the east side of the Picacho Mountains (see Fish and Fish 1992). Red-on-brown
ceramics took on a less curvilinear and more rectilinear pattern than in previous periods.
Inhumations were added to the burial practices of the Hohokam, and both cremations and
inhumations continued through the Classic period. Populations aggregated in larger primary
villages, formed along the major drainages throughout the Tucson Basin. The total population
of the region may have peaked in the early Classic period (or the Tanque Verde phase, A.D.
1150-1300), but then declined in the late Classic (or the Tucson phase, A.D. 1300-1450). A
debate continues regarding the causes of the reorganization that occurred between the
Sedentary and Classic periods, and one also continues regarding the disappearance of the
Hohokam at the end of the Classic period. It is likely that environmental changes played a role
in both events (see Waters and Ravesloot 2001 for one such argument concerning the
transition), and the influx of an outside population, particularly from the Tonto Basin may also
have played a role (Haury 1945; O'Mack et al. 2004; Sires 1987; Whittlesey 2000). Alternatively,
Hill and others (2004) argue that the disappearance of the Hohokam was due less to a
catastrophic event than to demographic trends started many years earlier. Future
investigations of Classic period sites may help resolve these differing interpretations.
Native Americans of the Protohistoric and Historic Periods
Whatever the full explanation for the demise of the Hohokam and other Classic-period
traditions, the period between A.D. 1450 and the European-dominated historic era was a
transition from the prehistoric cultures documented by archaeology to the modern Native
American cultures documented by historical sources and ethnographic studies. The transition
from prehistory to history is often called the Protohistoric period by archaeologists, but in
southern Arizona it is defined in various and sometimes contradictory ways (Gilpin and Phillips
1998). Ravesloot and Whittlesey (1987:83) have pointed out that, strictly speaking, protohistory
began with the first arrival of Europeans in the New World (A.D. 1492) and ended with the start
of sustained contact between Europeans and Native Americans, which means that the end date
for the Protohistoric period differs by region. But they suggest that in southern Arizona, where
sustained European contact came relatively late, the start of the Protohistoric period is usefully
defined as A.D. 1540, the year of the first substantial Spanish expedition to the region, and the
end of the period is best defined by the establishment of the first Spanish presidio along the
Santa Cruz River at Tubac in 1752. On the other hand, Officer (1987) has argued that a more
appropriate end date would be the 1690s, when the Jesuit priest Eusebio Francisco Kino
initiated the Catholic conversion of the region, establishing missions along the Santa Cruz as far
north as San Xavier del Bac (see Chapter 3 of this report on the early Spanish presence in
southern Arizona).
Despite questions about its precise definition, the Protohistoric period is a convenient way of
referring to Native American cultural developments in southern Arizona during a time before
Europeans arrived in the region but after European influences—in the form of European crops,
livestock, and material culture—were already strongly present. When Kino made his earliest
trips along the Santa Cruz River into southern Arizona, the sedentary peoples in the farming
villages he visited had long ago added wheat and other European crops to their fields, and the
horse had been adopted long ago by the nomadic peoples who frequented the surrounding
mountains and canyons. Infectious diseases introduced by Europeans to the New World had
undoubtedly also spread into the Southwest by the seventeenth century, though the timing and
impacts of these diseases on Native Americans in the region are poorly understood (Sheridan
1988).
Southern Arizona was known by Kino as the Pimeria Alta, the upper land of the Piman speakers,
in contrast to the Pimeria Baja, the lower land of the Piman speakers, now part of the Mexican
state of Sonora, where Kino had been a missionary for many years before expanding his work
into southern Arizona. There were two major groups of indigenous peoples living in the Pimeria
Alta when Kino arrived, separated by differences in language and way of life. The more
numerous group was the O'odham (the name Piman speakers used for themselves), who relied
on agriculture to the extent that a particular local environment would allow. The other major
group was the Apache, who spoke an Athapaskan language and who relied on a mix of hunting,
gathering, and raiding and only minimally on farming. The Apache were highly mobile and did
not live in permanent villages. Their primary range was the vast, sparsely populated area north
and east of the Pimeria Alta, but they often entered the Tucson Basin to raid the livestock and
food supplies of the sedentary O'odham.
According to Spicer (1962:119), there were as many as 30,000 Piman speakers living in the
Pimeria Alta in the late 1600s. Early on, the Spanish thought of the O'odham in terms of four
major subdivisions—the Pima, the Soba, the Sobaipuri, and the Papago—which may not have
corresponded closely with the O'odham's own conceptions. The Pima lived in the southeastern
part of the region, extending into modern Sonora; the Soba lived to the southwest along the
Altar River; the Sobaipuri lived along the San Pedro and Santa Cruz Rivers as far north as the
Gila River; and the Papago, now known as the Tohono O'odham, lived in the desert to the west
of the Santa Cruz River. In the course of the eighteenth century, the distribution of all of these
groups changed significantly as encroachments by the Spanish and introduced diseases took
their toll. The Soba and Sobaipuri lost their distinct identity altogether and were absorbed by
other O'odham groups. The Tohono O'odham became the largest component in the mission
settlements along the Santa Cruz River.
Ethnohistorians have noted other probable distinctions among the Piman speakers living along
the Santa Cruz River. For example, the Kohatk seem to have been a distinct group living along
the lower Santa Cruz as far north as the Picacho Mountains. The Piman speakers living along
the Gila River, later known as the Akimel O'odham, were also a discrete group that fared
comparatively well in the colonial period, largely because they were beyond the regular reach
of Spanish missionaries (Dobyns 1976; Erickson 1994). When modern anthropologists began
studying O'odham culture in the twentieth century, the O'odham themselves recognized three
distinct groups based on economic practices and residential patterns. The Hia C'ed O'odham, or
Sand People, were the most mobile and least agricultural of the O'odham and lived in the arid
western desert as far south as the Gulf of California. The Tohono O'odham or Desert People,
alternated between summer farming villages and winter hunting-and-gathering camps in the
vast area between the Santa Cruz River and the arid western desert. And the Akimel O'odham,
or River People, stayed year-round in permanent villages along the Gila River. In Fontana's
(1983) terms, these groups are, respectively, the No Villagers, the Two Villagers, and the One
V i I I a g e r s .
The Apache were also labeled many different ways by the Spanish, though the Spanish
tendency to call any nomadic people "Apache" whether or not they were Athapaskan speakers
makes it difficult to interpret some early sources. In southeastern Arizona and southwestern
New Mexico, the Jocome and Suma occupied what was later the territory of the Chiricahua
Apache (Spicer 1962:237). Farther to the east were the Jano, Manso, and Jumano, who ranged
through what is now Chihuahua as far east as the Rio Grande. Schroeder (1974a, 1974b) has
suggested that no Apache peoples ranged south of the Gila River before the 1680s, which
would mean that the ongoing conflict between O'odham and Apache first described by Kino
and other Spaniards late in the seventeenth century had begun only recently. North of the Gila
River was a region mostly unexplored by the Spanish but called Apacheria, land of the Apache,
a loosely applied term describing the area between Pimeria Alta and and the pueblos of Hopi
and Zuni (Opler 1983:402). Basso (1983:465) has suggested that the inhabitants of this area
later became the Western Apache. By 1700, the Western Apache occupied an extensive
territory extending south from the Mogollon Rim to the Gila River.
From the founding of the first Spanish presidio at Tubac in 1752 until the surrender of the
Apache leader Geronimo in 1886, the history of southern Arizona was dominated by the
conflict between the sedentary peoples of the region and various bands of Apache. The
successive efforts of the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. governments to make the region suitable
for settlement were focused heavily, often exclusively, on reducing the threat of Apache raids.
There were occasional conflicts between Euroamericans and the O'odham in the region, but
none compared in duration or ferocity with the conflict between Euroamericans and the
Apache, and the O'odham typically sided with the Spanish, Mexican, or U.S. forces in their
attempts to drive out or eliminate the Apache. For the Apache, raiding was a cultural tradition
and an important element in their economic survival. The villages of the O'odham, the
associated small Euroamerican settlements, and any traveling party in the region were easy and
regular targets of the Apache. It was only in the 1870s, when the U.S. Army succeeded in
driving the Apache east and north out of the Tucson Basin, that Euroamerican settlement was
able to expand significantly beyond the narrow confines of the Santa Cruz River valley (Dobyns
1976; Officer 1987; Sheridan 1995).
The Canada del Oro area was apparently devoid of O'odham settlements in the historic period,
probably because it was part of the usual range of various Apache bands. Apart from occasional
references to encounters between Apaches and Euroamericans along the Canada del Oro, there
is little evidence for how the Apache may have used the area for hunting and gathering or how
often they may have passed through the area en route to raids. As discussed in the next
chapter, historical references to the conflict between the Apache and the people of the Tucson
area often mention the Canada del Oro crossing, but archaeological evidence for the Apache
presence in the area is entirely lacking.
A third group of Native Americans, the Yaqui, had an important presence in the Tucson Basin
relatively late in the historic period. The Yaqui speak a dialect of Cahita, a language once spoken
in a large area in what are now the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. The traditional home
of the Yaqui is along the Yaqui River in Sonora and in adjacent portions of the Sierra Madre,
where they led a primarily agricultural way of life. Because of persecution by the Mexican
government in the late nineteenth century, groups of Yaqui abandoned their traditional
territory for locations elsewhere in northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In the Tucson area,
the Yaqui eventually settled in two principal locations: Pascua Village on the near north side of
Tucson and a smaller satellite community in Marana. Although there is no evidence that the
Yaqui had a substantial presence in the Oro Valley study area, many Yaqui have worked on
farms and ranches all around the Tucson area and it would not be surprising to learn that they
also worked at places along the Canada del Oro (Spicer 1940, 1983).
CHAPTER 3
HISTORY IN THE ORO VALLEY STUDY AREA, 1539-1974
In southern Arizona, the beginning of the historic period is conventionally placed at 1539, the
year of the first entrada (exploratory expedition) to the region sponsored by the Spanish
colonial government in Mexico City. The end of the historic period is often placed, more
arbitrarily, at 50 years ago—currently 1959—in conformance with the usual practice of the
National Register of Historic Places not to consider a property historically significant until it is at
least 50 years old. Archaeologists and historians, who are often called on to evaluate properties
for National Register eligibility, usually refer to anything less than 50 years old as modern, but
in southern Arizona such a distinction between historic and modern is not always a meaningful
one. In Oro Valley, where the modern landscape is above all a product of post—World War II
suburban development, a more useful distinction is the one between the postwar period, or
1945 to the present, and the four centuries of history that preceded it. The first three decades
of postwar development in Oro Valley culminated in the incorporation of the Town of Oro
Valley in 1974, the year that marks the limit of our concern for the cultural resources inventory.
In this chapter, we survey the history of the study area in two pieces. First we look at the long
period from the earliest Spanish entrada into southern Arizona to the end of World War II, or
1539-1945. Then we look at the much shorter period from the end of the war to the
incorporation of the town, or 1945-1974. Throughout the chapter, we try to link the regional
history of southern Arizona to the particular history of the Canada del Oro area, but this is not
always easily done. Before the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated, the history of the area
was mostly peripheral to the history of Tucson, which was the cultural and economic center of
southern Arizona throughout the historic period. Tucson was itself, for most of the historic
period, a place on the periphery of a much larger entity, first the Spanish colonial empire, then
the newly independent Mexican republic, then the large, sparsely populated area added to the
United States well before social and economic ties made it a recognizable part of the country.
Thus, the place that became Oro Valley was long a peripheral part of an already peripheral
place, which means that much of Oro Valley's history is undocumented, or approachable only
through the history of southern Arizona as a whole. The first few sections below review a
regional history with little direct mention of the Canada del Oro or its vicinity, but it is all useful
background for the later sections dealing directly with the study area.
Southern Arizona History in Brief
The history of southern Arizona can be divided into three periods, corresponding to the three
political entities that have encompassed the region in succession: the Spanish Colonial period
(1539-1821), the Mexican period (1821-1854), and the U.S. period (1854—present). The
transition from one period to the next was not as neat as these precise year dates suggest, but
each period was characterized by distinctive social and economic patterns that left lasting
impressions on the region. The following discussion of the three periods is based on syntheses
of Arizona and regional history by Bolton (1984), O'Mack and others (2004), O'Mack and Toupal
(2000), Sheridan (1988, 1995), Weber (1982, 1992), and Whittlesey and others (1994).
Spanish Colonial Period (1539-1821)
The earliest documented entrada into what later became Arizona was made by the Franciscan
friar Marcos de Niza in 1539. With the support of the Spanish colonial government, Niza led a
small expedition northward from the town of Culiacan, in what was then northernmost New
Spain, to the vicinity of the pueblo of Zuni, in what is now western New Mexico. It is uncertain
whether Niza himself made it as far north as Zuni, but he and his companions probably passed
through southern Arizona along the San Pedro River, reaching at least as far north as the Gila
River before returning to Culiacan. One member of Niza's expedition, a North African called
Esteban, reportedly did reach Zuni but died there at the hands of the suspicious residents.
Niza's report of a fabulously wealthy place called Cibola (inspired by what he had heard of Zuni)
prompted a more substantial entrada in 1540, led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and
consisting of some 300 Spaniards, 1,000 Native American guides and porters, and 1,500 head of
cattle, horses, and mules. Much of Coronado's route, which eventually led him as far north and
east as the Great Plains, is difficult to reconstruct, but he, too, passed through southern
Arizona, probably also traveling along the San Pedro River. Over the next two years, Coronado's
lieutenants made numerous exploratory side trips, including at least a dozen into Arizona, but
none of these trips included any further exploration of the southern portion of the state.
Coronado never did find Cibola or anything remotely like it, and southern Arizona remained
essentially unexplored and uninhabited by Europeans for the next 150 years.
A sustained Spanish presence in southern Arizona did not begin until 1691, when Eusebio
Francisco Kino, a Jesuit priest, led a small expedition from an established Jesuit mission in what
is now Sonora, Mexico, to an O'odham (Pima-speaking) settlement at Tumacacori on the Santa
Cruz River. Kino's purpose was to spread the Catholic faith to the inhabitants of the region,just
as he and his Jesuit colleagues had already done at their missions in Sonora. His many
subsequent trips to the region over the next two decades led to the establishment of missions
at several O'odham settlements on the Santa Cruz, most notably San Xavier del Bac, nine miles
south of modern Tucson. Kino also established a number of visitas—secondary mission sites
without resident priests—at smaller O'odham settlements along the Santa Cruz north of San
Xavier, including San Cosme de Tucson, on the west bank of the river and across from the
eventual site of the Tucson presidio.
In 1752, in response to a rebellion by the O'odham the year before, the Spanish government
established a presidio at Tubac on the Santa Cruz River near Tumacacori. This was the first
permanent Spanish settlement in Arizona. The presidio afforded some protection to the
missions along the river and served as a base for further explorations of southern Arizona.
Following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the New World in 1767, care of the missions along
the Santa Cruz fell to the Franciscans, who continued the efforts of the Jesuits despite a
declining O'odham population and an increasing incidence of Apache raiding. Bands of Apaches
lived in mountain strongholds to the north and east of the Santa Cruz Valley, descending
regularly on the sedentary O'odham population to carry off food and livestock, and disrupting
the efforts of the missions. In 1776, with the hope of better protecting the settlements and
missions of the northernmost frontier of the colony, the colonial government closed the Tubac
presidio in favor of a new presidio at Tucson, and for the remainder of the colonial period,
Tucson represented the maximum northern extent of the Spanish colony in what later became
A r i z o n a .
The Tucson presidio held a small, permanent contingent of soldiers and officers, which afforded
enough protection from Apache raids to allow the development of a small community of
settlers outside its adobe walls. This community, the beginning of modern Tucson, consisted
mostly of Spanish-speaking settlers from other parts of New Spain, but it also included Tohono
O'odham from places in the surrounding desert and a small enclave of pacified Apaches. The
presidio community, located at the tail end of colonial supply lines, largely supported itself,
farming the adjacent Santa Cruz River floodplain and grazing cattle and other stock on the lands
around the presidio. Mining was pursued on a small scale, but the places suitable for mining
were in the mountains, where travel was too dangerous to allow any sustained effort at mining.
Mexican Period (1821-1854)
When Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the Spanish presence in southern
Arizona was limited to the Tucson presidio with its small dependent community of settlers and
the two Franciscan missions at San Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. At first, little changed under
the newly formed Mexican government, except that daily life for both the Spanish and the
O'odham residents of the Santa Cruz Valley became even less secure. The remoteness of the
administrative center of Mexico, along with the instability of the Mexican government in the
early decades of independence, led to a neglect of the northernmost frontier, which led in turn
to an increase in the incidence of Apache raids, further isolating the already remote outpost of
Tucson. In 1828, uneasy with the power of the Catholic Church in remote parts of the republic,
the Mexican government ordered the withdrawal of the Franciscans from the northern
missions, leaving the O'odham community and the recently built mission churches at San Xavier
del Bac and Tumacacori without their longtime advocates in the region.
In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, the Gila
River became the new boundary between Mexico and the United States. The region south of
the river remained a part of Mexico, but the new proximity of the United States fostered a
significant increase in the social and economic interaction of the region with the rapidly
expanding country to the north. In 1849, the California gold rush brought an influx of Anglo-
American and other Euroamerican immigrants to southern Arizona, following long-established
but never heavily used trails across the region.
U.S. Period (1854—present)
In 1854, the Gadsden Purchase made the rest of what is now southern Arizona, from the Gila
River to the modern international border, a part of the United States. The Gadsden Purchase
was prompted in part by U.S. interest in securing a suitable right-of-way for a southern railroad
route to California, and it was immediately followed by topographical surveys searching for the
most practical route. Small U.S. Army posts were also established in the region shortly after its
purchase, and soon more Anglo-Americans and others were entering the region, first as traders
and merchants, and later as farmers and ranchers. The Homestead Act of 1862 made it easy for
ordinary citizens to file claims on recently acquired government lands, and the end of the Civil
War sent a new generation of immigrants to the west in search of economic opportunities in
farming, ranching, and mining. Tucson was still the only substantial settlement in southern
Arizona at the start of the U.S. period, but within a decade new settlements were taking shape
in the region, including along the Salt and Gila rivers to the north.
The Civil War made southern Arizona an area of Union-Confederate contention for a brief time
in 1861-1862, which temporarily inhibited Anglo-American settlement, but a far more
substantial obstacle was posed by the Apaches, who were a relentless threat in southern
Arizona for another two decades. Arizona, a part of New Mexico Territory since the Gadsden
Purchase, became its own territory in 1863, but it was not until 1870 that U.S. Army Gen.
George Crook arrived in southern Arizona to begin the final campaign to subdue the Apaches.
By 1873 he had pushed the Apache frontier far enough eastward from Tucson to allow both
Mexican- and Anglo-Americans to ranch with some success along the Santa Cruz River. Other
ranchers soon followed with successful operations in the Arivaca area to the west of the Santa
Cruz, along Tanque Verde Creek to the east, along Sonoita Creek to the southeast, and along
the Canada del Oro to the north.
The Southern Pacific Railroad was built across southern Arizona, from west to east, in 1878-
1880. Following the same corridor along the Gila and Santa Cruz rivers used for many years by
foot and wagon traffic, the railroad reached Tucson in March 1880. Its arrival led to an even
greater influx of Anglo-Americans and others to southern Arizona and marked southern
Arizona's complete integration into the national economic system. The political integration of
Arizona into the United States became similarly complete when the territory finally achieved
statehood in 1912.
Sources on the Early History of the Study Area
Aside from its occasional mention as a place along the road north from Tucson, the Canada del
Oro area did not appear often in documentary sources until a few people began to live there on
something like a regular basis, which happened no earlier than the late 1860s. If the earliest
fitful attempts at settlement are excluded, the history of the area is not substantially
documented until the late 1870s, when George Pusch and his business partner, John Zellweger,
began raising cattle at the place later known as the Steam Pump Ranch. An abundance of
documentation is available for the late 1870s and later, including articles in the Tucson
newspapers; federal census records; federal land patents; county land records; birth, death,
and marriage records; and so on. Thiel's recent study of the Steam Pump Ranch (2007) is a good
example of the kind of detailed information on a particular place that can be gathered from
these sources. Many other places in the study area, not settled or used quite as early as Pusch
and Zellweger's ranch, could be studied in similar detail using the same kinds of sources.
George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch have been the focus of all or part of several other
works (Allen-Bacon 1997; Jeffery 2003; Marriott 2005, 2008; OVHS 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Zipf
1988-1989), but the subject is far from exhausted. Henry Zipf, a grandson of George Pusch and
a resident of Oro Valley, has donated to the Oro Valley Historical Society twenty banker boxes
full of documents and other items relating to his grandfather's business and private life. These
materials have not been fully inventoried but will undoubtedly provide much new information
about the George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch. The Town of Oro Valley will also soon
donate to the Oro Valley Historical Society the collection of early photographs found recently in
the ruins of the chicken coop at the Steam Pump Ranch. These photographs date to the period
when John Procter and his family owned and lived on the ranch, a period already examined in
some detail by Thiel (2007).
The following paragraphs discuss the history of the Canada del Oro from the days of the earliest
settlers to the mid-twentieth century, as it can be approached using two sources, early maps
and homesteading records. This is not a comprehensive study of either the period or the two
kinds of sources, but hopefully it provides a sense of the relevant sources that exist for the
study area and of the interesting, unanswered questions that these sources can raise.
Early Map Research
Because of its proximity to Tucson, the land encompassed by the study area is included on most
early maps of southern Arizona, but it was not until the early U.S. period that maps of the
region were prepared with enough detail to show features such as settlements or roads in the
area just west of the Santa Catalina Mountains. A good example from the early U.S. period is
the Map of the Military Department of New Mexico, prepared during the Civil War by a U.S.
Army engineer (Anderson 1864). The map covers both New Mexico and Arizona territories (the
latter created just a year before), but it is nonetheless fairly detailed, with an emphasis on the
locations of military posts and the routes that connected them (Figure 4). The map has certain
shortcomings (among them, miscomprehensions of Spanish place names: the Tortolita
Mountains are labeled "Sierra Tortillista"), but it accurately shows the army posts at Tubac
("Tabac") and Tucson, and the wagon road that connected them paralleling the Santa Cruz
River. It also shows Fort Grant, recently established northeast of the Santa Catalinas near the
point where Aravaipa Creek enters the San Pedro River. A trail (not a wagon road) extends
north from Tucson to Fort Grant, skirting the west side of the Santa Catalinas then heading
northeast to the San Pedro River. This is one of the earliest depictions of the route that
eventually became modern Oracle Road. (The place labeled "Charles de los Pimas" north of
Tucson and west of the Tucson—Fort Grant Road is probably the place known as Charco de
Yuma or Charco de las Jumas, a large Hohokam ruin better known as Los Morteros, in present-
day Marana; see Wallace 1996).
Most other nineteenth-century maps of southern Arizona show little else along the west side of
the Santa Catalinas other than the road between Tucson and one or another named destination
on the San Pedro River. An important exception is the Official Map of Pima County prepared in
1893 by a former county surveyor, George Roskruge (Roskruge 1893). Roskruge's map includes
a wealth of detail for the Tucson area but also for other parts of Pima County where settlement
was still sparse. His depiction of the area between the Santa Catalina and Tortolita Mountains
(the latter labeled "Tortillita Mountains") shows the Canada del Oro, the road from Tucson to
Mammoth (a mining settlement on the lower San Pedro), and three locations where early
settlers had established ranches, labeled Steam Pump, Romero, and Charouleau (Figure 5).
Roskruge also included the surveyed route of the proposed Tucson, Globe, and Northern
Railroad, which roughly paralleled the Tucson-Mammoth road. All of these features, which
played different roles in the history of the area, are discussed below.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Roskruge's map is the contrast between the large
number of settlers shown along the Santa Cruz and Rillito rivers, just outside Tucson proper,
and the near-absence of settlers along the Canada del Oro. Within a decade after the map
appeared, the Canada del Oro area would see the steady spread of homesteading north from
Tucson, but at the end of the nineteenth century it was still largely without settlement. The
relatively late beginning for settlement along the Canada del Oro can be attributed in large part
to a continuing perception of the area as dangerous: it was still considered a place too far from
Tucson and too close to the usual range of the Apaches.
General Land Office Survey Plats
In the early twentieth century, as settlement in the Tucson area began to expand northward
into the Canada del Oro area, the first formal surveys of the area were carried out by the U.S.
Surveyor General's Office in Phoenix. Prior to the surveys, all of the lands in the Canada del Oro
area, like the lands in any other unsettled part of the West, were part of the public domain and
regulated by the federal government. Surveying the land was a necessary step in making the
land available for homesteading and other claims by private parties. The maps (called plats) and
notes from these early surveys, all of which were eventually filed with the General Land Office
(GLO) in Washington, D.C., are often uniquely detailed sources on the cultural and natural
features in an area early in its settlement history.
The typical plat covers a township, or an area six miles square, designated with Township and
Range numbers that indicate the place of the township in a large survey grid established for the
given region. The grid itself is defined by a baseline (or east-west line) and a meridian (or north-
south line) that intersect at a specified point. A standard township contains 36 one-mile-square
sections. The Oro Valley study area encompasses portions of four townships, all part of the
survey grid defined by the Gila and Salt River Baseline and Meridian, which intersect at a point
near the confluence of the two named rivers. The earliest GLO plats for all four townships in the
Oro Valley study area are listed in Table 1.
We reviewed the portion of each survey plat that falls within the Oro Valley study area for
cultural features. The resulting list of features, arranged by township and section, is presented
in Table 2. The list does not include roads or trails, which are too numerous and extensive to list
and describe in this way. The portions of each township plat falling within the Oro Valley study
area are reproduced in Figures 6-11. All of the features depicted on these early maps represent
potential historical-archaeological sites, although modern development has undoubtedly
destroyed many of them.
United States Geological Survey Topographic Maps
Around the same time that the earliest GLO survey plats of the Canada del Oro area were being
drawn, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was preparing the first detailed topographic
maps of southern Arizona. Like the survey plats, the early USGS maps are generally accurate
and useful records of the settlements, transportation routes, and other features that existed in
an area at the time a given map was prepared. The earliest USGS maps that include the Oro
Valley study area are the 1:125,000-scale maps in the 30-minute topographic series, most
notably the 1905 Tucson quadrangle, which encompasses most of the study area (USGS 1905).
A thin slice of the northernmost portion of the study area falls on the adjacent Winkelman 30-
minute quadrangle (USGS 1911).
On the 1905 Tucson quadrangle (Figure 12), some of the same names appear that are also seen
on the Roskruge map and the GLO plats—Pusch, Sutherland, Romero, Lockas—but a few are
shown in unexpected places. "Pusch's Steam Pump" is shown at its well-known location along
the Canada del Oro, but the 1905 map also shows a "Pusch's Ranch" several miles to the north,
near the foot of the Tortolita Mountains. This second location, on a parcel apparently never
officially owned by Pusch and part of a land claim patented many years later (1935) by Warren
Stewart, was evidently part of the Pusch ranching operation at an early date. Similarly, the Matt
Lockas homestead, settled around 1912 a few miles downstream from Pusch's Steam Pump,
was evidently preceded by a Lockas Ranch located in 1905 a full township to the north, also at
the foot of the Tortolitas. This earlier Lockas property was never patented by anyone and
became state property in 1937. (See below for more discussion of these and other early
homesteads in the study area.)
The next USGS maps to include the study area are the 1:62,500-scale, 15-minute topographic
quadrangles. The 1957 Mount Lemmon quadrangle (USGS 1957) includes most of the study
area; smaller portions of the area fall on the adjacent Cortaro, Oracle, and Tortolita Mountains
quadrangles (USGS 1947, 1959a, 1959b). The larger-scale 15-minute quadrangles are notably
more detailed than the 30-minute quadrangles but do not label as many isolated properties as
the earlier maps. The 1957 Mount Lemmon quadrangle (Figure 13) is especially interesting for
its depiction of the study area just before it experienced the development boom that began in
the 1960s. In the southern portion of the study area (Figure 14), the Steam Pump Ranch is still
prominently depicted, but so are the beginnings of some of the earliest subdivisions in the area:
Campo Bello, platted in 1946 but its distinctive radial street layout still only partially in place,
showing 14 houses (section 23, right-center of Figure 14); and Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, just to
the north of Campo Bello, showing a half dozen houses, including one surrounded by an
orchard (depicted as a small rectangle of green dots).
The successor to the 15-minute series of USGS topographic maps is the 1:24,000-scale, 7.5-
minute series, which is the most recent USGS series. Six quadrangles in this series cover
different portions of the study area (USGS 1981, 1988a, 1988b, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c). Each
quadrangle has seen several revisions over the years, to keep pace with the rapidly changing
landscape of metropolitan Tucson. All of the quadrangles were originally based on aerial
photography ranging in dates from
1958 to 1975, with later revisions based on more recent aerial photography. The 7.5-minute
quadrangles are of less interest for the pre-development historic period in the study area and
are not discussed here, but their sequence of revisions are a potentially valuable source for a
closer look at the progression of suburban development in the study area.
Early Historic Settlement in the Study Area
When the Gadsden Purchase made southern Arizona a part of the United States in 1854, almost
all of the land in the region became part of the public domain, subject to federal laws regarding
its appropriate use, including the laws that regulated the transfer of public land to private
parties. An important exception to the status of public domain was any grant of land made by
the Mexican government or its predecessor, the Spanish colonial government, to a private
citizen before southern Arizona became U.S. territory. Under the terms of the Gadsden
Purchase, the United States agreed to honor any existing Spanish or Mexican land grant that
could be confirmed as legitimate. The same terms were part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War and transferred most of what is now the U.S.
Southwest (except for the Gadsden Purchase) from Mexico to the United States (Mattison
1946).
In southern Arizona, Spanish and Mexican settlement was restricted mostly to the Santa Cruz
River valley in the vicinity of Tucson and never extended at all to the north of Tucson, so the
number of Spanish and Mexican land grants in the region was relatively small compared to the
much larger number of such grants in New Mexico and California. Most grants in southern
Arizona were nevertheless large-17,000 acres was typical, and a few were much larger—and
the legal wrangling over these grants in the second half of the nineteenth century was often
long and involved, tying up large tracts of choice land for decades and having enduring effects
on land tenure in the region. But none of this had any direct effect on the Canada del Oro area,
where the land suitable for agriculture was minimal and settlement in the Spanish and Mexican
periods was nonexistent because of the nearly constant threat of Apache raiding.
It was not until the 1870s, two decades after the Gadsden Purchase, that Euroamericans began
settling with any permanency near the Canada del Oro. By that time, the staking of claims on
public land was governed by a series of federal laws passed to promote settlement in previously
unsettled areas, most notably the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act provided that an
adult head of a family could claim and receive title to 160 acres of surveyed land if the claimant
built a house on the property, cultivated a portion of it, lived there continuously for five years,
then paid a small registration fee per acre (Stein 1990). During the later nineteenth century and
the first decades of the twentieth century, various other acts were passed that represented
modifications of the original Homestead Act, such as the Desert Land Act of 1877, intended
specifically to promote the irrigation of arid lands, and the Stock Raising Homestead Act of
1916, which increased the acreage of the original Homestead Act to a maximum of 640 acres to
allow claims large enough to support grazing in arid areas. The latter act became the most
important and commonly used authority for claiming land in the Oro Valley study area before
1945.
Homesteaders and Other Early Settlers
To get an idea of the nature of settlement in Oro Valley during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, we compiled a comprehensive list of patents granted by the General Land
Office (GLO) before 1945 to private individuals for homesteads and other land claims within the
limits of the study area (Table 3). From 1945 to 1959, many more private claims were granted
by the Bureau of Land Management (the successor to the GLO) in the Oro Valley area, but most
were cash sales of small tracts and were not part of the traditional pattern of homesteading
that prevailed before the end of World War II. Our list also excludes lands granted by the
federal government to the State of Arizona either before or after World War II, because such
grants were similarly unrelated to the homesteading tradition.
Table 4 lists the legal authorities used in the study area to claim and patent public lands before
1945, including the total number and acreage of patents granted under each authority. Of the
72 patents, the majority (45) were made under the Stock Raising Homestead Act in the period
1920-1944. Only 14 patents were granted under the original Homestead Act, all in the
relatively early period 1908-1926. Another 10 patents were Cash Sale entries in the period
1919-1939. Two patents were Forest Lieu Selections in the period 1903-1904, both
undoubtedly prompted by the creation of national forest reserves after 1891, such as the Santa
Catalina Forest Reserve in 1902 (see below). And one patent was a Forest Service Exchange
granted to the Arizona Desert School in 1939. The large number of patents granted in the study
area after 1920 under the Stock Raising Homestead Act is notable and undoubtedly reflects the
perception of most settlers by that year that the land in the area was suitable for grazing
livestock but mostly unsuitable for farming. The impact of the act on the privatization of public
land in the study area is remarkable: of the approximately 49,000 acres in the study area,
22,640 acres became private land through the Stock Raising Homestead Act.
Although the appearance of a name in Table 3 does not necessarily mean that the claimant held
on to his or her property any longer than it took to receive a patent, a look at the list of 72
patentees does give a sense of the farming and ranching community that took shape in the
study area during the first half of the twentieth century. Much like the rest of southern Arizona
in the same period, the study area was a mix of Anglo-Americans and Mexican Americans, with
the occasional recent European immigrant. A few of the names—Romero and Pusch—have
become closely associated with Oro Valley's early history, while others—Hardy, Magee,
Overton, Rudasill—survive in the modern names of streets and roads in the study area. Some
patentees later subdivided their property for residential development. As a notable example,
Lue W. G. Skinner, who patented two Stock Raising Homestead claims totaling about 600 acres
in 1926-1929, almost immediately
subdivided the claims as the Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, obtaining county approval of his plat in
1930 (see the discussion of residential development below). The actual construction of houses
in the subdivision did not begin until after World War II, but Skinner was clearly interested in
using his claims for something other than raising stock shortly after he received them, if not
before.
Limiting our coverage of GLO patents to the Oro Valley study area excludes some homesteads
just outside the area that were nonetheless influential in Oro Valley history. For example,
William Sutherland and his family patented a series of homesteads in the early 1920s just east
of the study area, along the upper Canada del Oro and what is now known as Sutherland Wash,
including parts of sections 1, 2, 10, 14, 15, 23, and 26 of Township 11 South, Range 14 East.
Most of this land later became part of Catalina State Park. Similarly, Pierre (Pedro) Charouleau,
a prominent Tucson-area rancher in the early twentieth century, patented claims in section 35
of Township 10 South, Range 14 East, and sections 1 and 2 of Township 11 South, Range 14
East, immediately north of the study area. His first patent was obtained in 1904, but
Charouleau was settled in the area many years earlier. His property appears on the 1893
Official Map of Pima County (Roskruge 1893) along the Tucson-Oracle Road, right where the
road crosses into Pinal County (see Figure 5).
Francisco Romero and Descendants
A notable characteristic of the list of patented claims in Table 3 is the relatively late date of the
earliest patents—none is earlier than 1903—compared with the earlier dates for the initial
settlement of the Canada del Oro area known from other sources. Federal laws governing and
promoting claims on the public domain were fully in place when Euroamericans first settled the
area, but the earliest settlers were apparently not much concerned in the early days with
formalizing their ownership of lands in the public domain, perhaps because of more pressing
concerns. Francisco Romero, a member of an old Tucson family that first came to southern
Arizona as part of a Spanish presidio force in the late eighteenth century, was probably the first
settler of the Canada del Oro area. Romero established a ranch near the confluence of the
Canada and Sutherland Wash, probably in the late 1860s though a Romero descendant once
claimed the original attempt took place as early as 1828 (Mabry 1991:62). Another source
(Hayden n.d.) puts it at 1844, but Sheridan (1986:280, n. 7, citing a personal communication
with James Officer) has noted that Romero is unlikely to have been ranching in the Canada del
Oro area even as early as the 1840s: "[I]t would have been almost impossible . . . to run cattle
that far north of [Tucson] at a time when Apache raiding was at its most intense, especially
since the Canon was located along one of the Pinal Apaches' primary raiding routes." In 1871,
Romero complained to the territorial legislature that his Canada del Oro ranch had been raided
by Apaches several times in 1869-1870, which prompted him and his family to abandon the
property in 1870 (Mabry 1991:64). This suggests that he was living on the ranch at least as early
as 1869, which, regardless of his lack of success, made him the earliest known Euroamerican to
settle in the area.
Francisco Romero's ranch centered on an enclosed house compound that he built atop the
ruins of a large prehistoric archaeological site known at the time as Pueblo Viejo. The site is
better known today as the Romero Ruin, or archaeological site AZ BB:9:1 (ASM) (see the
discussion in Chapter 5). The Romero compound was probably a ruin itself by the time
Romero's only son, Fabian Romero, returned to the Canada del Oro and built a new ranch
house in 1889, just below the ridge where his father's house had stood; the remains of the
younger Romero's house also survive today as an archaeological site, AZ BB:9:52 (ASM) (Mabry
1991:68-69). It is not clear how much of a presence the Romero family had along the Canada
del Oro between the abandonment of the first Romero house and the building of the second,
but after the family first left the area they lived for many years along the Santa Cruz River near
Tucson; perhaps they continued to run cattle in the Canada del Oro area when conditions
permitted. Mabry (1991:68) cites a source on Fabian Romero that gives the eventual acreage of
his Canada del Oro ranch as 4,800 acres, an acreage accumulated before 1900. A house labeled
Romero appears on George Roskruge's 1893 map of Pima County (Roskruge 1893), in about the
location of the Romero Ruin (Township 12 South, Range 14 East, Section 4), but Fabian
Romero's house, located in the next section north, was presumably the only one standing by
that time.
Francisco Romero eventually patented a 160-acre homestead in the vicinity of Romero Ruin in
1911 (see Table 3), but since he died in 1905 (Hayden n.d.), the patent was probably issued
posthumously in his name to an heir. Interestingly, this homestead did not include Romero
Ruin, though it did include the parcel where Romero's son, Fabian, had built his house in 1889.
Fabian himself never patented any land in the area. In 1924, a patent was issued to Fabian
Romero for a stock-raising homestead of 640 acres (see Table 3), but this was probably Fabian
Romero, Jr., a son of the original Fabian Romero. This homestead did include the Romero Ruin
and thus the remains of Francisco Romero's original house. Also in 1924, Bernardina Romero,
the wife of Fabian, Jr., patented a 600-acre stock-raising homestead just to the north of her
husband's claim. Without knowing more about the history of the family, it is hard to say what
prompted this particular sequence of claims by the Romeros, but they clearly had a history in
the area that long predated their official ownership of the land.
George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch
Another settler along the Canada del Oro whose presence long predated his official ownership
of the land was George Pusch, a German immigrant who came to Tucson from California in
1874. Shortly after he arrived, Pusch and his friend John Zellweger, a Swiss immigrant, pooled
their resources and acquired a ranch along the Canada del Oro, soon to be known as the Steam
Pump Ranch after Pusch dug a well there and installed a steam-powered pump, probably the
first such pump in Arizona. The exact year the pump was installed is uncertain, but the property
was apparently well known as the Steam Pump Ranch by the early 1880s. In 1883, Pusch
became sole owner of the ranch when he bought Zellweger's share in it. Both he and Zellweger
were successful businessmen apart from their joint interests, and Pusch also became politically
active, eventually serving in the territorial legislature. The Steam Pump Ranch was for many
years a much-used watering place and stopover for cattlemen moving stock along the road
between Tucson and the San Pedro River, where Pusch and Zellweger also had a large
operation known as the Feldman Ranch. Pusch operated the Steam Pump Ranch until his death
in 1921. The ranch was acquired from his estate by another rancher, John Procter, in 1933
(Allen-Bacon 1997:2; OVHS 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Thiel 2007:13-20; Zipf 1988-1989).
The reference to Pusch and Zellweger acquiring what became the Steam Pump Ranch in 1874
raises a number of questions that we have been unable to answer with the sources we have
consulted. First, who did they buy the ranch from? It is hard to imagine that someone had
established a ranch on the Canada del Oro by 1874, just five years after Romero had given up
on the area because of difficulties with the Apaches. Second, what was the legal basis for the
original ownership? The area was part of the public domain in 1874, still unsurveyed by the GLO
and, technically at least, not subject to claims much less prior ownership. Indeed, Pusch himself
did not receive a patent for the 40-acre parcel where the Steam Pump Ranch was centered until
1903 (see Table 3), and his receipt of the patent implies that the land was previously unclaimed
and unowned. If Pusch and Zellweger really did buy the ranch in 1874 from someone they
believed owned it, it may mean that private parties at the time were buying and selling land in
the public domain before anyone had an actual legal claim to it. Unfortunately, research into
the history of the Steam Pump Ranch by Marriot (2005, 2008), the Oro Valley Historical Society
(OVHS 2009b, 2009c), Thiel (2007), and others has not uncovered any information in this
regard. This is a worthy subject of further research, since it would undoubtedly involve not only
Pusch but other early settlers in the area.
Whatever the circumstances, it is clear that by 1903, the year he received his patent, Pusch was
well established in the Canada del Oro area and was undoubtedly also using other parcels in the
general vicinity for his ranching operation. Marriott (2005:61) has published a map of the
eventual extent of Pusch's holdings in southern Arizona, which covered a vast area in Pima and
Pinal counties, dwarfing the one 40-acre parcel he obtained directly from the public domain.
(Henry Zipf, the grandson of George Pusch, is the principal source for the depiction on the
Marriott map.) Pusch's early use of other lands in the Canada del Oro area might also seem to
be indicated by the type of patent he received for his Steam Pump Ranch parcel: a Forest Lieu
Selection, which means he was granted the patent in exchange for a parcel he had previously
been using within an area later designated as a national forest reserve. The nearby Santa
Catalina Forest Reserve, designated in 1902 and incorporating a large portion of the Santa
Catalina Mountains (the reserve became part of the newly created Coronado National Forest in
1908 [Coronado National Forest 2009]) seems the most likely location, but Pusch actually
received his Forest Lieu Selection in exchange for a 40-acre parcel he owned in what became
the San Jacinto Forest Reserve in southern California (GLO 1903), a reserve that is now part of
the Cleveland National Forest near San Diego. Pusch lived for a short time in California before
coming to Tucson (Zipf 1988-1989). Either he claimed the forest parcel himself while he was in
California or he acquired it secondarily from someone else.
A Possibility for Further Homestead Research
The scope of work for this overview did not allow for it, but additional information on patented
GLO claims can be obtained by contacting the National Archives and Records Administration in
Washington, D.C., which keeps the land-entry case files for individual claims. These files, copies
of which are currently available by mail at $40.00 per land entry (http://www.archives.gov/),
typically include the original claim filed by the patentee, the written testimonials of witnesses in
support of the claim, other documents related to the verification of the claim or any dispute it
may have prompted, and the final claim decision. Some case files include descriptions of the
property, including the improvements made by the claimant to satisfy the requirements of the
claim, such as buildings and irrigation ditches. Land-entry case files are almost always useful to
a historian or archaeologist interested in the early history of a property, but the amount of
information they provide varies considerably. Some case files contain a surprising amount of
detail while others hold very little information, and it is impossible to know what a particular
case file might hold before examining it.
Mining, Farming, and Ranching in the Study Area
The historic period in Arizona was dominated by three economic pursuits—mining, farming,
and ranching (see especially Sheridan 1995:103-227)—but the amount of emphasis placed on
each pursuit varied by the circumstances in a given location. In the Oro Valley study area,
mining was important early on, but only as something carried out in the nearby mountains by
settlers who were sometimes also busy with other pursuits directly in the study area, notably
ranching. The Canada del Oro (Canyon of Gold) was called by that name at least as early as the
1850s, but the name was probably originally applied because of what was going on in its
uppermost reaches. The stream begins on the northern slope of Mount Lemmon in the Santa
Catalina Mountains, about 10 miles south of the modern town of Oracle; it flows directly north
for several miles before turning west and southwest to eventually pass through the study area.
The history of mining in the Santa Catalinas has been summarized by Wilson (1995a:161-162;
1995b:16-17), who mentions efforts to exploit the gold placer deposits in the gravels of the
upper Canada del Oro in 1858-1859, and possibly earlier. The same placers continued to be
exploited occasionally into the 1930s, but the yields were always small.
Ranching was the most important pursuit drawing people to the Canada del Oro area in the late
nineteenth century, as is clear from our discussion of the earliest families settling in the study
area. It was also the most important factor in drawing people to the area well into the
twentieth century, as the large number of stock-raising homestead claims made in the period
1900-1944 indicates (see Table 4). But much about ranching in the area has yet to be studied
systematically. For example, how much land was required for a successful ranch? How were
sources of water developed and controlled? What kinds of facilities were built by ranchers, and
how did this vary in relation to different factors, such as the ethnic background of the rancher?
And what role did farming, always a minor pursuit in the area, have in the ranching economy?
Details on the early GLO plats of the study area points to the kinds of information that might be
gathered to answer these questions. First is the depiction of the Steam Pump Ranch property
on the 1902 plat of Township 12 South, Range 14 East (Figure 15). Pusch's property sat close to
another property, labeled "Mexican Ranch," just to the north. This was probably the land later
patented by Francisco Marin in 1908 (see Table 3) and may have been settled by him long
before that year, much as Pusch was operating the Steam Pump Ranch long before he patented
it. In fact, according to the Oro Valley Historical Society (Patricia Spoerl, personal
communication 2009), an Oro Valley resident recently suggested to the society that the land
that became the Steam Pump Ranch was originally owned by the Marin family and bought from
them. We have not yet been able to evaluate this information, but if that was indeed the case it
raises the interesting question of how Pusch and Zellweger learned about their property and its
availability, and what arrangements they may have made with the family that suddenly became
their close neighbor. For that matter, how much did Pusch and Zellweger, recent immigrants to
an environment they must have found very unfamiliar, rely on the local knowledge of Francisco
Marin and other Mexican-American ranchers with long experience in the region to get their
own ranch up and running?
Other GLO plat details similarly emphasize the proximity of Anglo-American and Mexican-
American ranches in the study area, which continued after the earliest settlers in the area had
sold their claims. A detail from the 1921 plat of Township 11 South, Range 13 East (Figure 16)
shows two houses labeled Jimenez, about a half mile apart and probably representing two
generations of a Mexican-American family, and another house labeled Trevan, a half mile from
one of the Jimenez houses and probably representing an Anglo-American settler. Neither the
Jimenez or Trevan name is among the names of the original GLO patentees in the area (see
Table 3), which means both must have acquired their land from earlier owners. By itself, the
map depiction means little, but it suggests the continuing multicultural (or at least bicultural)
nature of ranching in the study area during the early twentieth century.
The question of water and its relationship to ranching in the study area is also hinted at in GLO
plat details. On the plat just mentioned, the Trevan house and one of the Jimenez houses are
both shown with wells. Having a well was undoubtedly indispensable for watering livestock in a
place where the most substantial watercourse, the Canada del Oro, was miles away and in any
case altogether dry for most of the year, but some early settlers in the study area also built
small dams on the seasonal washes that crossed their property. On the 1921 plat of Township
11 South, Range 13 East, the Nelson Ranch is shown with a house and well, but there is also a
dam shown just northwest of the ranch, on the small wash that passes north-south along the
foot of the Tortolita Mountains (Figure 17; the wash is labeled Sausalito Creek on modern
maps). Nelson, a Swedish immigrant who first ranched near the Tortolitas in the 1890s, later
bought the large ranching operation of William Sutherland near the Santa Catalinas; he became
well known in Pima County when he was elected sheriff in 1908 (Willson 1956:30). The purpose
of the small dam on his Tortolita Mountain property is uncertain, but it would only have
functioned during rains, routing the flow in the wash either onto fields to irrigate crops or into
an earthen tank for watering livestock. This particular location probably lacked land appropriate
for farming, so the dam probably served to fill a tank, though it is not depicted on the plat. The
extent to which ranchers like Nelson relied on dams rather than wells to water their stock is an
interesting question for future research.
Early Roads in the Study Area
Transportation in the study area before 1945 centered on a single route, the road variously
labeled on early maps as the Tucson—Camp Grant road, the Tucson-Mammoth road, the
Tucson-Florence road, and the Tucson-Oracle road. It is the direct predecessor of modern
Oracle Road, which is also a portion of modern State Route 77. In 1961, the road was
designated with an archaeological site number, AZ BB:9:41 (ASM), but the designation was
based solely on early map depictions and historical references and not on an actual field
recording. Aside from its frequent appearance on modern maps, the road is not documented as
a historic property and today bears no resemblance to its earlier self.
As noted above, one of the earliest depictions of Oracle Road is on the Map of the Military
Department of New Mexico, which dates to the Civil War (Anderson 1864). This map was
prepared not long after the only encounter of Union and Confederate troops in Arizona, the
brief skirmish known as the Battle of Picacho Pass, which was fought on April 15, 1862,
between a small force of Confederates, sent west to occupy Tucson, and the California
Volunteers, a Union force sent east from California to chase the rebels out of the Southwest.
After the indecisive skirmish at Picacho, the California Volunteers regrouped on the San Pedro
River at what soon became Fort Grant, then entered Tucson from the north via the Canada del
Oro (Wilson 1995a:91-92).
On their way from the San Pedro River to Tucson, the California Volunteers followed a road that
had long played an important role in the history of the region. Especially important was the
point where the road crossed the Canada del Oro, a location that seems to have served as a
kind of entry point to the Tucson Basin. Officer (1987:257) describes a moment in 1850, during
the late Mexican period, when several bands of Apaches, including the Pinal Apaches, joined
forces to attack the presidio at Tucson. The Pinal band had second thoughts and decided not to
join the attack, waiting instead at a point just north of the Canada del Oro. Officer (1987:264)
also describes a second incident, a year later, when an Apache attack was repelled and the
attackers were pursued fruitlessly by a presidio force as far as the Canada del Oro, where the
chase was abandoned.
The Canada del Oro crossing continued to serve a similar role in the early U.S. period. The Oro
Valley Historical Society has gathered several secondary references to interactions between
Apache bands and the earliest representatives of the U.S. government (military men, Indian
agents, and settlers) in the late 1850s, enough to suggest strongly that the wash and its crossing
were seen by the Apaches as a good site both for raiding travelers and for negotiating a truce.
In 1871, the Canada del Oro crossing also apparently played a role in the infamous Camp Grant
massacre, when a group of about 150 Tucsonans, including Anglo-Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Tohono O'odham, attacked an Apache camp near Fort Grant, ostensibly in
retaliation for a series of recent Apache raids in the Tucson area. More than 100 Apaches were
killed in the attack, including many women and children, and the event became a notorious
example of unnecessary brutality in the treatment of Native Americans by settlers in the
Southwest. According to one source, the attackers stationed men at the Canada del Oro
crossing to turn back messengers from Tucson who might have alerted the Apache camp of the
impending attack (OVHS 2009d; Spoerl n.d.).
It is hard to tell from early map depictions whether the most suitable point to cross the Canada
del Oro was always the same or whether it shifted from time to time depending on conditions
in the wash. Today Oracle Road crosses the Canada del Oro just upstream of its junction with
Big Wash, which does not seem much different from the alignment of the road on the 1902
GLO plat of the area (see Figure 15). But earlier maps, notably the 1893 Roskruge map (see
Figure 5), show the road heading due north from the Steam Pump Ranch, which would put the
crossing almost a mile southwest of its location today. The 1902 GLO plat does show another,
presumably secondary road crossing the wash directly at the Steam Pump Ranch, which may
indicate that a crossing was maintained at the ranch even when the principal crossing for the
main road was well to the northeast. On all of the early GLO plats that show it, the road is
accompanied by what seem to be short, alternative routes diverging from it, then roughly
paralleling it for short distances, then returning to join it again. These lesser routes may have
simply been roads to access particular properties, or they may have been temporary
realignments prompted by difficulties in the main road caused by weather or other factors.
All of the GLO plats of the area also show numerous trails (dashed lines) and other roads (solid
lines), most trending northeast-southwest, parallel to the drainages that cross the area,
including the Canada del Oro (see Figures 6-11). Some connect individual homesteads with
other properties or with Oracle Road. Unlike Oracle Road, most of these trails and roads have
disappeared with development.
The Tucson, Globe, and Northern Railroad
The other early transportation feature of note in the study area was never actually completed
or used. Myrick (1975:258-262) has summarized the history of the ill-fated project (also see
McClintock 1916:299-230; Robertson 1986:109). In 1882, two years after the Southern Pacific
Railroad reached Tucson, a group of local businessman organized to build the Arizona Narrow
Gauge Railroad, which would run north from Tucson through Oracle to the Gila River, then
eastward to New Mexico. The project was troubled from the start with political wrangling and
the dubious motives of investors, but the company was nevertheless able to convince Pima
County to provide substantial funding through bonds. Construction began in 1883 when a grade
was raised for several miles extending north from Tucson. Some track was also eventually laid,
but the effort was repeatedly stalled by difficulties in funding and organization. In 1887, the
name of the railroad was changed to the Tucson, Globe, and Northern to reflect revised plans
and a renewed construction effort, but by 1894 the project had been abandoned altogether
and the company was sold off.
The proposed route of the Tucson, Globe, and Northern through the study area is shown on the
1893 map of Pima County prepared by Roskruge (see Figure 5), who in 1886 surveyed part of
the line in his capacity as county surveyor. The extent of the completed portion of the railroad
is uncertain, but Myrick has suggested Magee Road as the northern limit of laid track. The
grade itself was probably completed at least as far north as the Steam Pump Ranch, where a
grading camp was established with the consent of George Pusch, who stood to benefit from a
railroad passing through his property. The track was removed when the railroad went out of
business, but the grade was left in place and may still survive today in a few places. In our
review of the early GLO plats of the study area, we noticed a probable remnant of the grade on
the 1913 plat of Township 12 South, Range 13 East (Figure 18). This remnant, mostly in section
24 of the township, ran immediately northwest of the future site of Canyon del Oro High
School. Today this is part of a residential area of large lots, large enough to offer hope that
some part of the remnant still survives, but nothing like it is discernible in modern air photos of
the location.
The Postwar Period, 1945-1974
From the end of World War II to the incorporation of the Town of Oro Valley in 1974, the study
area changed from an expanse of open land used mostly for grazing to the nucleus of a
suburban community that soon had little room for grazing. A detailed history of the period has
not yet been written, but some of its main features have been recounted by Marjorie Kriegh
(OVHS 2009e), Barbara Marriott (2005, 2008), Henry Suozzi (1999), and Henry Zipf (1989-
1990). Much useful information is also preserved in the county records that were created as
new subdivisions were planned and approved, and in the records of county tax assessments of
individual properties. Because part of our task in the cultural resources inventory has been to
identify and evaluate residential neighborhoods in the town that are of potential historic
interest, we have looked closely at some of these county records, including the original plats
submitted to the county for proposed residential developments and the information on
individual houses maintained by the county assessor. The Pima County Assessor's Office has
helped by providing digital data on houses in the study area, including construction dates.
Other sources on the recent history of Oro Valley exist that we have not consulted for this
project. The Oro Valley Town Clerk, Ms. Kathryn Cuvelier, provided us with a comprehensive list
of governmental records maintained by the town and available to the public, all potentially
useful sources for a study of the history of Oro Valley after incorporation. The town also has a
complete set of Oro Valley newspapers, most notably the Oro Valley Voice, originally collected
by town resident Jim Kriegh and donated to the town. The Oro Valley Public Library also has a
collection of newspaper clippings about the town donated by Marjorie Kriegh.
Early Residential Development in Oro Valley
Although much of Oro Valley's growth came after the town was incorporated in 1974, interest
in the residential development of the area actually began well before World War II. The most
obvious indication of this early interest is the range of years that plats were originally filed with
Pima County for the subdivisions that are now within the Town of Oro Valley. Table 5 lists the
19 subdivisions with original plats approved before 1974. (As the names indicate, several of the
19 subdivisions are later phases of an originally smaller subdivision.) The fact that two plats
date to before 1945, and the earliest plat dates to 1930, attests to the early development
ambitions of private landowners in the Oro Valley area, even at a time when the economic
circumstances of most people made the successful development of a still relatively remote part
of suburban Tucson a long shot. Not surprisingly, the year the first house was built in any one of
these 19 subdivisions was usually much later than the year of the plat, and in no subdivision
was the first house actually built before 1945.
In the first 20 years after the war, 1945-1964, construction within the platted subdivisions was
limited largely to a handful of subdivisions: Oro Valley Estates, Shadow Mountain Estates,
Campo Bello, and Suffolk Hills (first two phases). With the exception of Suffolk Hills, these
subdivisions would form the core of the area incorporated as the Town of Oro Valley in 1974.
The new town also included Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, which was essentially undeveloped at the
time despite its early plat date.
As related in interesting detail by Zipf(1989-1990), Oro Valley Estates was part of an ambitious
development project conceived in 1958 by Louis F. Landon, a Chicago businessman and avid
golfer who had wintered in Tucson for many years. Landon was convinced that the Tucson area
could support another golf course—there were just three at the time—so he assembled a
group of investors in Chicago and began shopping for a suitable building site. In a deal that
reflects the enduring influence of George Pusch on the area, Landon contacted Hank Lieber, a
former professional baseball player and University of Arizona athlete who had a real estate
office in downtown Tucson's Pioneer Hotel. The Pioneer was owned at the time by Lieber's
father-in-law, Jack (John) Procter, the man who had bought the Steam Pump Ranch from the
Pusch estate. Lieber and Landon were interested in land along the south bank of the Canada del
Oro, an area that was then a part of the Canada del Oro Ranch, just down the wash from
Procter's property. The Canada del Oro Ranch was owned by Francis Rooney, president of the
Manhattan Construction Company (of Oklahoma) and managed by George Pusch, the son of
the original owner of the Steam Pump Ranch.
Unfortunately for Landon, Rooney sold the desired portion of the Canada del Oro Ranch to
another investor, Joseph Timan, before Landon could make an offer. Timan went on to found
the enormously successful Horizon Land Company, which was later involved in large land deals
in several other states. Undaunted, Landon soon persuaded Timan to sell 375 acres of the
Canada del Oro property to Landon's newly created corporation, Oro Valley, Inc. The sale was
made official on May 14, 1958, with Landon required as part of the deal to build a golf course.
Later that year, Timan and Landon announced plans to build an elaborate resort on the Canada
del Oro property, with a vast artificial lake, luxury hotels, health spas, swimming pools, tennis
courts, and other amenities. Most parts of the plan never materialized, but Landon did build his
golf course, designed by the noted golf-course architect Robert Bruce Harris; it opened in
February 1959. In October of the same year, Landon and a few others incorporated the Oro
Valley Country Club, which has operated the golf course ever since. Landon also developed Oro
Valley Estates on the land surrounding the golf course, and Timan developed The Highlands, a
mobile home park on the other side of the wash from the golf course. Timan also built a large
apartment complex on Greenock Drive at the Oracle Road entrance to Oro Valley Estates.
According to a longtime Oro Valley resident, the apartments were completed before
construction in Oro Valley Estates had gotten far and were initially rented to people waiting for
their houses to be completed (Lois Nagy, personal communication 2009).
Landon's use of the name Oro Valley both for his development company and his subdivision
project seems to have been the earliest use of the name later adopted by the Town of Oro
Valley. Although incorporation of the town did not take place until 1974, the idea of
incorporation dated to at least as early as 1968, just 10 years after Landon acquired the land to
build his golf course and subdivision. According to Marjorie Kriegh (OVHS 2009e), the original
impetus for incorporation was the mayor of Tucson's strongly expressed desire to extend
Tucson's corporate limits to include all such outlying developments. Many of the residents in
Oro Valley Estates and the immediately adjacent subdivisions felt strongly that the area should
not be absorbed by Tucson and began organizing to incorporate their own town, which they
planned to call Palo Verde. State laws on incorporation, written primarily to protect large
municipalities from the adjacent proliferation of small municipalities, allowed for incorporation
of areas located at least six miles from an existing corporate boundary and having a minimum
of 500 like-minded inhabitants. It took six years and a protracted court battle—finally resolved
in the Arizona Supreme Court—but the Town of Oro Valley, encompassing about 2.5 square
miles and holding just 800 residents was officially incorporated on April 15, 1974. (The town's
birthday is celebrated today on April 17, the day in 1974 when the first mayor and town council
were appointed). The new town included parts of the early subdivisions of Campo Bello, Linda
Vista Citrus Tracts, Shadow Mountain Estates, and Shadow Mountain Estates East, and all of
Oro Valley Estates. The switch from Palo Verde to Oro Valley for the name of the town was
made to encourage the residents of a key component of the new town, Oro Valley Estates, to
support incorporation.
Organization of the incorporation effort was taken on by two presidents of local homeowner
associations, Jim Kriegh of Shadow Mountain Estates, and Steve Engle of Oro Valley Estates.
Kriegh, who died in 2007, was a native of Kansas and a retired professor of civil engineering at
the University of Arizona. He was long interested in the history of the Oro Valley area and was
later a co-founder the Oro Valley Historical Society (in 2005). Because of his efforts in pursuing
incorporation, he is considered by many town residents to be the founding father of Oro Valley.
In 1995, when the Town of Oro Valley assumed ownership of Dennis Weaver Park from Pima
County, it renamed it James D. Kriegh Park. The park is located just west of Oracle Road, on the
north side of Calle Concordia and adjacent on the east to Canyon del Oro High School. Jim
Kriegh and his family lived just across the street from the park in Shadow Mountain Estates
(Sottosanti 2007).
Citrus Groves in the Study Area
The names of some of the earliest subdivisions in the Oro Valley area include references to
citrus—for example, Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, Catalina Citrus Estates—as do the names of some
of the major streets in the study area—for example,Tangerine Road and Naranja Drive (naranja
is Spanish for orange). We have not been able to investigate the history of citrus farming in the
study area in any detail, but all of these names probably relate to an interest on the part of
early landowners to promote the area as a suitable location for small-scale citrus farming, in
response to the successful development of citrus groves just south of the study area in the
1920s and 1930s. Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, originally platted in 1930, did not see residential
development until decades later, but the land apparently had a citrus orchard of some size by
the 1950s, as can be seen on the 1957 USGS 15-minute Mount Lemmon topographic
quadrangle (see Figure 13 and the Early Map Research section above).
As surveyed by Parkhurst (2000:2-8), citrus farming in the area northwest of Tucson began in
the late 1920s, had a period of relative success after World War II and into the 1950s, then
declined steadily until its virtual disappearance in the 1970s. The largest citrus operation in the
area, and the only one to have substantial commercial success, was Reid Farms (also known as
Reid's Citrus Gardens, then Rancho Palos Verdes) which included about 1,500 acres in the area
bounded by Orange Grove Road on the south, Ina Road on the north, Oracle Road on the east,
and La Cholla Road on the west. The owner, Maurice Reid, defied the many skeptics who
considered the Tucson area too prone to winter frost to allow for successful citrus farming. He
learned through his own study of temperature patterns that certain areas north of the Rillito
River and west of the Santa Catalina foothills constituted a "thermal belt" where higher areas
were protected from frost by the drainage of cold air through adjacent lower areas.
Reid sold off his citrus farms in the 1950s, prompted by the lowering of the water table, which
made pumping irrigation water for citrus trees too expensive, and by the expansion of
suburban Tucson, which was quickly making land more valuable for housing than for farming.
But Reid's demonstration that citrus could be raised successfully in the foothills north of Tucson
led to an interest in the "gentleman's orchard estate," or the establishment of small citrus
groves by individuals who were interested as much in having a rural lifestyle as in the actual
commercial viability of citrus. "Citrus farming," Parkhurst (2000:5) writes, "was considered to
be an occupation which combined the aesthetic and practical values of life." As early as 1935,
Reid had begun to supplement his citrus business with a second career as a real estate
developer, selling small orchard estates and promoting them with large advertisements in the
Arizona Daily Star(see especially Bowen 1935 and the advertisement following the article).
In the Oro Valley study area, the platting and development of subdivisions with names like
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts were apparently related to the success of Reid (and perhaps others) in
promoting these small-scale orchard estates and not to the presence of large-scale citrus farms.
Aerial photographs from 1945 and ca. 1953 included by Parkhurst (2000; she reproduces
photographs by Gene Magee published by Glinski 1995:58, 60) show the area of Reid's citrus
operation in the Oracle—Orange Grove area, with a good view of the southern portion of the
Oro Valley study area just to the north. In contrast to the large rectangle of irrigated orchards
belonging to Reid, the area to the north has only a few small areas of irrigated growth that
probably represent small orchards, including what is probably a part of Linda Vista Citrus Tracts.
Rancho Romero and Catalina State Park
A few years before the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated, the proposed development of a
large area along the western foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains came close to radically
changing the appearance of the east side of the Oro Valley study area. Price (2004:103-108)
has traced the history of Rancho Romero, a planned community of 17,000 residents, that was
almost built on the land between Oracle Road and the Coronado National Forest, land that
instead became Catalina State Park.
Rancho Romero was conceived by the developer John Ratliff, perhaps better known today as
the developer of Rancho Vistoso. Ratliff named his earlier project after the historic ranch of the
Romero family, discussed earlier in this chapter. By 1972, the project had caught the attention
of a diverse group of environmental organizations in the Tucson area, all of whom viewed the
proposed development as an unacceptable use of a pristine tract of the Santa Catalina foothills.
Through the efforts of these organizations and a series of umbrella organizations, enough
public outcry was raised against Rancho Romero to convince the Pima County Board of
Supervisors to vote against approval of the project in September 1973. The subsequent effort
to preserve the undeveloped land eventually led to the establishment of Catalina State Park,
but it involved a long and complicated process of acquiring land for the state from numerous
landholders by purchase or exchange. It was only in 1981 that the full, 5,500-acre park parcel
became state trust lands, and it was not until 1983 that Catalina State Park finally opened.
In the beginning, Arizona State Parks leased the land for Catalina State Park from the Arizona
State Land Department, but as land values quickly rose in the surrounding area, the land
department was required by law to raise its lease rate. By 1987, the rate was beyond what
Arizona State Parks could pay, which threatened the existence of the park. The park was
rescued when the land it occupied became part of the Coronado National Forest through the
Santa Rita Land Exchange Project, which involved a complicated exchange of federal lands for
state lands at several locations around Arizona. In 1991, most of Catalina State Park became the
property of the U. S. Forest Service, which remains the owner today (except for 19 acres still
owned by Arizona State Parks). The park is leased from the Forest Service by Arizona State
Parks at a much lower rate than would have been possible if the park had remained with the
Arizona State Land Department.
CHAPTER 4
HISTORIC CONTEXTS FOR THE STUDY AREA
Based on the narrative of prehistory and history presented in Chapters 2 and 3, we have
defined a set of historic contexts for evaluating the significance of cultural resources in the Oro
Valley study area. As noted in Chapter 1, the National Register of Historic Places defines a
historic context as a statement about the "patterns or trends in history by which a specific
occurrence, property, or site is understood and its meaning (and ultimately its significance)
within history or prehistory is made clear" (NRHP 1997:7). In other words, a historic context is
the basic information one needs to understand how a historic property relates to its particular
time and place. "Historic property" as used by the National Register means any district, site
(including archaeological site), building, structure, or object. A historic property is considered
significant in a particular historic context if it is clearly associated with the context and still has
the physical characteristics that convey that association.
Historic contexts are used to evaluate the eligibility of a property for listing on the National
Register. The National Register provides four criteria for significance evaluation that amount to
general statements about how a property must relate to specific historic contexts. In other
words, to be eligible for listing on the National Register, a property must meet at least one of
the four criteria, but meeting these criteria requires the development of specific historic
contexts relevant to the particular property. The four National Register criteria for evaluation
are:
A.The property is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad
patterns of our history.
B. The property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.
C. The property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of
construction, or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or
represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual
distinction.
D. The property has yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in prehistory or
history.
Criteria A, B, and C are typically used to evaluate districts, buildings, structures, and objects, but
Criterion D is used almost exclusively to evaluate archaeological sites. Most archaeological sites
do not readily convey an association with particular events or individuals or methods of
construction and are instead valuable primarily for the information they might yield through
excavation. At the same time, certain properties may be eligible for the National Register under
two or more criteria, or even all four. As a pertinent example, the Steam Pump Ranch was
recently listed on the National Register under Criterion A for its association with the historic
context of "early cattle ranching during the Arizona Territorial period and the founding of
settlement along the Canada del Oro" (Barker 2009). Although the nomination considered only
the Criterion A eligibility of the ranch, a recent evaluation by Thiel (2007) recommended that
the ranch be considered eligible under all four criteria: A, for its association with ranching; B, for
its association with the Pusch and Procter families; C, for its distinctive ranching-associated
architecture; and D, for its archaeological potential relating to the historic period. The Arizona
State Historic Preservation Office probably decided to ease the process of National Register
nomination by pursuing only one criterion of eligibility, but the ranch may retain its eligibility
under the other three.
As this discussion implies, an important part of evaluating the National Register eligibility of a
property is its integrity. If a property has been altered or renovated or damaged in a way that
seriously compromises its ability to convey its association with a historic context, it no longer
has significance and is not eligible for listing on the National Register. Depending on the type of
property, integrity may apply to "location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and
association" (NRHP 1997:2). For archaeological sites, the essence of integrity is the likelihood
that a site preserves information relevant to one or more historic contexts developed for the
region, usually in a research design written by a professional archaeologist.
The National Register eligibility of a property is also evaluated in terms of the scope of its
significance, or whether the property is of local, state, or national significance. It is likely that
most historic properties in the Oro Valley study area, if eligible for the National Register, are
eligible at a local level of significance. The pertinent example is again the Steam Pump Ranch,
which was nominated under Criterion A in part for its association with cattle ranching. Although
cattle ranching is the subject of a statewide historic context (Collins n.d.), the level of
significance pursued in the Steam Pump Ranch nomination was local. In other words, the ranch
is significant for the way it represents a statewide phenomenon, but its significance does not
extend beyond the local context. Other statewide contexts that are potentially relevant for
historic properties in Oro Valley include contexts on homesteading (Stein 1990), historic trails
(Stein 1994), railroads (Garrison et al. 1989), the New Deal (Collins 1999), the Protohistoric
period (Gilpin and Phillips 1998), prehistoric water utilization (Foster et al. 2002), stone artifacts
(Slaughter 1992), and the Paleoindian and Archaic periods (Mabry et al. 1998).
Historic Contexts for Prehistoric Archaeological Sites
The development of historic contexts for prehistoric archaeological sites is typically based on
the kinds of questions that a group of sites is thought to be capable of answering through
excavation or other intensive study. In other words, the historic contexts developed for
prehistoric sites amount to a research design, with a set of general research themes tailored for
the expectations in a particular project. The following paragraphs describe four historic
contexts (research themes) appropriate for the evaluation of the information potential of
prehistoric sites in the Oro Valley study area. Because archaeological research in the study area
has focused primarily on three large sites (Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village, and
Romero Ruin) and very little work has been carried out at other sites, the four contexts are
based heavily on what is known to be relevant for understanding these three sites.
Cultural Affiliation and Interaction
The study of affiliation and interaction among distinct cultures has long been an important part
of archaeological research, including in southern Arizona. At prehistoric sites in the region,
elements of the prevalent Hohokam tradition are sometimes found in close association with
elements of the Mogollon, Salado, and other cultures centered in regions well to the north and
east of the Tucson Basin. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Hohokam traditions of the Tucson Basin
are themselves, in many respects, distinct expressions of traditions originating or better known
in the Phoenix Basin. The significance of a prehistoric site in the Canada del Oro area can
depend on the degree to which the site provides evidence of affiliation and interaction
between the Tucson Basin and other cultural regions at different times in prehistory.
Cultural affiliation and interaction were also important aspects of Native American life during
the Protohistoric and historic periods. In the Canada del Oro area, Native American
archaeological sites from these two periods have yet to be recorded, but we know from
historical and ethnographic documentation that the area was frequented by different bands of
Apache early in the historic period. The Canada del Oro itself seems to have marked a frontier
between the Apache and the Tucson Basin, which in protohistoric times was the home of
sedentary Pima speakers and in historic times the Tohono O'odham. If Protohistoric or later
Native American sites are eventually found in the study area, their interpretation will
unavoidably include the context of affiliation and interaction among distinct Native American
cultures.
Chronology
Dating an archaeological site, or determining when it was occupied, is a fundamental task of
archaeological research. Site dates are used to construct a regional chronology, or a temporal
sequence that places sites in relation to each other according to their periods of occupation. In
the Southwest as a whole, the period of occupation of a site is usually established through
absolute or chronometric dating techniques such as radiocarbon dating, archaeomagnetic
dating, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and dendrochronology; or by relative dating,
which relies on the presence of artifacts or other material culture known to be diagnostic of a
particular time period. In southern Arizona, radiocarbon dating is the most commonly used
technique for obtaining absolute dates; relative dating relies mostly on ceramic (pottery) and
stone tool (especially projectile point) typologies with well-established temporal associations,
often tied to absolute dates.
Sites in the Oro Valley study area have the potential to contribute to questions of regional
chronology when they are likely to yield materials for either absolute or relative dating.
Chronological information gathered in recent excavations at two of the major prehistoric sites
in the study area—Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village—has provided substantial new
insights into the timing of settlement and population growth in the Canada del Oro area.
Diet and Subsistence
The foods people ate and how they obtained them is a focus of almost any archaeological
study. One of the first steps in studying prehistoric diet and subsistence is to reconstruct the
natural environment, or the setting where the inhabitants of a site necessarily pursued their
mode of subsistence, whether it was large-game hunting, a mix of hunting and gathering, or
agriculture. Geoarchaeological studies, the analysis of macrobotanical and pollen samples, and
the analysis of animal remains can provide information useful in the reconstruction of the
prehistoric environment. In addition to environmental reconstruction, an understanding of
prehistoric diet and subsistence depends on interpretations of site structure, land-use
practices, and settlement
patterns, and on the analysis of artifacts, notably ceramics and stone tools. Reconstructing diet
and subsistence with these methods has been an important part of the recent work at Sleeping
Snake Village and Honey Bee Village.
Community Organization
Archaeology has long placed an emphasis on intrasite organization, or the distribution of
artifacts and features (such as the remains of houses) within an individual site, and on
settlement patterns, or the distribution of archaeological sites across a regional landscape.
Taken together, intrasite organization and settlement patterns can illuminate the nature of
community organization in a given time and place, or how the different parts of an individual
site and the different contemporaneous sites in a region functioned together as a community.
For the Tucson Basin Hohokam, the nature of both intrasite organization and settlement
patterns changed through time, and archaeologists have correlated these changes with
developments in subsistence focus, sociopolitical complexity, religious and ideological systems,
and other aspects of Hohokam culture.
In the Oro Valley study area, the work at Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village has
examined the complexity of intrasite organization at these large sites and its relationship to the
distribution of smaller sites in the surrounding area, all of which seems to reflect a significant
degree of functional specialization both within and among sites. Evaluation of the information
potential of other prehistoric sites in the study area will necessarily take into account the issue
of community organization.
Historic Contexts for the Historic Period in the Study Area
The Oro Valley study area, always on the periphery of the historic core of southern Arizona at
Tucson, nevertheless experienced to one degree or another nearly every part of the larger
region's history. But the timing and details of southern Arizona history as experienced in the
study area are what make Oro Valley a distinctive place with its own historical identity. Three
contexts capture much of that distinctiveness and can serve as references for interpreting the
significance of individual cultural resources in the study area.
Early Transportation Routes and the Canada del Oro Crossing
Although we have not documented it fully in this report, a recurrent theme in the history of the
study area is the importance of the Canada del Oro crossing as a way station along the road
between Tucson and points north, particularly places along the lower San Pedro River. At least
as early as the Mexican period (1821-1854), both Euroamericans and Native Americans
considered the crossing not simply the best place to ford the Canada del Oro but apparently
also as a kind of marker of the northern limit of the Tucson Basin. It is not clear if the crossing
was fixed at a specific spot or if it varied somewhat over the years or with the seasons, but it
seems always to have been in the same general location. It was, not surprisingly, the focus of
the earliest successful settlements in the vicinity of the Canada del Oro, including George
Pusch's Steam Pump Ranch.
It is safe to say that virtually all transportation routes in the Oro Valley study area, from the
earliest trails to modern Oracle Road, were created with some reference to the Canada del Oro
crossing. The remains of other historic features associated with the crossing, such as camp
sites, stage stops, or early bridges, may also survive as archaeological sites in the area, and all
would be covered by this context. We have not specified a time period for the context, but it
potentially includes the entire historic period.
Cattle Ranching and Homesteading in the Canada del Oro Area, 1869-1962
Cattle ranching was the impetus for nearly all early settlement in the study area, from the
earliest attempts by Francisco Romero, George Pusch, and a few others to the many stock-
raising homesteads patented in the area before World War II. The dominant role of the stock-
raising homestead in the transfer of public lands to private ownership meant that cattle
ranching and homesteading were essentially the same activity for most early settlers. The
stock-raising homestead was also the starting point for much of the residential development
that took place in the area after the war.
This context is a slight modification of the historic context defined for the National Register
nomination of the Steam Pump Ranch, "early cattle ranching during the Arizona Territorial
period and the founding of settlement along the Canada del Oro" (Barker 2009). Here the
beginning date, 1869, is the probable earliest year of Francisco Romero's presence in the area.
The end date is the same as that of the Steam Pump Ranch context, which reflects the end of
John Procter's tenure at the ranch.
Early Residential Development in the Canada del Oro Area, 1945-1974
The platting of subdivisions in the Oro Valley study area began as early as 1930, but the actual
construction of houses in platted subdivisions did not begin until well after World War II—the
earliest subdivisions in what is now the Town of Oro Valley did not see their first houses until
the late 1950s. But despite the late date of initial construction, residential development in the
study area is part of the larger postwar boom that had an almost immediate effect on the
entire greater Tucson area, including the area immediately south of modern Oro Valley. Thus,
early residential development in the Oro Valley area is best understood with reference to all of
the postwar years preceding the incorporation of the Town of Oro Valley; hence the period of
significance here, 1945-1974.
Just as the ranching and homesteading period was defined by the transfer of a single expanse
of public land in pieces to the private domain, the period of early residential development in
the study area was defined by the transformation of a relatively small number of large ranch
holdings into numerous, far smaller parcels for individual houses. It is this process of
subdivision and the variety of forms it took that characterize the postwar years, and it is this
process that is now represented in the plats, streets, lots, and houses of Oro Valley's early
neighborhoods.
CHAPTER 5
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AND SURVEYS IN THE STUDY AREA
In this chapter, we summarize the results of our search for information on previously recorded
archaeological sites and previously conducted archaeological surveys in the Oro Valley study
area. The primary source of information for both sites and surveys is AZSITE, the statewide
electronic database of archaeological sites and surveys maintained by the Arizona State
Museum (ASM) in Tucson. We also consulted the paper site and survey files of the ASM
Archaeological Records Office, as well as the archaeological reports collection of the ASM
Library. The University of Arizona Library is another important source for archaeological
reports, and we have also relied in this regard on the WSA—Tucson company library. For
information on National Register of Historic Places sites and districts in the Oro Valley study
area, we have consulted the National Register nomination forms for the individual properties.
Information on archaeological sensitivity in the study area was adapted from the Sonoran
Desert Conservation Plan, a long-term planning initiative of Pima County. Additional
information on archaeological sensitivity within the Arroyo Grande Planning Area was also
obtained from Pima County.
Archaeological Survey Coverage in the Study Area
Systematic archaeological survey, which typically consists of walking over an area at regularly
spaced intervals in search of artifacts or other archaeological evidence, has been a fundamental
part of archaeological research in the United States for over 50 years. Nevertheless, the first
recorded archaeological survey in the Oro Valley study area did not take place until 1976. This
seemingly late date is not unusual for southern Arizona (or even for most other regions in the
country) where archaeological surveys did not become common until the 1970s. It was only
then that federal, state, and many municipal agencies began regularly requiring archaeological
surveys in advance of development projects.
The sudden demand for surveys can be attributed to implementation of Section 106 of the
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which requires a federal agency to consider the
effects of its undertakings (even minor ones, such as issuing a permit) on archaeological sites
and other historic properties eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
Together with related state and local legislation, Section 106 led to the emergence of contract
archaeology as an industry, and soon professional archaeological surveys—of all sizes, for
projects of all descriptions—were being conducted around the country, including in the Oro
Valley study area.
Since the first survey in 1976, 157 archaeological surveys have been carried out in the Oro
Valley study area. We have listed all of the surveys in Table 6, which is based primarily on the
information available on AZSITE. Most of these surveys have been of limited areas associated
with minor development projects, such as road widenings, linear utility installations, and small
residential tracts, but taken together these 157 surveys have covered approximately 35 percent
of the study area. Three surveys (or sets of surveys) in the study area account for a large part of
the total archaeological survey coverage and are discussed individually below. The coverage of
these three surveys within the Oro Valley study area, totaling 11,644 acres, is depicted in the
Appendix A map. Because it is difficult to accurately depict the coverage of small archaeological
surveys relying solely on the GIS data available from AZSITE, Appendix A does not include the
many smaller surveys carried out to date in the Oro Valley study area.
The total area of the Town of Oro Valley is about 22,338 acres. Of that area, about 11,644 acres
were covered in the three major surveys discussed below. Total archaeological survey coverage
within the Town of Oro Valley limits, including the many minor surveys, is about 65 percent.
Regarding previous survey coverage in both the Town of Oro Valley and the larger Oro Valley
study area, it is important to emphasize that the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office
generally requests that an area previously surveyed for archaeological sites be resurveyed
when the previous survey took place more than ten years ago. This is especially pertinent for
the major surveys discussed below, all of which took place more than ten years ago (with the
exception of small surveys representing expansions of the original major surveys).
Catalina State Park Surveys (1973-1999)
The earliest archaeological survey of what is now Catalina State Park was conducted in 1973,
when ASM was contracted by Ratliff-Miller Development Company to survey the proposed
residential development known as Rancho Romero, which encompassed seven 640-acre
sections (Roubicek et al. 1973) (see Chapter 3 of this overview for the history of Catalina State
Park and its relationship to Rancho Romero). However, the survey was limited to a cursory field
inspection of a sample area of four sections within the entire seven-section project area. A few
years later, ASM was contracted by Brown and Caldwell Consultant Engineers to provide an
archaeological assessment of 100 square miles in advance of construction of a system of
wastewater treatment plants and a gravity sewer line. The study area included the future
Catalina State Park, as well as areas to the north, south, and west (Brew 1975). The assessment
was performed by completing a records search for previously recorded sites, but no fieldwork
was carried out. At the time of the records search, 45 sites had been recorded in and around
the vicinity of Catalina State Park.
It was not until 1980 that ASM archaeologist Lisa Huckell carried out the first systematic
archaeological survey of Catalina State Park (Huckell 1980a). Huckell's project included
pedestrian coverage of over 9.7 square miles, recorded four new sites, and revisited seven
previously recorded sites. The sites ranged in dates from the Early Ceramic period to the
historic period (A.D. 650-1900). Huckell recommended that four sites, including the Romero
Ruin (AZ BB:9:1 [ASM]), be nominated to the National Register. She also noted that, with
further investigation, the whole of Catalina State Park might be eligible for listing in the
National Register as an archaeological district (Huckell 1980a; Elson and Doelle 1987a).
More recently, site-specific documentation and limited excavation of the Romero Ruin, along
with National Register eligibility documentation of the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District,
have been carried out by the Institute for American Research (later Desert Archaeology) (Elson
and Doelle 1987a; Swartz 1991, 1994). In 1994 and 1999, three small surveys were carried out
within the limits of the park in advance of road and facilities expansion and park boundary
fencing (Freisinger and Montero 1994; Schaafsma 1999; Schrager and Farrell 1994). The total
acreage for all of the Catalina State Park surveys within the study area is about 2,170 acres.
Northern Tucson Basin Survey (1980-1987)
One large survey that included part of the Oro Valley study area was prompted by an academic
research program rather than a development project. In 1980, ASM archaeologists carried out a
survey of the middle and lower Santa Cruz River valley north of Tucson. The initial phase of the
survey, completed with support from an Arizona Historic Preservation Planning and Survey
Grant, included the lower Canada del Oro in the vicinity of Marana. The results of the initial
phase served as the basis for a National Science Foundation grant, which allowed a
continuation of the fieldwork over a much larger area. Between 1980 and 1983, over 100
square miles of the northern Tucson Basin were surveyed. A year later, the Bureau of
Reclamation invited ASM to continue additional phases of survey in the vicinity of Marana,
Brady Wash, and McClellan Wash (Madsen et al. 1993). By the time these phases were
completed in 1987, over 685 square miles had been surveyed and 1,267 newly identified
prehistoric and historic sites had been recorded (Madsen et al. 1993). The Northern Tucson
Basin Survey is still the largest archaeological survey ever carried out in southern Arizona. Many
of the archaeological sites known today along the Canada del Oro, and along the eastern edge
of the Oro Valley study area were first recorded during the Northern Tucson Basin Survey. The
total acreage for the Northern Tucson Basin survey within the study area is about 2,595 acres.
Rancho Vistoso Surveys (1980-2007)
In 1977, Vistoso Partners, a Tempe-based concern, proposed a large residential and commercial
development in the area north of the recently incorporated Town of Oro Valley. Later known as
Rancho Vistoso, the project eventually grew to encompass 7,626 acres and included shopping
centers, office parks, and several retirement communities (Ezzo 2007b). Rancho Vistoso has
prompted numerous archaeological investigations in the Canada del Oro area. In 1980-1981,
the archaeological field school of Pima Community College carried out a systematic survey of
portions of the proposed development, recording for the first time the major Hohokam site
now known as Sleeping Snake Village (AZ BB :9:104 [ASM]) (Ezzo and Euler 2007). Three years
later, the Bureau of Land Management conducted a 480-acre survey in a land exchange
associated with the Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act. During the course of the survey, the BLM
identified three prehistoric sites that would later be the focus of excavations carried out by
SWCA Environmental Consultants in 2006 (Brunson et al. 1984, Ezzo 2006).
The entirety of the Rancho Vistoso property was surveyed by the Institute for American
Research (now Desert Archaeology) in 1986 (Craig and Wallace 1987). During the survey, 51
prehistoric sites and three historic sites were recorded. The prehistoric sites, all of them of
probable Hohokam association, included artifact scatters, village and farmstead sites,
procurement and processing sites (with bedrock mortars and grinding slicks), rock art, and lithic
quarries (Craig and Wallace 1987). In 2003, SWCA performed a noncollection survey of 208
acres within Neighborhood 12, at the north end of Rancho Vistoso (Hesse, I. 2003b). Five newly
recorded sites and three previously recorded sites were documented; four of the sites were
later excavated (in 2006), and one site, AZ BB:9:149 (ASM), a series of historic rock fence
segments, was thoroughly mapped and described (Ezzo 2006; Hesse, I. 2003b). Additional small
surveys in Rancho Vistoso related to telecommunications towers and substations have been
performed in recent years (Bauer and Dobschuetz 2002; Cook 2006; Erickson and Rogge 2007).
The total acreage for all of the Rancho Vistoso surveys within the study area is about 6,880
acres.
Several large excavations have been carried out at major sites in the Rancho Vistoso area,
including Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village (AZ BB:9:88 [ASM]) (Craig 1988; Ezzo
2007b). We discuss the work at these two sites later in the chapter.
Archaeological Sensitivity in the Study Area
Archaeological sensitivity, or the probability that a given location as yet unsurveyed will
preserve archaeological remains, can be estimated by considering various characteristics of the
location, including proximity to sources of food and water, suitability for building houses,
proximity to good farm land, the presence of transportation routes, and so on—the things that
matter will vary according to the economic adaptation and cultural preferences in a given time
period. Another important clue to the archaeological sensitivity of a location is the distribution
of archaeological sites already recorded in the surrounding area.
The only systematic analysis of archaeological sensitivity to include the Oro Valley study area
was carried out by the Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation Office in 2000
as part of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP). The SDCP is a comprehensive planning
document for eastern Pima County developed by biologists, ecologists, geographers,
archaeologists, and other specialists to guide the long-range planning decisions of the county
(SDCP 2009). The goal of the archaeological sensitivity analysis was to create a sensitivity map
for the eastern portion of the county that would help county planners gauge, in a general way,
the probable impacts of proposed development projects on archaeological sites. The map is
currently in use by county planners and can be viewed in its entirety on the SDCP web site
(http://www.dot.co.pima.az.us/cmo/sdcpmaps/). We have excerpted the portion of the map
covering the Oro Valley study area as Appendix B.
The SDCP sensitivity map is based on the kinds of factors already mentioned—proximity to
resources, suitability for habitation, the distribution of known sites, and so on—and defines
areas in terms of three archaeological sensitivity ratings: low, moderate, and high. As in all
analyses of archaeological sensitivity, the distinctions made between areas of different
sensitivity have to be considered rough estimates rather than precise calculations, because it is
impossible to know all of the factors affecting the use of a location in any time period. An area
characterized as having low sensitivity may well hold significant archaeological sites, and an
area of high sensitivity may well be devoid of sites. Nevertheless, the Appendix B map does
provide a useful characterization of the Oro Valley study area: about 77 percent of the study
area is rated as having high sensitivity,
about 23 percent is rated as having moderate sensitivity, and no part of the study area is rated
as having low sensitivity.
The sensitivity ratings for the study area do not take into account the impacts of recent
development. Given that much of the study area has been drastically altered through ground-
disturbing activities associated with residential and commercial development, significant
portions of the areas of high and moderate sensitivity actually have little or no potential to
preserve archaeological remains. But the impacts of development are highly variable and
difficult to know precisely without archaeological investigation. An area long used as a parking
lot, a road, or even a large building may still preserve significant subsurface archaeological
features despite the evident impacts to the original ground surface. Thus, archaeological
sensitivity ratings can be used only as an initial indication of the archaeological sites that might
be found in an area and not to predict whether archaeological remains are preserved in a
particular place.
Archaeological Sensitivity in the Arroyo Grande Planning Area
The northern portion of the Oro Valley study area includes the Arroyo Grande Planning Area,
which consists of 11,547 acres of state trust land in unincorporated Pima County, situated
between the northern boundary of the Town of Oro Valley and the Pima-Pinal county line (see
Figure 2). The Arroyo Grande Planning Area is the focus of an effort by the Arizona State Land
Department to develop a land use plan that will outline appropriate uses for the area based on
a wide range of environmental, economic, and social considerations. In response to the state
planning effort for Arroyo Grande, the Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic
Preservation Office prepared a brief overview of archaeological potential in the Arroyo Grande
Planning Area (Mayro and Rose 2008). The overview notes that Arroyo Grande includes an area
of potentially great archaeological significance, centered on a large Hohokam village site known
as Indian Town Ruin, or AZ BB:5:26 (ASM).
First recorded in 1976 in a survey by Pima Community College (Hewitt and Johnson 1978),
Indian Town Ruin is located just north of the Pima-Pinal county line. It covers at least 74 acres
and is probably much larger, extending south of the county line into Pima County. Although it
has not yet been fully documented, Indian Town Ruin includes over 100 adobe-walled
structures, pits, trash mounds, and other features, as well as petroglyphs, rock alignments, and
myriad artifacts. The site was in all likelihood the center of a complex system of settlement in
the eastern foothills of the Tortolita Mountains, a system that included a wide range of sites of
different sizes and functions. Some of these other sites have already been documented on both
sides of the county line, but the percentage of the Arroyo Grande planning area that has been
surveyed for sites is still low, less than 25 percent.
In keeping with the goals of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and the Pima County
Comprehensive Land Use Plan, the county has recommended that a contiguous parcel of about
3,500 acres encompassing the Indian Town Ruin and 31 other previously recorded sites—all
possibly related to the Indian Town Ruin—be designated a Priority Archaeological Site Complex
(see Appendix B). This designation amounts to a recommendation that the entire complex of
sites
be preserved in place as an archaeological landscape of exceptional importance. If preservation
of the entire complex is not possible, individual sites within the complex should be avoided by
proposed land uses and protected in place, and newly discovered sites in the area should be
treated in the same way. When avoidance of an individual site is not possible, the impacts
should be mitigated—in other words, the site should be excavated by professional
archaeologists following a county-approved data recovery plan. The authors of the county
overview also emphasize that a thorough reassessment of the entire Indian Town Ruin complex
is needed to determine the full extent and condition of its archaeological resources.
Previously Recorded Archaeological Sites in the Study Area
Archaeological surveys in the Oro Valley study area have recorded a total of 185 archaeological
sites, ranging in dates from the prehistoric Early Ceramic period (A.D. 100-750) to the historic
post–World War II period (1945-1960). Of the 185 sites, 160 are exclusively prehistoric in date,
17 are exclusively historic in date, and eight sites have both prehistoric and historic
components. Table 7 lists the numbers of sites in the study area by period and site function.
Table 8 provides a full list of sites with report references. The locations of previously recorded
archaeological sites are provided on the Appendix C map. Three prehistoric sites—Honey Bee
Village, Romero Ruin, and Sleeping Snake Village—have special importance both for the study
area and for the prehistory of the Tucson Basin more generally. All three sites were large
Hohokam villages that were occupied for extended periods of time. All three sites hold the
remains of numerous houses, storage and roasting pits, and a variety of other features,
including the probable remains of ball courts, which served a specialized ritual function. Each
site was the center of an organized system of smaller sites related to the large site through
social, economic, and political connections.
Honey Bee Village (AZ BB:9:88 [ASM])
Honey Bee Village covers an area of about 75 acres on the west side of Honey Bee Wash, one of
the main feeder washes draining from the north into the Canada del Oro. The site was first
recorded in 1980 by archaeologists and field school students from Pima Community College in a
survey of the eastern Tortolita Mountains. The fieldwork consisted of sketch maps and limited
surface collections of artifacts (Hewitt and Johnson 1978). The site was revisited in 1986 by the
Institute for American Research (later Desert Archaeology) during the Rancho Vistoso Survey
(Craig and Wallace 1987). Detailed maps were made and an intensive surface collection yielded
more than 6,000 Hohokam-associated artifacts. Preliminary analysis of the surface artifacts
indicated an occupation from the Colonial period through the Rincon phase of the Sedentary
period. In 1989, the Institute for American Research conducted archaeological testing at the
site within a 12-acre area believed to represent the central part of the site (Craig 1989). The
area included large trash mounds, a ball court compound, and other rock-walled features
visible on the modern ground surface. The test excavations, which revealed architecture and
artifacts consistent with the range of dates established for the site in the previous surveys,
focused on questions of community organization. The results showed that the trash mounds
were arranged around areas of intensive habitation, which were arranged in turn around a
central plaza or open area.
In 2006-2007, Desert Archaeology carried out large-scale excavations at Honey Bee Village,
recording nearly 800 pit houses, 206 human burials, and the burials of several dogs, a hawk,
and a golden eagle; the total number of artifacts recovered from the site exceeds 73,000
(Medrano 2008). Preparation of a final report on the excavations is still in progress, but Honey
Bee Village has already become an important example of the wealth of information that
prehistoric sites in the Oro Valley area can provide when they are the focus of systematic
archaeological investigation. The final treatment of Honey Bee Village is also a landmark in the
protection of archaeological resources. In an agreement among the various stakeholders in the
project—the developer, the Town of Oro Valley, Pima County, ASM, and the Tohono O'odham
Nation (which considers Honey Bee Village an ancestral site)—the developer donated 13 acres
at the core of the site to be protected in perpetuity as an archaeological preserve. The
protected parcel includes several large mounds, a plaza, a ball court, and various other
features, all of which are protected from development (OVHS 2009e).
Romero Ruin (AZ BB:9:1 [ASM])
Romero Ruin is a 15-acre Hohokam site with a later historic component located within present-
day Catalina State Park. It sits on a ridge above Sutherland Wash, with an associated field
system that extends from the southern edge of the site toward the adjacent Santa Catalina
Mountains. Professional archaeologists consider Romero Ruin "one of the most significant sites
in the Tucson Basin" (Elson and Doelle 1987a:1). The Romero Ruin is also part of the Sutherland
Wash Archaeological District, which was listed on the National Register as an archaeological
district in 1987 (Elson and Doelle 1987b).
Elson and Doelle (1987a) provide the most detailed summary of the history of investigations at
Romero Ruin, as well as a comprehensive discussion of the site itself; we follow their summary
here. Romero Ruin, originally called Pueblo Viejo, was identified as early as 1915 by Robert
Forbes, an early president of the University of Arizona and an avid explorer of southern
Arizona's wilderness areas. The earliest scientific investigation of the site was by Ellsworth
Huntington (1910), who was interested in human adaptations to arid climates and used the
Hohokam as a case study. Huntington recorded the two ball courts at the site as reservoirs, but
correctly identified the occupation sequence at the ruin (Elson and Doelle 1987a:6-8).
From 1973 to 1980, archaeologists working with ASM conducted two surveys and an overview
of Romero Ruin and the surrounding area. Roubicek and others (1973) resurveyed the area
including Romero Ruin for the Ratliff-Miller Development Company, and recommended further
intensive survey. Brew (1975) conducted a records search on behalf of Brown and Caldwell
Consultant Engineers. Brew was among the first archaeologists to note the importance of the
historic component of Romero Ruin in addition to the Hohokam component. Huckell (1980a)
assessed the Catalina State Park area for impacts of park development, examined the outlying
area, and reassessed all previously known sites to update the ASM files. Huckell recommended
Romero Ruin for National Register nomination in addition to more intensive investigations.
In early 1987, Elson and Doelle (1987a) conducted a survey of the Catalina State Park centered
on Romero Ruin. They collected diagnostic surface artifacts, then mapped and described all of
the surface features. They collected a total of 11,499 artifacts from the site surface and
analyzed a sample, including 1,659 decorated ceramic sherds, 339 flaked stone tools, and 126
pieces of ground stone (Elson and Doelle 1987a:14-18). The same year, the National Register
nominations for the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District (Elson and Doelle 1987b) and the
adjacent Sutherland Wash Rock Art District (Farrell and Burton n.d.) were prepared and
submitted. In the fall of 1990, test excavations were carried out at Romero Ruin (Swartz 1991),
providing the largest early red ware assemblage from a stratigraphic context at the time and
establishing the Tortolita phase (A.D. 450-650) occupation at Romero. In 1993, additional
limited archaeological testing was conducted by the Center for Desert Archaeology at Romero
Ruin to make way for an interpretive trail ( Swartz 1994 ) .
The archaeological features at Romero Ruin include 17 trash mounds, 12 trash concentrations,
two ball courts, three possible cremation areas, a masonry compound, a plaza area, a large field
system for agriculture, and 37 other prehistoric cultural features; the site also has the visible
remains of four or five masonry rooms from historic times. Romero Ruin was occupied
prehistorically from around A.D. 550 through the Tucson phase (A.D. 1300-1450) of the
Hohokam Classic period, and likely during some part of the Protohistoric period (A.D. 1450-
1692), though the intensity of occupation in the latter period is unknown. The site was
reoccupied in the late 1860s as a cattle ranch by Francisco Romero and his family (see the
discussion of the Romero family in Chapter 3). The Hohokam occupation of the site led to a
series of mound groups at the site, each mound representing a combination of trash, building
rubble, and living space surrounded by trash. Elson and Doelle (1987a:47) have argued that the
mounds were placed deliberately, in order to define social space at the site; this is supported by
the placement of two ball courts, one at either end of the site. There is evidence of continuous
occupation of the site as a whole, and periodic reoccupation of individual mound areas.
Sleeping Snake Village (AZ BB:9:104 [ASM])
Sleeping Snake Village is an extensive Hohokam site covering about 99 acres at the eastern foot
of the Tortolita Mountains, in the northern portion of the Oro Valley study area. Like Romero
Ruin and Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village is a ball court site with evidence of a long,
continuous occupation. The site dates to the middle Sedentary through early Classic periods of
the Hohokam chronology, with its most intensive occupation occurring during the Sedentary
period (A.D. 950-1150). The site was first recorded in 1980 by archaeologists and field school
students from Pima Community College during a survey of the eastern Tortolita Mountains
(Ezzo and Euler 2007). This initial survey included the preparation of sketch maps of the site and
a limited surface collection of artifacts. The site was revisited in 1986 during the Rancho Vistoso
survey carried out by the Institute for American Research (Craig and Wallace 1987). The Rancho
Vistoso survey included the first systematic investigation of Sleeping Snake Village: a site grid
was established, five mound areas (called site loci) were defined, and more than 100 features
were tentatively identified, including the ball court and 30 trash mounds. The ball court was
mapped in full cross section (Ezzo 2007b:53).
In 1994, SWCA began test excavations at Locus B for Vistoso Partners. A total of 380 linear
meters of backhoe trenches exposed 24 features, and diagnostic artifacts were collected from
the site surface, the trenches, and a hand-excavated test unit. In the SWCA report (Roberts et
al. 1995), the archaeologists recommended data recovery excavation under eight research
themes: site structure, household economy, socioeconomic relations, chronology, subsistence
and resource exploitation, mortuary practices, paleoenvironment, and settlement patterns
(Ezzo 2007b:53). In 1995, 1996, and 2000, SWCA carried out additional test excavations and
then phased data recovery excavations at all five original loci (A—E), identifying another mound
area (Locus F). Additional trenching (3,481 linear meters), feature mapping, excavation, and
sampling allowed SWCA to identify a total of 520 previously unrecorded features. Of these, 267
were more intensively investigated (Ezzo 2007b:53-70).
The results of the work at Sleeping Snake Village, combined with the results from Los Venados
(AZ BB:9:186 [ASM]), a nearby site of the same age also investigated by SWCA, has provided
valuable information about community structure, settlement patterns, and other aspects of the
Hohokam culture of the northern Tucson Basin. Ezzo (2007c:779) has concluded that
households at Sleeping Snake Village were tightly linked in courtyard groups, in contrast to the
more loosely connected households at Los Venados. This suggests a difference in social
organization at the two sites even though many inhabitants of the area likely used both sites.
Sleeping Snake Village held little evidence for the manufacture of goods beyond items relating
to the basic activities of hunting, gathering, and growing maize and other foods. Instead, the
people who lived at the site seem to have imported the pottery, obsidian projectile points, and
shell ornaments that they used (Ezzo 2007c:779).
The layout of Sleeping Snake Village matches the dispersed rancheria plan typical of Hohokam
sites in the Tucson Basin: a nucleated center surrounded by numerous smaller clusters of
features, all of it distributed across a large open space (Ezzo 2007d:795; Fish and Fish 1994).
The smaller clusters represent multiple site types—procurement areas, food-processing loci,
individual pit houses, and hamlets. Rock art, which is common in the area, may have played an
integrative role for the site center and the outlying clusters. Ezzo (2007e:805) has suggested
that rock art in the area "layered the landscape with ritualistic, shamanic, territorial,
cosmological, and informational meaning." There is some evidence that the vicinity of Sleeping
Snake Village, including Los Venados and Honey Bee Village, was occupied by two distinct
cultural traditions in succession: the Pioneer-period Cochise tradition, then the Sedentary-
period Hohokam tradition, which became the primary cultural presence in the region. There is
little to no evidence of a Classic period occupation at Sleeping Snake Village, which suggests
Classic-period resettlement to larger aggregated settlements such as the Marana Community
near the Santa Cruz River (Ezzo 2007e:805-806).
Historic Archaeological Sites in the Study Area
As Table 7 indicates, far fewer historic archaeological sites have been recorded in the Oro Valley
study area than prehistoric sites. This circumstance relates in part to the relatively brief period
of settlement in the historic period-150 years or so—compared to the relatively long period of
settlement in the prehistoric period-2,000 years or more. But it also relates to a bias toward
prehistoric sites on the part of archaeologists during the past 35 years of systematic surveys in
the study area. As elsewhere in the United States, the archaeological remains of historic-period
settlement in southern Arizona, particularly the unexotic, relatively recent remains of ordinary
houses and other features from the early twentieth century (not to mention the remains of
even more recent settlement), were long overlooked by archaeologists or given less priority
than prehistoric sites or simply dismissed as unimportant. In recent years, this bias has waned
significantly and archaeological surveys now regularly record historic sites that would have
been neglected in earlier surveys.
Not withstanding the increased attention that archaeologists now pay to historic archaeological
sites, the number of such sites recorded in the Oro Valley study area is still low. Ironically, the
two historic sites that have received the most attention owe that attention to other aspects of
their identity. The archaeological component of the Steam Pump Ranch, AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), has
been recommended as eligible to the National Register (Thiel 2007), but the site is best known
for its architectural and other surviving ranching-related features, and its recent listing on the
National Register is based on those features rather than its archaeological potential (Barker
2009). Similarly, the historic component of Romero Ruin, AZ BB:9:1 (ASM), is recognized by
archaeologists (e.g., Brew 1975) as an important part of the site, but one wonders if the
remains of Francisco Romero's early ranch house would have even survived if he hadn't built it
directly atop an important Hohokam site.
The GLO survey plats and other early maps discussed in Chapter 3, along with the large number
of homesteads patented in the Canada del Oro area, suggest that plenty of other historic
archaeological sites await discovery in Oro Valley, even if many others have already been
destroyed by development.
Sites and Districts on the National Register of Historic Places
Currently, the Oro Valley study area has only two historic properties listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. The first to be listed was the Sutherland Wash Archaeological
District, a large area in Catalina State Park that includes the lower portion of Sutherland Wash
and the vicinity of its junction with the Canada del Oro. Listed in 1987, the district consists of 38
mostly undisturbed archaeological sites ranging in age from the Archaic period to the historic
period of the late nineteenth century (Elson and Doelle 1987b). A portion of the district,
including its largest site, Romero Ruin, or AZ BB:9:1 (ASM) falls within the Oro Valley study area
(see earlier in this chapter for a description of the site). A plot of the boundary of the
Sutherland Wash Archaeological District is included on the Appendix C map.
The other National Register—listed property in the Oro Valley study area is the Steam Pump
Ranch, or AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), which was listed just this year (Barker 2009). The home of early
settler George Pusch and his family during the approximate period 1874-1931, the Steam
Pump Ranch is located along the west side of Oracle Road just north of its intersection with
First Avenue. The ranch was owned by the John Procter family from 1933 until 2005, and the
Procter family is as important to the ranch's historic identity as the Pusch family. Twenty
structures still stand on the property, 13 of which are considered contributing elements of the
historic ranch. Of the 20 structures, 9 are buildings and the rest are ranching-related structures.
The period of significance
for the Steam Pump Ranch nomination is 1874-1962, for which the ranch is considered to
retain integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
The ranch has undergone various changes over the years, but the "essential physical features"
of the ranch in the period of significance are still readily appreciated.
Another National Register—listed property falling just outside the Oro Valley study area is worth
mentioning because of its connection to the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District. The
Sutherland Wash Rock Art District, located just east of the study area, was also listed in 1987
(Farrell and Burton n.d.). It consists of a 30-acre area along Sutherland Wash that holds an
estimated 1,500 petroglyph elements, one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric rock art
documented in southern Arizona. The petroglyphs represent two principal traditions: the
Hohokam tradition, usually dated to A.D. 600-1450; and the earlier Western Archaic tradition.
The boundary of the Sutherland Wash Rock Art District is just east of the area covered by the
Appendix C map.
As Table 8 makes clear, the small number of properties in the Oro Valley study area that are
currently listed on the National Register belies the number of important archaeological and
historic sites previously recorded in the area. Of the 185 previously recorded sites in the study
area, six others have been determined eligible for listing and another 29 have been
recommended eligible for listing by their recorders. Many of the recorded sites have never
been evaluated, and many have probably been destroyed by development since they were
recorded. There is little question that other sites in the study area, both previously recorded
sites and sites yet to be discovered, are eligible for listing on the National Register.
A final note regarding historic district designations in the Oro Valley area: the entire cultural
resources inventory study area is included in the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage
Area, which encompasses the portion of the Santa Cruz River watershed from the international
border with Mexico to the Pima-Pinal county line (Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance 2009).
The National Register sites and districts already designated in the study area, along with
additional sites and districts designated through future work, will be an important part of the
National Heritage Area and contribute to the attraction of the Oro Valley area for both local
residents and visitors.
CHAPTER 6
HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE STUDY AREA
An important goal of the Oro Valley cultural resources inventory has been to gather basic
information about the extent and nature of potentially historic architecture in the study area.
As discussed in Chapter 3, residential development in the Oro Valley area did not begin until
after World War II, and the first subdivisions, though originally platted as early as the 1930s, did
not see the construction of significant numbers of houses until the late 1950s. Even so, the
study area holds at least two important examples of residential architecture built before the
war, and several of the earliest subdivisions in Oro Valley are now of an age to merit
consideration as historic districts (Figure 19). The following paragraphs describe the two
notable architect-designed residences in the study area and summarize the results of our initial
survey of early residential subdivisions.
Countess of Suffolk Forest Lodge
In 1935, Margaret Howard, a wealthy American also known as the Countess of Suffolk because
of her marriage to the Earl of Suffolk (the Englishman Henry Molyneaux Paget Howard), came
to Tucson to establish a winter residence. She was a widow by that year, her husband having
died in combat years earlier in World War I. The Countess hired noted Tucson architect Richard
A. Morse to design a house for a property she had bought in the foothills of the Santa Catalina
Mountains north of Tucson. The result was the spacious and distinctive Forest Lodge, a pure
example of the Modern style (Figure 20; and see Figure 19).
The Forest Lodge, 410 East Magee Road, is today a part of the Suffolk Hills subdivision, which
occupies the southeasternmost corner of the Town of Oro Valley.The house, mostly unchanged
from its original construction, is owned by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a
religious order of the Roman Catholic Church (Figure 21). The order operates Immaculate Heart
Academy and Immaculate Heart High School on the former property of the Forest Lodge and
uses the house itself as a residence for the members of the order.The house is well maintained
and the residents recognize its importance as a historic architectural property.
The spare, uncluttered Modern (or International) style exemplified by the Forest Lodge was
popular in the upscale residential architecture of Los Angeles and a few Eastern cities in the
1930s, but it was unusual for Tucson. Not long after it was built, the house appeared in a
number of architectural publications as a notable example of the Modern style. James Ford and
Katherine Morrow Ford included it in The Modern House in America (1940), a compendium of
residential architecture in the Modern style in the United States (Ford and Ford 1989:80-81).
The Fords included in their book floor plans and three photographs of the Forest Lodge, along
with a brief description of its construction and fixtures. The spacious, two-story house included
multiple servant quarters and expensive materials like travertine floors, but it also had the
pronounced austerity of its style: "Trim as far as possible has been eliminated and all built-in
fittings, such as cabinets, bookcases, and window seats are of plain design" (Ford and Ford
1989:81). Some local residents failed to appreciate these aesthetic virtues. An interior
decorator familiar with the house thought it looked like "an institution or a hospital" (Needham
n.d.:2).
Richard Morse, educated at Harvard University and a native of Massachusetts, came to Tucson
in 1932. He established his own architectural firm and worked with success in a variety of styles
in the course of a long career. He and one of his Tucson protégés, Arthur T. Brown, who
became successful in his own right, designed another residence in the Modern style for a
Tucson client, built in 1939 near the University of Arizona. Morse was the first president of the
Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects, serving in 1941-1942. He died in 1982
at 84 years of age (Brown 1982; Ford and Ford 1989:82). The Arizona Architectural Archives at
the University of Arizona holds the complete set of Morse's architectural drawings for the
Forest lodge, which are in excellent condition, if fragile. The plans show that the original Forest
Lodge grounds were much larger than the property that survives. Morse drew plans for the
grounds, including an elevation drawing of the gate, which had the words "Forest" and "Lodge"
prominent at either side.
In 1957, the Countess decided to relocate farther from the growing Tucson metropolitan area
and had a new house built near Oracle; the house is now part of the University of Arizona's
Biosphere II. She sold the Forest Lodge residence and associated buildings to the Catholic
Church, which established Immaculate Heart Academy on the property in 1962. The Sisters of
the Immaculate Heart of Mary have operated the school ever since. The land around the Forest
Lodge was sold to a developer who platted the Suffolk Hills subdivision, named for the
Countess, in 1958. Suffolk Hills is one of the earliest subdivisions in Oro Valley and is discussed
below.
Joseph E. McAdams House
In 1940, noted Tucson architect Josias Joesler was hired by Joseph E. McAdams of Springfield,
Ohio, to design a residence for a parcel McAdams owned just east of Oracle Road, near what is
now its intersection with Tangerine Road (Figure 22; and see Figure 19). The house was built
the same year by Tucson builder John Murphey, whose company was responsible for several
notable residential developments in the Tucson area, including Catalina Foothill Estates.
Joesler, born in Switzerland and educated in Europe, had come to Tucson in 1926, teaming with
Murphey for the next 30 years and designing a wide range of distinctive residences for
Murphey's affluent clients, as well as other buildings (Nequette and Jeffery 2002:258-259).
The McAdams residence is Contemporary Ranch in style and has a separate garage and guest
house in the same style, also designed by Joesler. The three buildings occupy the top of a hill
and are surrounded by a mostly natural desert landscape. Joesler's complete drawings for the
house, on file at the Arizona Architectural Archives at the University of Arizona, show the main
house with adobe brick construction, a clay tile roof, and a C-shaped floor plan around an open
courtyard (Figure 23). As Joesler-designed residences go, the McAdams house is a modest
example, but it retains most of its original materials and exterior appearance, and the desert
setting is still much as it was when the house was built. The project architects visited the
property during the initial survey but were unable to access the main house.
When the hill where the McAdams house stands was prepared for construction in 1940, the
grading unexpectedly exposed a substantial Hohokam archaeological site, including pottery,
grinding stones, a human burial, and other features, including possible pit houses. The
Murphey-Joesler files at the University of Arizona indicate that, to Murphey's credit, he stopped
the grading immediately and contacted the Arizona State Museum. The museum director
visited the site and documented the site. McAdams, still in Ohio while the house was being
built, was fascinated by the discovery. Murphey assured him that no one else would be allowed
to disturb the site. In 1997, an archaeological survey of the area around the McAdams house
recorded the house as part of an archaeological site, AZ BB:9:320 (ASM), making reference to
the inadvertent 1940 discovery (Jeffery 1997; Lorentzen et al. 1997).
Today the McAdams house is part of a 120-acre parcel known as Kelly Ranch, which borders
Catalina State Park at the eastern limits of the town. In 2004, a county bond election approved
$2.5 million to be used by the Town of Oro Valley to buy the Kelly Ranch property, but just
recently the Town Council approved an alternative use of the bond money, to buy the land
needed to create a wildlife crossing of Oracle Road. The purpose of the proposed crossing,
which is part of the Arroyo Grande planning effort, is to preserve an ecological connection
between the Tortolita Mountains and the Coronado National Forest via Catalina State Park. The
Kelly Ranch property, which also includes many archaeological sites, remains in private
ownership, but many Oro Valley residents believe its acquisition by the town is still an
important goal in preserving the ecology and heritage of the area between Oracle Road and
Catalina State Park (Medrano 2009).
Other Individual Buildings of Note in the Study Area
In their guide to the notable architecture of Tucson and the surrounding area, Nequette and
Jeffery (2002:234-235) mention three other buildings that fall within the Oro Valley study area.
Two of the buildings are part of the 49-acre Tohono Chul Park, a botanical garden and
interpretive center located just northwest of the intersection of Ina and Oracle Roads. The
earliest of the two buildings at Tohono Chul is the Exhibit House, designed by Paul Holton and
built in 1937 using heavy adobe blocks made on site. Originally in the Sonoran style, the Exhibit
House was remodeled in 1984 but retains much of its historic character. The second building is
the Tea Room, designed by Lewis Hall and built in 1963 as the residence of the property owner.
The Tea Room is of burnt adobe block with exposed wooden rafters and distinctive ceramic tile
accents.
The third building noted by Nequette and Jeffery is St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, located
at 750 West Chapala Drive, just south of Magee Road and west of Oracle Road. Built in 1962,
the church was designed by Ned Nelson with a large A-frame roof supported by laminate
wooden beams. Nequette and Jeffery point especially to the "commendable" interrelationship
of the building and its site, which includes multiple-level seating, intimate courtyards, and a
stone base for the church itself.
Pre-1974 Subdivisions in the Town of Oro Valley
As part of the Cultural Resources Inventory, the historic architects on the WSA team made an
initial survey (sometimes called a "windshield survey") of selected residential architecture in
Oro Valley. The purpose of the survey was to identify buildings and neighborhoods with
potential historic or architectural significance and to provide preliminary descriptions of these
resources. The results of the survey will serve as the basis for later decisions about which
buildings or neighborhoods are most suitable for detailed study and documentation.
The selection of residential neighborhoods for the initial survey was based on our research into
the history of development in the Oro Valley area. Of particular use were the dates of
subdivision plats and house construction that we gathered from the records of the Pima County
Assessor. The tables below summarize this information, organized with reference to two years:
1965 and 1974. The usual age threshold for historic resources, following the guidelines of the
National Register of Historic Places, is 50 years. In other words, a historic property—whether a
building, a neighborhood, an archaeological site, or another resource—is generally not eligible
for listing on the National Register until it is at least 50 years old. However, the Arizona State
Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) usually places the age threshold at 45 years for architectural
properties, including residential neighborhoods, to help ensure that properties close to the age
threshold are not excluded from consideration. The SHPO also generally requires that at least
50 percent of the houses in a neighborhood be at least 45 years old for the neighborhood to
qualify as a historic district.
Our initial survey focused on neighborhoods that have at least some houses built 45 years ago,
or before 1965. We were less concerned about the percentage of pre-1965 houses, because
other factors, such as exceptional design, can outweigh the 50 percent rule. In addition to pre-
1965 houses, we also wanted a sense of how many neighborhoods had a significant number of
houses built before 1974, the year the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated. This would give us
an idea of the character of the town at the time of incorporation and also show us which of the
neighborhoods with only a limited number of pre-1965 houses would soon be increasing that
number. In other words, the number of pre-1974 houses in a neighborhood is a hint of the
historic preservation issues that the town may face over the next decade.
Nineteen subdivisions in the Town of Oro Valley were platted before 1974, with the earliest plat
filed in 1930 (see Table 5). All of these subdivisions are located in the southern portion of the
town, in or near the original limits of incorporation. Note that in a few cases a considerable gap
came between the platting of the subdivision and the actual construction of the first house. All
19 subdivisions have at least one house built before 1974, but only 11 subdivisions have houses
built before 1965. In terms of percentages of pre-1965 houses, only three subdivisions exceed
50 percent, but there are enough pre-1974 houses in the other eight to push them over the 50
percent mark in the next decade (Table 9).
Discounting the pre-1974 subdivisions without pre-1965 houses, and combining the multiple
phases of the Suffolk Hills and Fairhaven Village developments, we narrowed our list of
neighborhoods for the initial survey to just seven (Table 10). These seven neighborhoods have
been the focus of the initial survey by the project architects (see Figure 19). The following
paragraphs summarize the results of the initial survey in each of the seven neighborhoods. The
brief survey forms completed for the seven neighborhoods during the survey are provided in
Appendix D.
Campo Bello
Campo Bello was one of the earliest subdivisions to be platted and developed in Oro Valley.The
original plat was filed just after World War II by the owners, Toney and Mabel Hardy, for a 160-
acre tract that was formerly part of a homestead patented by Wylie Rudasill in 1935 (Figure 24).
Campo Bello is notable for its distinctive radial street plan, which is similar to Beaux Arts—
inspired street plans known elsewhere before the war, most notably at El Encanto Estates in
Tucson, platted in 1928. The radial plan derives ultimately from the Renaissance and Baroque
periods in Europe (Ames and McClelland 2002:41).
Campo Bello was platted early but developed only gradually. Of the 25 houses that currently
stand in the Campo Bello neighborhood, the earliest was built in 1948 and only 12 were built
before 1965. The large early lots of the original plat, ranging from 9.1 to 10.3 acres, were later
subdivided, but today all of the lots are still relatively large, the smallest around 3.3 acres. The
5-acre circular area at the center of the street plan was originally reserved for a community
center, but nothing was ever built on the parcel (Figure 25). The diagonal streets of the
symmetrical street plan have never been paved.
The spacious lots, low-density housing, unpaved streets, and large number of properties having
horse facilities give Campo Bello a notably open, rural feel (Figure 26). The view of the Santa
Catalina Mountains is uniformly spectacular (Figure 27). Native vegetation is the rule, primarily
prickly pear and cholla, with occasional trees. Most properties have some type of perimeter
fence or wall.
Although the architecture of Campo Bello is of limited historic interest in itself, with only 36
percent of its houses meeting the 45-year age threshold, the neighborhood does have potential
as a historic district because it preserves its distinctive subdivision design. The north half of
Campo Bello formed part of the original Town of Oro Valley when the town was incorporated in
1974; the south half became part of the town in 1984.
Oro Valley Estates
As discussed in Chapter 3, the development of Oro Valley Estates is linked closely with the
history of the Town of Oro Valley. Platted in 1959, Oro Valley Estates is located just west of
Oracle Road on the south bank of the Canada del Oro, an area that was formerly part of the
Canada del Oro Ranch. It is an early example of a residential community planned around a
professionally designed golf course, with the greens and fairways of the course flanked by
small, curvilinear residential clusters (Figures 28 and 29). The design reflects considerable
terrain modification of the kind landscape architects call naturalistic constructivism. The
neighborhood as a whole has spectacular views of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east,
and the golf course offers extensive, grass-turf vistas with occasional tree borders (Figure 30).
The residential clusters are of well-designed houses, most in the Modern style, carefully sited
on large, irregularly shaped lots with open front yards (Figure 31). Residential landscaping is
sparse, consisting mostly of desert species planted on gravel or scraped earth. The openness of
the subdivision, its superior design linking the residential areas with the golf course, and the
proximity of the mountains give this neighborhood a distinctively tranquil feel.
Today Oro Valley Estates has a total of 216 houses, just 32 of which (14.8 percent) were built
before 1965; another 60 were built before 1974. Despite the low number of early houses, Oro
Valley Estates has some potential as a historic neighborhood because of the relatively early
date of its design as a golf course community and the aesthetic layout of its streets and lots in
relation to the course. Oro Valley Estates was one of the principal parts of the Town of Oro
Valley at its incorporation in 1974.
Shadow Mountain Estates
Shadow Mountain Estates, located on the west side of Oracle Road between Hardy Road and
Calle Concordia, was platted in 1959 on part of a large homestead patented by Walter D. Ackley
in 1934. According to Marriott (2008:69-72), who has published several photographs of the
original homestead kept by the Ackley family, Ackley was an optician who playfully named his
homestead the Eye del Wild Ranch. The homestead also included a large acreage on the east
side of Oracle Road (see Table 3), which included the area later subdivided for Shadow
Mountain Estates–East and Suffolk Hills. The history of ownership of the Ackley homestead
after the family sold the property has not been researched, but all of this area was the property
of the Arizona Land, Title and Trust Company when the original plats for Shadow Mountain
Estates, Shadow Mountain Estates–East, and Suffolk Hills were filed.
Shadow Mountain Estates has a postwar curvilinear subdivision plan, which is also true of three
other early subdivisions in the survey—Shadow Mountain Estates–East, Suffolk Hills, and
Fairhaven Village. This type of plan became the approved standard of the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) for sound neighborhood design after World War II. The type includes
curvilinear interior roads, cul-de-sacs, and generously sized, irregularly shaped lots (Figure 32).
Curvilinear plans were promoted heavily by the building industry in response to the strict
standards required by FHA loans, and the many curvilinear subdivisions that sprang up across
the United States in the postwar period, most filled with Ranch and Modern style houses, were
the direct result of these standards. Curvilinear subdivision plans actually had their beginnings
in the concepts of landscape architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
who sought an alternative to the conventional rigidity of the urban grid (Ames and McClelland
2002:48-51; also see Akros, Inc., et al. 2007).
Shadow Mountain Estates has a builder-designed subdivision plan that is largely intact. About
51 percent of the houses were built before 1965, and 138 of the 151 of the houses were built
before 1974. The pre-1965 houses, many of which appear to be the work of a single builder,
tend to be Ranch-style houses with wide frontal gables and lateral shed carports. Other houses
are Modern or Eclectic in style (Figure 33). Many lots were scraped originally, but there has
been some natural regrowth. Drives are circular or straight; some are unpaved, some have rock
edging.The Santa Catalina Mountains are prominent in views to the east.
Shadow Mountain Estates has a subdivision plan that is average in quality and distinctiveness
and would probably not qualify as a historically significant neighborhood based solely on the
subdivision plan. However, the percentage of houses built before 1965 gives it some historic
potential.
Suffolk Hills
As noted above, the Suffolk Hills subdivision takes its name from the Countess of Suffolk, whose
distinctive Forest Lodge residence, built in 1937, now forms part of the Immaculate Heart
Academy property, in the northeastern portion of the neighborhood. Although the Suffolk Hills
subdivision was built in several phases based on plats from the years 1958-1960, it is a
coherent whole and is best considered as a single development (Figure 34). The subdivision is
located on the south side of Magee Road and the east side of Oracle Road, bounded on the east
by First Avenue and on the south by the Town of Oro Valley boundary. Suffolk Hills has the
most houses-190—of any of the seven early subdivisions in the survey.
Suffolk Hills is an excellent, visually pleasing example of a postwar curvilinear subdivision plan.
True to its name, the subdivision is quite hilly, and the interior road system is adapted to the
natural topography. Significant landscape features include an abundance of natural desert
vegetation, added plantings along streets, and the generous use of native stone in retaining
walls and edgings. About 60 percent of the houses in Suffolk Hills are of historic age; most are
Modern or Ranch in style (Figure 35). Suffolk Hills has historic potential both for its distinctive,
well-preserved design and its relatively high percentage of pre-1965 houses. The presence of
the historic, essentially intact Forest Lodge residence is an added virtue.
Shadow Mountain Estates–East
An extension of the original Shadow Mountain Estates subdivision, Shadow Mountain Estates–
East is located on the opposite side of Oracle Road, bounded on the north by Calle Concordia,
on the south by Hardy Road, and on the east by the Coronado National Forest. Its increased
proximity to the Santa Catalina Mountains gives it a distinctly different feel from its namesake
west of Oracle Road. This area is steeply hilly, with excellent views of the looming mountains to
the east (Figure 36).
Shadow Mountain Estates–East is postwar curvilinear in design, with a main north-south street
(North Riviera Drive) from which three cul-de-sacs extend uphill to the east. Most lots are
irregularly shaped and generously sized; many building sites are quite steep. The earliest
houses are in the Ranch style; later houses are Neoeclectic (Figure 37). There is less consistency
of style here than in other early subdivisions in the survey. Natural desert vegetation is the
most common landscaping throughout the subdivision, either intact natural vegetation or
enhanced with plantings; very little non-native vegetation is seen in the subdivision. Driveways
are asphalt or gravel, semicircular where the terrain allows.
Despite its striking views and attractive setting, Shadow Mountain Estates–East currently has
low potential as a historic district. Just 14 percent of the houses were built before 1965, house
styles are inconsistent, and the subdivision design is average. Because 35 of the 57 houses in
the subdivision were built before 1974, the historic potential of the subdivision should be
reconsidered in another 10 years.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 was platted in 1937 by the owners, Lue W. G. and Frieda A.
Skinner, the same couple who had platted Linda Vista Citrus Tracts in 1930. Lue Skinner had
patented the land covered by these plats as two separate GLO claims in 1926 and 1929 (see
Table 3). Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 is bounded on the east by Oracle Road, on the west by
Calle Loma Linda, on the south by Calle Concordia, and on the north by Linda Vista Boulevard.
The smaller Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, located on the north side of Linda Vista Boulevard, was
never fully developed and today holds just 14 houses, the earliest of which was built in 1971.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has 44 houses today, just five of which were built before 1965
and just seven before 1974.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has a regular, rectilinear subdivision plan, originally consisting of
40 basically square lots, each measuring about 9.5 acres in area. Some lots have been further
subdivided since the original plat was filed, but the lots in general are still large and rectangular.
The overall design is simple in the extreme and may reflect a desire by the original owners to
sell the land quickly, with minimal investment, perhaps in response to the demand for
"gentleman's orchard estates" of the 1930s, as discussed in Chapter 3. The north-south streets
that were part of the original plat—Calle Loma Linda, Calle Milagro, Calle Buena Vista, Calle
Almendra, Calle Codorniz—are still in place today and divide the rectangular subdivision into
five rectangular parts (Figure 38).
Like the other early subdivisions in the survey, Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has excellent
views of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east. Most have limited natural desert vegetation
and instead include a mix of introduced plantings concentrated near the houses. In certain
areas, some desert vegetation has regrown, especially prickly pear and cholla cactus, and some
of the denser stands may reflect patterns of former orchard or other agricultural growth.
Because of the large size of many lots, the subdivision has an open, rural feel; some of the more
substantial properties have distinctive gate features, perimeter fencing or walls, and horse-
related features. The southeast corner of the subdivision is occupied by Canyon del Oro High
School and James D. Kriegh Park (formerly Dennis Weaver Park).
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has only a small number of historic houses and many show
evidence of significant alterations. Although the neighborhood is of interest for its connection
to early efforts to develop the Oro Valley area in the 1930s, the architecture and landscape of
the neighborhood reflect this connection only in a limited way. The subdivision has low
potential as a historic district based on either its design or its houses.
Fairhaven Village
Platted in two parts in 1958 and 1960, Fairhaven Village is another, minor example of a postwar
curvilinear subdivision plan. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by Oracle Road, on the
north by Fairhaven Street, on the west by Northern Avenue, and on the south by Cortaro Farms
Road. This area has relatively flat terrain with a slight uphill slope to the northeast; good views
of the mountains to the east; and sparse natural desert plantings with no enhanced plantings
along the streets. The streetscape includes some shallow drainage ditches but no other special
features.
Only 3 of the 26 houses in Fairhaven Village were built before 1965, though 22 were built
before 1974 (Figure 39). The design of the subdivision is intact but simple and undistinguished.
Because of the small number of early houses and the average quality of the subdivision,
Fairhaven Village has low potential as a historic district.
CHAPTER 7
RECOMMENDATIONS
This report summarizes Phase One of the Oro Valley cultural resources inventory, a first step in
documenting the number and variety of archaeological sites, historic places, and early
residential architecture in the Town of Oro Valley and its planning area. The report will serve as
a basic planning tool for the town and is the starting point for Phase Two of the inventory,
which will center on the preparation of a preservation plan. This chapter presents a set of
general recommendations for cultural resources work in the town over the next five to ten
years and discusses the specific tasks to be carried out in Phase Two. The general
recommendations are organized by three categories of resources: archaeological sites, sources
on the history of Oro Valley, and residential subdivisions. A summary list of the general
recommendations is provided at the end of the chapter, followed by the specific
recommendations for Phase Two.
Archaeological Sites
Information about archaeological sites in the Town of Oro Valley and its planning area is
constantly changing and expanding as archaeological survey and excavation projects are carried
out in advance of development. This report provides a comprehensive list of previously
recorded prehistoric and historic archaeological sites in the study area, as well as a
comprehensive list of archaeological surveys carried out in the study area, but both lists, based
on the AZSITE archaeological database maintained by the Arizona State Museum, are useful
only as an indication of the state of archaeological research in the study area at this particular
moment. Evaluating the potential impacts of a proposed project on archaeological sites will
always require freshly updated information from AZSITE (as well as other sources). In addition,
because of the highly variable quality of the data recorded in AZSITE, the significance and
reliability of the data is always a matter of interpretation. Using AZSITE data to make decisions
about the potential impacts of a proposed project should always be left to a professional
archaeologist familiar with the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of data collected at many
different times and under many different circumstances.
A useful and inexpensive step that the town can take to ensure that it always has updated
archaeological information for the planning area is to subscribe to AZSITE as a land-managing
agency. This will allow the town to receive regular, updated installments of AZSITE
archaeological site and survey data. The full interpretation of this information will still require a
professional archaeologist (and AZSITE may require that the town have an established
relationship with a professional archaeologist who will receive and interpret the information),
but the data will provide the town with a preliminary sense of resources already recorded and
the extent of previous research in a given location. Information about AZSITE and how to
subscribe can be found at http://www.azsite.arizona.edu/.
The task of managing the archaeological resources of Oro Valley would also benefit greatly
from the creation of the town's own centralized archaeological archive. In addition to the basic
information on site locations and survey coverage available from AZSITE, keeping track of
previously recorded
sites and the professional attention they have already received requires direct reference to
survey and excavation reports. In many cases, consulting the full range of reports on a site or a
particular area can involve trips to multiple locations, including the Arizona State Museum, the
University of Arizona Library, and various local, state, and federal agencies. And obtaining
copies of reports on short notice from any of these repositories can be time-consuming and
expensive. With a well-focused effort, the town could acquire copies of all reports and other
documentation for all previously recorded sites and previously conducted archaeological
surveys in its jurisdiction, which would help streamline future planning efforts involving
archaeological sites and survey coverage. These reports and other documentation, like the site
locational and survey information obtained from AZSITE, would need to be kept by the town in
a way that restricts public access yet allows ready access to the appropriate professionals.
Evaluating the potential impact of development on archaeological resources always benefits
from a consideration of all available information on archaeological sensitivity in areas that have
not been surveyed or otherwise systematically investigated by archaeologists. The general
information on archaeological sensitivity in the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (see Chapter
4) is a useful start, but a valuable expansion of this effort would be to prepare a
geoarchaeological study of site sensitivity in selected areas. Geoarchaeological investigation
involves backhoe trenching in locations considered to be of high sensitivity but lacking
significant surface archaeological remains. A specialist in geoarchaeological analysis (someone
who combines geological and archaeological expertise) examines the trenches for evidence of
buried cultural deposits and assigns sensitivity ratings based on a variety of geomorphological
factors. An example of an area of particular interest in Oro Valley is the floodplain of the
Canada del Oro, where major prehistoric sites may be mostly or totally obscured by relatively
recent soil deposition.
Finally, because the information on previously recorded archaeological sites provided in this
report was collected at many different times over the last 40 years or more, much of the
information has been made obsolete by the many development projects that have taken place
in the town over the same period. It was beyond the scope of the present project to make a
systematic, reliable assessment of which previously recorded sites are still intact today and
which have been partially or wholly destroyed by development. This kind of assessment is
complicated by the fact that some sites, although obliterated from the modern ground surface,
may still survive to a significant degree below the surface. An important and valuable step the
town could take to increase its understanding of selected archaeological sites in its jurisdiction
would be to make a systematic evaluation of impacts to these sites, including field evaluations
by a professional archaeologist.
Sources on Oro Valley History
As Chapter 3 of this report makes clear, the history of Oro Valley is known today only because
people at different times have saved the documents that relate to that history or have written
down their own memories and experiences of places and events. Many useful sources on Oro
Valley history have been generated or preserved through the official activities of government
agencies—survey plats by the GLO, topographic maps by the USGS, subdivision plats and tax
assessment records by Pima County—but other important sources exist only because private
individuals, through their personal connections to the Oro Valley area, were interested in its
history and took the time to write things down. The official records of government agencies
will, we can reasonably assume, continue to be generated and preserved; for example, the Oro
Valley Town Clerk has provided us with an outline of the comprehensive town records actively
maintained by her office. But it is not safe to assume that the many people who have firsthand
experience of Oro Valley's history will have the opportunity or the inclination to record their
memories and experiences. The town can be grateful that so many descendants of early Oro
Valley residents have already contributed to the valuable collections of historical information
by Marriott (2005, 2008), but how many other residents and descendants of residents have yet
to share their important memories?
We recommend that the Town of Oro Valley sponsor a systematic effort to collect the historical
memories of Oro Valley residents and their descendants, and to seek out the documents,
photographs, and other items owned by residents that relate to the history of the town. One
part of this effort should be a well-publicized notice that the town is interested in hearing from
people with memories of the town in the years before incorporation, followed by as many
interviews (usually called oral history interviews) of interested people as possible. To preserve
this information and make it easily accessible to everyone, the interviews should be recorded
with good equipment in a suitable setting, then accurately transcribed. A second part of the
effort should be an annual history clinic, when residents and other interested people are invited
to bring documents, photographs, and other items to be examined by knowledgeable people
who can photograph or scan the items as appropriate and record any information that the
owners provide. The annual history clinic could coincide with other public events, such as an
open house at the Steam Pump Ranch or a reading at the Oro Valley Public Library. The Oro
Valley Historical Society is an active and thriving organization that could undoubtedly be
enlisted to assist in the effort.
The accumulation of historical documents, photographs, and other items implied by history
clinics and similar efforts raises the question of how and where all of these materials will be
organized and stored. The Oro Valley Historical Society itself already has a substantial collection
of materials, many of which still need to be inventoried and organized, and all of which lack a
permanent storage facility. The town will do a great service to its residents and its history if it
makes a systematic effort to consolidate, inventory, organize, and house the various sources on
Oro Valley history that are currently held by individual residents, the Oro Valley Historical
Society, and the town itself. The ideal situation would be a central repository in Oro Valley,
perhaps at the public library or the town government offices, where these sources are
organized and maintained, and where town residents and other interested people can have
easy access. Because of the sensitive and irreplaceable nature of some of the materials, access
would have to be carefully monitored and limited to onsite use. The repository would probably
need to operate in the manner of a special collections department at a library. A good starting
point for an effort leading to a centralized repository would be a curation-needs assessment to
determine the volume and kinds of materials to be managed and the type of facility required to
manage them effectively.
Getting the town's historical sources in one place, organizing and inventorying them, and
making them readily accessible will help promote a fuller use of these sources by interested
professionals, the town's residents, and the town itself. One important use of visual and
documentary sources that the town should consider is to develop exhibits on the history of the
Oro Valley area. Exhibits could be designed for a single location, such as the public library or
the town government offices, or they could be designed to travel among different locations,
including the public library, area schools, special events, and other public settings. The same
could be done for the major prehistoric sites in the town: displays incorporating the artifact
collections from Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village, or Romero Ruin—much of which
languish in boxes at the Arizona State Museum—could be developed for the same kinds of
venues.
Residential Subdivisions
Our initial survey of residential architecture in Oro Valley has shown that four of the earliest
subdivisions in the town are potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of
Historic Places as residential historic districts. The four subdivisions are Oro Valley Estates,
Suffolk Hills, Campo Bello, and Shadow Mountain Estates. We recommend that the town
consider nominating each of the four subdivisions to the National Register, with the consent
and cooperation of the residents.
Because of the preliminary nature of our survey, we are not certain that the Arizona State
Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) will agree that any of the four subdivisions is appropriate for
a National Register nomination. Before deciding to pursue a nomination, which can be a
significant expense, a determination of eligibility should be made for the selected subdivision
by the SHPO. A determination of eligibility involves contacting the SHPO, providing a minimal
level of documentation about the selected subdivision, and arranging for the SHPO to visit and
tour the subdivision. If the SHPO determines that the subdivision is eligible for listing on the
National Register, a nomination is warranted.
Following a determination of eligibility, the town would approach the neighborhood association
for the subdivision, or the residents themselves, and recommend that a nomination be
prepared. The nomination process, which includes writing a detailed historic context for the
subdivision and preparing SHPO historic building inventory forms for all of the houses, could be
funded directly by the town, by contributions from the neighborhood residents, or by a
combination of these sources. When each resident contributes a portion of the nomination
cost, individual contributions are usually smaller when the neighborhood is large, because
much of the expense of a nomination is in the historic context, which is generally the same for
any size of neighborhood. In other words, the per-house cost of a nomination declines as the
number of houses increases.
If the town decides to pursue only one National Register nomination of a subdivision, we
recommend that either Oro Valley Estates or Suffolk Hills be nominated. Oro Valley Estates has
a relatively low percentage of houses built before 1965, but it is notable for its excellent
subdivision design in association with a golf course. It is also closely connected with the history
of the Town of Oro Valley as one of the original subdivisions at incorporation. Suffolk Hills has
both a high percentage of houses built before 1965 and an excellent subdivision design. It is
also associated with the Countess of Suffolk's Forest Lodge, an important example of Modern
architecture in the
town and in the Tucson area as a whole. The listing of either subdivision on the National
Register would be a boon to the residents, who would receive a tax benefit for having a
contributing house in the district, and to the Town of Oro Valley, which would draw new
attention to its commitment to the effective management of cultural resources in its
jurisdiction.
However many residential district nominations the town decides to pursue in the short term,
the long-term planning for the town should include regular consideration of additional district
nominations. As we indicated in Chapter 6, other subdivisions in the town not considered here
will soon approach the 45-year threshold. Not all will be suitable for nomination, but early
subdivisions constitute the most substantial undocumented cultural resources in the town,
even if an appreciation of their historic significance is still mostly uncultivated in Oro Valley.
Summary of Recommendations
Our general recommendations to the Town of Oro Valley for the next five to ten years can be
summarized in a list:
1. Archaeological Sites
a. subscribe to AZSITE as a land-managing agency
b. create a centralized archaeological archive
c. conduct geoarchaeological evaluation of selected high-sensitivity areas
d. conduct field assessment of recent impacts to selected archaeological sites
2. Sources on Oro Valley History
a. sponsor a systematic effort to collect sources on Oro Valley history, including:
oral history interviews and transcriptions
annual history clinics
b. conduct a curation-needs assessment for collected historical sources
c. develop a centralized repository for historical sources
d. develop exhibits on local history and archaeology
3. Residential Subdivisions
a. nominate four early subdivisions as National Register districts:
Oro Valley Estates
Suffolk Hills
Campo Bello
Shadow Mountain Estates
b. regularly consider additional nominations in long-term planning
Our specific recommendations for Phase Two of the inventory relate to two tasks: preparing a
preservation plan, and expanding public outreach.
1. Preservation Plan
The Phase One inventory has brought together much valuable information about the cultural
resources of Oro Valley and how these resources embody the history and cultural heritage of the
town. Using the results of the inventory and our general recommendations for additional cultural
resources work, an effective preservation plan can now be assembled that will help the town set
priorities and make decisions about the documentation, evaluation, and preservation of resources
as development projects in the town are proposed and carried out. The preservation plan should
be concise (5 to 10 pages) and include a distillation of the inventory findings. The general
recommendations presented here should be the focus of the plan. It is also important that the plan
be easily understood by a wide audience and consistent with the standards of the Arizona SHPO,
the Arizona State Museum, the National Register, and the cultural resource goals and standards
already established by the Town of Oro Valley.
2. Public Outreach
The Phase One inventory included the preparation of a four-page brochure summarizing the
goals and results of the inventory and geared to a general audience. The inventory also included
an Open House held in the town council chambers, with a slide show and large-format posters
(text and photographs) focused on the various aspects of the inventory. All of these materials
were intended to inform Oro Valley residents of the results of the inventory and to encourage
their participation, but only a small number of the town's residents have been able to take
advantage of these opportunities. We recommend that an additional effort be made in Phase Two
to involve the public in the results of the inventory and to encourage public participation in the
preservation of the town's cultural resources. This effort could include three items in particular:
a. publication of the Phase One brochure in a high-quality color format, slightly revised
to reflect completion of the inventory, with 2,000-3,000 copies printed; the brochure
could be distributed both by the town at public locations and by the Oro Valley Historic
Preservation Commission in its ongoing outreach efforts
b. making the Phase One inventory report easily available on CD (50-100 copies), and
for download on the town website; the town should also consider having 100 perfect-
bound hard copies of the inventory report printed for more limited distribution
c. hosting a public lecture series on the cultural resources of Oro Valley, sponsored by
the Oro Valley Historic Preservation Commission in cooperation with the Oro Valley
Historical Society
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2001f Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Salzburg AZ 0189,
Higley, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-21(AZ). URS, Phoenix.
2001g Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Newton AZ 0138,
Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-22(AZ). URS, Phoenix.
2001h Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Arabian AZ 0154,
Mesa, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-23(AZ). URS, Phoenix.
2001i Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Wildfire AZ 0155,
Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-25(AZ). URS, Phoenix.
2001j Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Falcon Field AZ
0025, Mesa, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-26(AZ). URS,
Phoenix.
2001k Cultural Resource Survey for Nextel Communication Tower Project: Ice Den AZ 0316,
Scottsdale, Maricopa County, Arizona. Cultural Resource Report 2001-27(AZ). URS,
Phoenix.
Wright, Thomas E.
2000 A Cultural Resources Survey along Portions of State Route 77 (Mileposts 69.55-76.40,
78.00-79.20, and 82.20-88.00), between Tucson and Catalina, Pima County, Arizona.
Project Report No. 99:37. Archaeological Research Services, Tempe.
Wyman, Terrence B., and Allen Dart
2001 Cultural Resources Survey of Conjoined Corridors Totaling Approximately 1.5 Miles in
Length and 157 Feet Wide along 1st Avenue and along Palisades Road in Oro Valley,
Arizona. Letter Report No. 2001.072. Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, Tucson.
Zipf, Henry
1988-1989 One Century in the Life of the Steam Pump Ranch. Oro Valley Magazine
Winter:5.
1989-1990 Dreams of Grandeur: The Founding of the Oro Valley Country Club. Oro Valley
Magazine Winter:5-7.
_.
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CHAPTER 1
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INTRODUCTION
In July 2009, William Self Associates, Inc. (WSA), was hired by the Town of Oro Valley to prepare
an inventory of cultural resources within the limits of the town and its larger planning area. The
purpose of the inventory was to identify potentially significant cultural resources—including
prehistoric and historic archaeological sites, individual historic buildings, and historic
architectural districts—using a combination of archival research, historic context development,
limited field survey, and evaluation. This report presents the results of the inventory, which was
carried out by the WSA team in July–October 2009. The inventory has shown that the Town of
Oro Valley and its planning area have a long and rich history and hold a wealth of cultural
resources, ranging from prehistoric archaeological sites to post–World War II residential
subdivisions. Most of these resources have not been fully evaluated for their historic or
scientific significance, and many resources recorded within the last few decades have already
been destroyed. Many other resources, as yet unrecorded, likely exist within the town and its
planning area in locations not yet surveyed for cultural resources.
The cultural resources inventory is viewed by the Town of Oro Valley as Phase One in a two-
phase effort to document and evaluate the cultural resources in its jurisdiction. Based on the
results of the inventory the town also plans to carry out a Phase Two, which will focus on the
development of a preservation plan that defines policies, procedures, and strategies for
maintaining and preserving significant cultural resources. An effective preservation plan will
help the town make the most of Oro Valley's heritage and help it avoid the complications that
arise when development projects unexpectedly impact significant resources.
The WSA team for the cultural resources inventory was led by John Ravesloot, Ph.D., principal
of the Tucson office of WSA, who served as principal investigator for the inventory. Scott
O'Mack, M.A., served as project director. Subconsultants for historic architecture were Ralph
Comey Architects and Janet H. Strittmatter, Inc., Associated Architects, of Tucson.
Subconsultant for public outreach and planning was Poster Frost Associates, also of Tucson. Dr.
Ravesloot and Mr. O'Mack were assisted in various aspects of the research and report
preparation by WSA staff members Michael Boley, Brandon Gabler, Melanie Medeiros, and
Trevor Self.
Project Overview
The Town of Oro Valley, incorporated in 1974, encompasses an area with deep historical roots.
Centered on the Canada del Oro drainage in the northern portion of the Tucson Basin, the town
occupies part of the western foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains (Figure 1). Pusch Ridge
forms a dramatic backdrop to the east, the picturesque Tortolita Mountains rise close by to the
north, and metropolitan Tucson flanks the town to the south and west. The distinctive natural
setting of Oro Valley, its location along a riparian strip that was a focus of human settlement in
prehistoric times, and its proximity to the historic core of southern Arizona at Tucson have
given the area a significant role in nearly every aspect of the region's cultural history. Ancient
rock art and Hohokam villages, historic trails and roads, nineteenth-century homesteads and
ranches, and post—World War II residential subdivisions have all helped to shape the modern
community of Oro Valley. All of these resources can contribute to an understanding and
appreciation of Oro Valley and its history, but all present notable challenges to town planning.
Archaeological sites are by their nature the most difficult of cultural resources to identify,
document, and evaluate, and the oldest archaeological sites are typically the most difficult of
all. At the same time, archaeological sites often yield uniquely valuable information about
cultures and ways of life that have otherwise gone unrecorded. Major prehistoric
archaeological sites in the Oro Valley vicinity include Sleeping Snake Village, Romero Ruin, and
Honey Bee Village. All three are extensive Hohokam village sites dating to the period A.D. 450-
1450. Archaeological investigations at the three sites have revealed a wide variety of features,
including the remains of houses (in the case of Honey Bee Village, nearly 800 pit houses),
storage pits, ball courts, and terrace gardens. The information from these sites has allowed a
significant expansion in our understanding of prehistoric Native American life in southern
Arizona, and archaeological sites of similar age and importance are likely preserved elsewhere
in the Canada del Oro drainage, including within Oro Valley. This inventory of cultural resources
includes an up-to-date list of known archaeological sites within the Town of Oro Valley planning
area, a list of archaeological surveys carried out to date in the planning area, and a discussion of
the culture history of the area useful in evaluating the significance of archaeological sites either
already known or yet to be recorded.
Historic-period cultural resources, which include standing architecture, early roads, ranching
and farming features (such as corrals and irrigation ditches), and even archaeological sites, can
be valuable both as sources of information about the past and as irreplaceable visual reminders
of a community's heritage. In the Canada del Oro drainage, the earliest known settlers of the
historic period came a decade or so after the Gadsden Purchase made southern Arizona a part
of the United States. In the late 1860s, Francisco Romero, a man of Mexican descent whose
family had a long presence in the Tucson area, established a cattle ranch in what is now
Catalina State Park, centering his spread on the former Hohokam village later called Romero
Ruin. Romero's tenure on his ranch was short-lived because of the constant threat of Apache
attacks, but other settlers eventually followed him to the area. In the 1870s, German
immigrants George Pusch and his Swiss colleague John Zellweger established the Steam Pump
Ranch along what is now Oracle Road, south of the Canada del Oro. Pusch later became sole
owner of the ranch, which received its name from the early use of a steam pump to raise well
water. Today, the Steam Pump Ranch, recently listed on the National Register of Historic Places,
is one of Oro Valley's most important historic properties and the center of a commercial
development that has accommodated the surviving portion of the ranch.
Other early residents of the Oro Valley area included William Henry Sutherland, whose ranch
can still be seen along the banks of the wash bearing his name, and William Neal, who ran a
stage coach line from Tucson to the mines at Mammoth, with a stop at the Steam Pump Ranch.
Archival research for the cultural resources inventory has expanded the list of known residents
of the Canada del Oro area in the historic period, and the list of surviving features associated
with their homesteads, ranches, and businesses. In some cases, historic features visible on the
ground are associated with significant buried archaeological features. A case in point is the
Steam Pump Ranch, where a 2007 evaluation concluded that subsurface archaeological
resources, at least 50 years old, were likely preserved on the property. And it is important to
note that subsurface archaeological features from the historic period may be present in places
where no surface features survive.
History in the Canada del Oro area did not end with the ranching and homesteading period of
Romero, Pusch, and other early settlers. A period of greater importance to the development of
modern Oro Valley came after World War II, when the population boom affecting nearby
Tucson pushed people beyond the city limits into the surrounding rural areas. Some of the
earliest residential development in the Oro Valley area during this period included well-
appointed homes, like the residence designed by noted Tucson architect Josias Joesler for
Joseph McAdams (1940), and the Countess of Suffolk's Forest Lodge Mansion (1937), now the
Immaculate Heart Convent, as well as the distinctive planning of the Campo Bello subdivision
(platted in 1946), with its baroque-inspired radial street plan. In 1958, Louis Landon, a frequent
visitor to Tucson and a golf aficionado, transformed 375 acres of land at the former Canada del
Oro Ranch into a resort golfing community with luxury homes. Sixteen years later, Landon's Oro
Valley Estates would be the center of a newly incorporated town.
By the late 1960s, the Canada del Oro area was becoming a residential hub and the City of
Tucson started planning to annex it. Residents of the area were alarmed at the prospect of
annexation and began to work toward the incorporation of an independent town. Despite a
lengthy court case that made its way to the Arizona Supreme Court, the Town of Oro Valley was
finally incorporated on April 15, 1974. At the time of incorporation, Oro Valley encompassed
2.5 square miles and was home to just 800 residents. Today the town encompasses more than
34 square miles and has a population of around 44,000.
Method of Approach
For Phase One of the cultural resources inventory, we have used the Town of Oro Valley
Planning Area, established in the Town of Oro Valley General Plan Update 2020, as the limits of
our study area (Figure 2). Throughout the report, we refer to this area as the Oro Valley cultural
resources inventory study area, or simply the study area. Because Oro Valley and its vicinity are
a part of southern Arizona, a region recognized by archaeologists and historians as a more or
less discrete entity, we often refer to this larger area, especially in the culture-historical
discussions, but the inventory itself did not extend beyond the planning area.
Our approach to Phase One of the inventory has been to: (1) collect detailed information about
the number, variety, and historical background of cultural resources in the study area through
archival research; (2) use the results of the archival research to prepare a narrative discussion
of prehistory and history in the study area; (3) conduct an initial field survey of potentially
significant cultural resources in the study area, also based on the archival research; and (4) use
the narrative discussion to define specific historic contexts for the study area. Each of these
four steps in the approach is briefly discussed here, with fuller discussions in the corresponding
chapters of the report.
In addition to the steps outlined here, Phase One also included a series of public meetings and
an open house, all designed to allow the Town of Oro Valley staff, the Oro Valley Historic
Preservation Commission, and the general public to evaluate the progress of the inventory and
to contribute their knowledge and expertise to the project.
Archival Research
The archival research consisted of a review of relevant published and unpublished materials on
the prehistory and history of the Canada del Oro drainage, including several electronic
databases. The following repositories were checked for relevant materials (in a few cases, our
search was limited to consulting an online catalog with negative results):
Arizona Historical Society, Tucson
Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records, Phoenix
Arizona State Museum Library and Archives, Tucson
Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records
Immaculate Heart Convent, Oro Valley
Oro Valley Historical Society, Oro Valley
Pima County Assessor's Office, Tucson
Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation Office
Pima County Recorder's Office, Tucson
Pima County Public Library, Tucson
Town of Oro Valley, Planning and GIS Departments
University of Arizona, College of Architecture, Arizona Architectural Archive, Tucson
University of Arizona Library, Special Collections, Tucson
The relevant materials kept at these repositories include books, newspaper and magazine
articles, maps, General Land Office (GLO) records, property and tax records, photographs, aerial
photographs, oral history interviews, and miscellaneous published and unpublished materials.
We cite particular sources of information at appropriate places throughout the report.
For information on prehistoric and historic archaeological sites, we consulted the AZSITE
database maintained by the Arizona State Museum. AZSITE combines the archaeological site
records of the Arizona State Museum, Arizona State University, the Bureau of Land
Management, and other agencies and is the principal database for archaeological site
information in Arizona. The Arizona State Museum is also the state's central repository for
archaeological survey and excavation reports and other site-related materials, and we have
relied heavily on its files for these materials. We have also checked the National Register of
Historic Places and the Arizona State Register of Historic Places for properties within the study
area.
An important component of the archival research has been the creation of maps of the study
area depicting archaeological survey coverage, archaeological sensitivity zones, and
archaeological site locations (Appendixes A—C). These oversize maps, accompanied by GIS
shape files, have been delivered on CD to the Town of Oro Valley.
Narrative of Prehistory and History
Using the results of the archival research, we have prepared a narrative that traces the culture
history of the study area from prehistoric times through the incorporation of the Town of Oro
Valley in 1974. Among the topics considered in the narrative are: the history of archaeological
and historical research in the area; the role of the natural environment in prehistory and
history; economic pursuits in prehistoric and historic times; ranching, mining, and
homesteading in the historic period; the influence and growth of the Tucson metropolitan area
after World War II; historic-period settlement patterns in Oro Valley; and the origins of the
current town configuration as conditioned by growth, transportation, subdivisions, and
annexation.
Historic Contexts
Our narrative of prehistory and history has served in turn for the definition of specific historic
contexts for the Oro Valley study area. As defined by the National Register of Historic Places, a
historic context is a statement about the "patterns or trends in history by which a specific
occurrence, property, or site is understood and its meaning (and ultimately its significance)
within history or prehistory is made clear" (National Register of Historic Places [NRHP] 1997:7).
Thus, a historic context provides a basis for evaluating the significance of a cultural resource,
whether an archaeological site, a historic building, or a traditional cultural property. Because
the Oro Valley study area includes diverse cultural resources from a long span of prehistory and
history, we provide multiple historic contexts to cover the range of resources.
Initial Survey of Cultural Resources
In our initial survey of cultural resources in the study area, we relied on early maps, aerial
photographs, and information gathered in our archival research to define areas of particular
historic interest. Because of the size of the study area and the constraints of the project, our
actual field survey was limited to the residential architecture of seven potentially historic early
subdivisions within the Town of Oro Valley. The information gathered in the initial survey is the
basis for our recommendations for additional documentation of these neighborhoods, which
will ideally include nomination of each neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places
as a residential historic district.
Organization of the Report
The report has seven chapters. This introductory chapter is followed by a chapter surveying the
Native American culture history of the study area. A third chapter reviews the results of the
archival and records research, presents lists of previously recorded archaeological sites and
previously conducted archaeological surveys in the study area, and describes in detail the most
important sites and surveys. A fourth chapter surveys the history of the study area from
Spanish colonial times to the founding of Oro Valley in 1974. A fifth chapter describes
important individual examples of historic architecture in the study area and discusses the
results of our initial survey of residential subdivisions. A sixth chapter provides the historic
contexts defined for the study area. And a seventh and final chapter provides our
recommendations for further work on the cultural resources of Oro Valley.
CHAPTER 2
NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE HISTORY IN THE ORO VALLEY STUDY AREA
Throughout the prehistoric period, the Native American peoples who lived in or visited the
Canada del Oro area participated in cultural traditions documented more fully by archaeologists
elsewhere in southern Arizona, most notably in the greater Tucson Basin. An understanding of
the prehistory of the Canada del Oro area is possible only with reference to these wider
traditions. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of Native American culture history in
southern Arizona, with an emphasis on the Tucson Basin. We begin with the earliest known
evidence for human occupation of the region and end with the period just before the earliest
contacts with Europeans (Figure 3). The discussion draws on earlier syntheses of southern
Arizona prehistory by Chenault and Tucker (2003), Craig (1989), Ezzo (2007a), O'Mack and
others (2004), Whittlesey (2003), and Whittlesey and others (1994). Other sources are cited
when the discussion touches on particular aspects of prehistory in the region. At the end of the
chapter, we briefly summarize Native American culture history in the period after Europeans
settled in southern Arizona.
Paleoindian Period
Archaeologists call the earliest documented Native American occupation of the Americas the
Paleoindian period, which began at least as early as 12,000 years ago—many recent studies
place its beginning thousands of years earlier—and lasted until around 10,000 years ago
(Meltzer 2009). The Paleoindian period was characterized by small, highly mobile bands of
people and a hunting-and-gathering way of life adapted to a climate that was generally cooler
and wetter than today. Archaeological sites dating to the early part of the Paleoindian period
are often associated with the remains of extinct large mammals such as mammoth, bison, and
camel, which has long been interpreted as reflecting a heavy reliance on hunting big game
(Waguespack and Surovell 2003) using spears tipped with the distinctive fluted Clovis and
Folsom stone points found at Paleoindian sites. Little evidence for the Paleoindian period has
been found in southern Arizona as a whole, but the Naco, Lehner, and Murray Springs sites, all
located in the upper San Pedro valley, were particularly important to the definition and
formulation of the Clovis culture (Haury 1953; Haury et al. 1959; Haynes and Huckell 2007).
Essentially no Paleoindian material has been recovered in the Tucson Basin, including the
Canada del Oro area.
Archaic and Early Agricultural Periods
The Archaic period, which in southern Arizona began around 10,000 years ago and ended about
4,000 years ago, was also characterized by a hunting-and-gathering way of life, but Archaic
peoples exploited a much greater diversity of plant and animal species than their Paleoindian
predecessors. Little evidence of an Early Archaic occupation (10,500 to 6,800 years ago) has
been found in the region, but archaeologists have recently excavated sites in the Santa Cruz
River floodplain that have shown an intensive Middle Archaic presence (6,800 to 4,000 years
ago) (Gregory 1999). Additionally, evidence of domesticated maize has been found in southern
Arizona dating to the Middle-to-Late Archaic transition (Ezzo 2007a:35-38; Ezzo and Deaver
1998), and evidence for the practice of agriculture is now abundant for the Late Archaic period,
which archaeologists have begun to call the Early Agricultural period (3,500 years ago to A.D.
350). About 4,000 years ago, the Archaic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle began to give way to a
more sedentary existence, made possible in no small part by the introduction of maize and
other cultigens and the techniques needed to grow these crops in different environments. This
period, formerly known as the Late Archaic period, is increasingly referred to as the Early
Agricultural period.
Intensive use of the Santa Cruz River floodplain in the Early Agricultural period, from about
4,000 years ago to A.D. 150, is indicated by the recent excavation of surprisingly large
settlements, which have included evidence for generally increased sedentism, the repeated use
of specific locations, and ritual practices, particularly during the San Pedro phase (3,200 to
2,800 years ago) and Cienega phase (2,800 years ago to A.D. 150) (Diehl, ed. 2005; Mabry 2008;
Mabry, ed. 2008; Sliva, ed. 2005). The evidence for sedentism includes specialized storage pits,
a reliance on maize and other tropical cultigens, and the production and use of pottery for
storage (Ezzo 2007a:37; Mabry 1998; Mabry and Clark 1994). Other evidence from the Early
Agricultural period points to the beginnings of transitions that are better known for the
subsequent Formative period: from informal "houses in pits" to true pit houses, and from
round to rectangular and better-made structures. Evidence for long-distance exchange
networks in the Early Agricultural period has been discovered at the Santa Cruz Bend site
(Mabry 1998; Thiel 1998), and the site of Las Capas has recently yielded evidence for fairly
complex agricultural practices during the period, notably irrigation ditches (Hesse and Foster
2005; Mabry 2008). Pit houses at Las Capas were also ahead of their time: large circular and
oval structures during the San Pedro phase are like the ones previously known only at Cienega
phase sites.
No Archaic or Early Agricultural period sites have been recorded within the limits of the Oro
Valley study area, but given the abundance of evidence for these occupations on the Santa Cruz
River floodplain, this is probably because a substantial portion of the study area has never been
systematically surveyed for archaeological sites. At least one small Archaic site has been
documented in Catalina State Park,just outside the study area (Huckell 1980a:36).
Formative Period
In the Formative period, typically defined as the period A.D. 150-1450, many of the important
adaptations of the Early Agricultural period continued to develop: increased sedentism, true pit
houses, pottery production, and long-distance exchange. The defining characteristic of the
Formative period has traditionally been a reliance on maize agriculture as the dominant form of
subsistence (Ezzo 2007a:38). A distinction is usually made between the pre-Hohokam cultures
of the Early Ceramic period and the Hohokam cultures of the successive Pioneer, Colonial,
Sedentary, and Classic periods.
Early Ceramic Period
The Early Ceramic period, comprised entirely by the Agua Caliente phase (A.D. 150-450) in the
Tucson Basin, is primarily defined by the presence of an early plain ware horizon and ends with
the appearance of a red ware horizon (Wallace 2003). This period witnessed an increase in the
diversity of pottery vessel forms and the proficiency of ceramic manufacturing techniques. Seed
jars and hemispherical bowls, both used mostly for food storage, were the most common vessel
forms in this period, which is similar in this way to the early Mogollon cultures to the north and
east of the Tucson Basin (Burton 1991; Whittlesey 1998). Agriculture intensified through the
period. The increase in ceramics for storage coincided with a decrease in the number of
subsurface storage pits found at Early Ceramic sites. Architecture during the period was more
formalized than before: square and rectangular pit structures were the rule, with plastered
hearths centered on the entry and the occasional flanking of entries by adobe pillars. The
distribution of these structures within communities became increasingly organized through
time, as discrete courtyard groups, open plazas, and communal houses appeared, anticipating
later developments along these lines (Wilcox et al. 1981). The cultural affiliation for Early
Ceramic period sites is unresolved, but three hypotheses exist: Haury's (1978) idea that these
groups were, basically, Hohokam; Huckell (1987) and Di Peso's (1956, 1979) proposition of a
Mogollon influence; and Deaver and Ciolek-Torrello's (1995) notion that the Hohokam culture
emerged from these Early Ceramic period farmers.
Hohokam Culture
By around A.D. 450, the Hohokam culture was taking root in the Tucson Basin, as evidenced by
a "consolidation of patterns in artifact styles, architecture, and economics" (Fish and Fish
2007:8). The distribution of red-on-buff ceramics and ball courts (Wilcox 1991) reached its
greatest areal extent during the Colonial and Sedentary periods, or A.D. 700-1150. Around the
end of the Sedentary period, a major reorganization took place, marked by changes in both
domestic and ritual life that would characterize the ensuing Classic period. Archaeological
evidence of the Hohokam disappears at about A.D. 1450. Reasons for the sudden decline
remain contested, but external environmental changes, internal political changes, and the
introduction of Old World diseases all may have played a role. Throughout the "Hohokam
Millennium" (Fish and Fish, eds. 2007), the Hohokam were most notable for their abilities as
farmers, using a combination of ditch irrigation, dry farming, and storm water runoff diversion,
elaborating many of the traditions first established in the Early Agricultural period.
Pioneer Period
The Pioneer period in the Tucson Basin consists of two phases: the Tortolita phase (A.D. 450-
700) and the Snaketown phase (A.D. 700-750), recently refined as the result of work at sites
like Valencia Vieja along the Santa Cruz River (Wallace ed., 2003). In the Tucson Basin, the
Pioneer period is characterized by small, dispersed villages with pit houses and some irrigation
ditches. At Snaketown, a major village site in the middle Gila River valley where the Hohokam
tradition was first defined, evidence was found of a developing ceremonial complex, including
artificial mounds, cremations, figurines, and ball courts (Doyel 1991; Gladwin et al. 1937; Haury
1976). Regional ceramic diversity began in the Pioneer period, especially during the Snaketown
phase, and some archaeologists consider the Pioneer ceramic traditions the beginning of truly
decorated pottery, like Snaketown Red-on-buff. Two of the largest prehistoric sites in the study
area, Honey Bee Village (Medrano 2008) and Romero Ruin (Elson and Doelle 1987a), were both
founded during this period.
Colonial Period
The Colonial period began around A.D. 750 and ended about A.D. 950. It consisted of the
Canada del Oro and Rillito phases, each approximately 100 years in length. In southern Arizona,
the Canada del Oro phase is not as well documented as other phases, but a handful of sites
have provided important information, including Hodges Ruin (Kelly 1978), Valencia (Wallace,
ed. 2003), Dakota Wash (Craig 1988), and the three largest prehistoric sites in the study area:
Honey Bee Village, Romero Ruin, and Sleeping Snake Village (Ezzo, ed. 2007). All of these sites
had at least one ball court (Doelle and Wallace 1991). During the subsequent Rillito phase,
there was a fourfold increase in the number of sites in the Tucson Basin (Doelle and Wallace
1991). Ezzo (2007a) discusses several of the ball court villages of this phase along the Santa Cruz
River, including Sunset Mesa (Lindeman 2000), Los Morteros (Wallace 1995), and Huntington
Ruin. The number of primary villages increases throughout the phase and there is a diversity in
pit houses, with both true pit houses and the less-formal "houses in pits." In contrast to other
changes in Hohokam culture during the period, there is little change in the ceramics apart from
some increase in the formalization of wares.
Sedentary Period
More recorded prehistoric sites date to the Sedentary period (A.D. 950-1150) (composed
entirely of the Rincon phase) than to any other prehistoric period in the Tucson Basin (Doelle
and Wallace 1991), which has made it the best-understood part of the Hohokam chronology in
the region. In general, the Sedentary period was a time of relative cultural stability and
population growth. Small, dispersed sites were located on the bajada (piedmont) slopes and
alluvial fans in the basin, while large sites were located along the Santa Cruz River and other
major drainages (Whittlesey et al. 1994). Courtyard groups, or several houses oriented around a
common courtyard or plaza, were the primary mode of organization within sites, and irrigation
systems were expanded during this time. Inhabitants used the bajada slopes for rock-pile agave
cultivation, in addition to other agricultural and wild resource uses. Ceramics of the Sedentary
period show a decrease in the quality of painted line decoration, with an overall bolder style;
vessels are also thicker and heavier. Rincon Red ware, a style of pottery coated with a red slip
before firing, entered into large-scale production. Rincon Polychrome, a style of pottery with
decoration in multiple colors, also became widespread. During the late Sedentary period,
people initiated new forms of adobe wall construction and increased their use of dry farming
and storm water runoff farming. Toward the end of the period, many villages were abandoned,
setting the stage for changes evident in the succeeding Classic period. Romero Ruin, Honey Bee
Village, and Sleeping Snake Village (Ezzo 2007a:43-44) were all still occupied during this time,
but not much beyond.
Classic Period
The tumultuous transition from the Sedentary period to the Classic period resulted in
numerous changes to the material culture of the Hohokam. In the Classic period (A.D. 1150-
1450), semi-subterranean adobe-walled pit houses and aboveground adobe and stone-masonry
structures became the principal forms of architecture, and they were typically located inside
walled compounds, as at the Marana Platform Mound site (Fish et al., eds. 1992) and the
University Indian Ruin (Hayden 1957). Ball courts were replaced by platform mounds as the
dominant form of public architecture, and local examples again include the Marana Platform
Mound site (Fish et al., eds. 1992), the University Indian Ruin (1957), and the Tom Mix mound,
located on the east side of the Picacho Mountains (see Fish and Fish 1992). Red-on-brown
ceramics took on a less curvilinear and more rectilinear pattern than in previous periods.
Inhumations were added to the burial practices of the Hohokam, and both cremations and
inhumations continued through the Classic period. Populations aggregated in larger primary
villages, formed along the major drainages throughout the Tucson Basin. The total population
of the region may have peaked in the early Classic period (or the Tanque Verde phase, A.D.
1150-1300), but then declined in the late Classic (or the Tucson phase, A.D. 1300-1450). A
debate continues regarding the causes of the reorganization that occurred between the
Sedentary and Classic periods, and one also continues regarding the disappearance of the
Hohokam at the end of the Classic period. It is likely that environmental changes played a role
in both events (see Waters and Ravesloot 2001 for one such argument concerning the
transition), and the influx of an outside population, particularly from the Tonto Basin may also
have played a role (Haury 1945; O'Mack et al. 2004; Sires 1987; Whittlesey 2000). Alternatively,
Hill and others (2004) argue that the disappearance of the Hohokam was due less to a
catastrophic event than to demographic trends started many years earlier. Future
investigations of Classic period sites may help resolve these differing interpretations.
Native Americans of the Protohistoric and Historic Periods
Whatever the full explanation for the demise of the Hohokam and other Classic-period
traditions, the period between A.D. 1450 and the European-dominated historic era was a
transition from the prehistoric cultures documented by archaeology to the modern Native
American cultures documented by historical sources and ethnographic studies. The transition
from prehistory to history is often called the Protohistoric period by archaeologists, but in
southern Arizona it is defined in various and sometimes contradictory ways (Gilpin and Phillips
1998). Ravesloot and Whittlesey (1987:83) have pointed out that, strictly speaking, protohistory
began with the first arrival of Europeans in the New World (A.D. 1492) and ended with the start
of sustained contact between Europeans and Native Americans, which means that the end date
for the Protohistoric period differs by region. But they suggest that in southern Arizona, where
sustained European contact came relatively late, the start of the Protohistoric period is usefully
defined as A.D. 1540, the year of the first substantial Spanish expedition to the region, and the
end of the period is best defined by the establishment of the first Spanish presidio along the
Santa Cruz River at Tubac in 1752. On the other hand, Officer (1987) has argued that a more
appropriate end date would be the 1690s, when the Jesuit priest Eusebio Francisco Kino
initiated the Catholic conversion of the region, establishing missions along the Santa Cruz as far
north as San Xavier del Bac (see Chapter 4 of this report on the early Spanish presence in
southern Arizona).
Despite questions about its precise definition, the Protohistoric period is a convenient way of
referring to Native American cultural developments in southern Arizona during a time before
Europeans arrived in the region but after European influences—in the form of European crops,
livestock, and material culture—were already strongly present. When Kino made his earliest
trips along the Santa Cruz River into southern Arizona, the sedentary peoples in the farming
villages he visited had long ago added wheat and other European crops to their fields, and the
horse had been adopted long ago by the nomadic peoples who frequented the surrounding
mountains and canyons. Infectious diseases introduced by Europeans to the New World had
undoubtedly also spread into the Southwest by the seventeenth century, though the timing and
impacts of these diseases on Native Americans in the region are poorly understood (Sheridan
1988).
Southern Arizona was known by Kino as the Pimeria Alta, the upper land of the Piman speakers,
in contrast to the Pimeria Baja, the lower land of the Piman speakers, now part of the Mexican
state of Sonora, where Kino had been a missionary for many years before expanding his work
into southern Arizona. There were two major groups of indigenous peoples living in the Pimeria
Alta when Kino arrived, separated by differences in language and way of life. The more
numerous group was the O'odham (the name Piman speakers used for themselves), who relied
on agriculture to the extent that a particular local environment would allow. The other major
group was the Apache, who spoke an Athapaskan language and who relied on a mix of hunting,
gathering, and raiding, and only minimally on farming. The Apache were highly mobile and did
not live in permanent villages. Their primary range was the vast, sparsely populated area north
and east of the Pimeria Alta, but they often entered the Tucson Basin to raid the livestock and
food supplies of the sedentary O'odham.
According to Spicer (1962:119), there were as many as 30,000 Piman speakers living in the
Pimeria Alta in the late 1600s. Early on, the Spanish thought of the O'odham in terms of four
major subdivisions—the Pima, the Soba, the Sobaipuri, and the Papago—which may not have
corresponded closely with the O'odham's own conceptions. The Pima lived in the southeastern
part of the region, extending into modern Sonora; the Soba lived to the southwest along the
Altar River; the Sobaipuri lived along the San Pedro and Santa Cruz Rivers as far north as the
Gila River; and the Papago, now known as the Tohono O'odham, lived in the desert to the west
of the Santa Cruz River. In the course of the eighteenth century, the distribution of all of these
groups changed significantly as encroachments by the Spanish and introduced diseases took
their toll. The Soba and Sobaipuri lost their distinct identity altogether and were absorbed by
other O'odham groups. The Tohono O'odham became the largest component in the mission
settlements along the Santa Cruz River.
Ethnohistorians have noted other probable distinctions among the Piman speakers living along
the Santa Cruz River. For example, the Kohatk seem to have been a distinct group living along
the lower Santa Cruz as far north as the Picacho Mountains. The Piman speakers living along
the Gila River, later known as the Akimel O'odham, were also a discrete group that fared
comparatively well in the colonial period, largely because they were beyond the regular reach
of Spanish missionaries (Dobyns 1976; Erickson 1994). When modern anthropologists began
studying O'odham culture in the twentieth century, the O'odham themselves recognized three
distinct groups based on economic practices and residential patterns. The Hia C'ed O'odham, or
Sand People, were the most mobile and least agricultural of the O'odham and lived in the arid
western desert as far south as the Gulf of California. The Tohono O'odham or Desert People,
alternated between summer farming villages and winter hunting-and-gathering camps in the
vast area between the Santa Cruz River and the arid western desert. And the Akimel O'odham,
or River People, stayed year-round in permanent villages along the Gila River. In Fontana's
(1983) terms, these groups are, respectively, the No Villagers, the Two Villagers, and the One
Villagers.
The Apache were also labeled many different ways by the Spanish, though the Spanish
tendency to call any nomadic people "Apache" whether or not they were Athapaskan speakers
makes it difficult to interpret some early sources. In southeastern Arizona and southwestern
New Mexico, the Jocome and Suma occupied what was later the territory of the Chiricahua
Apache (Spicer 1962:237). Farther to the east were the Jano, Manso, and Jumano, who ranged
through what is now Chihuahua as far east as the Rio Grande. Schroeder (1974a, 1974b) has
suggested that no Apache peoples ranged south of the Gila River before the 1680s, which
would mean that the ongoing conflict between O'odham and Apache first described by Kino
and other Spaniards late in the seventeenth century had begun only recently. North of the Gila
River was a region mostly unexplored by the Spanish but called Apacheria, land of the Apache,
a loosely applied term describing the area between Pimeria Alta and and the pueblos of Hopi
and Zuni (Opler 1983:402). Basso (1983:465) has suggested that the inhabitants of this area
later became the Western Apache. By 1700, the Western Apache occupied an extensive
territory extending south from the Mogollon Rim to the Gila River.
From the founding of the first Spanish presidio at Tubac in 1752 until the surrender of the
Apache leader Geronimo in 1886, the history of southern Arizona was dominated by the
conflict between the sedentary peoples of the region and various bands of Apache. The
successive efforts of the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. governments to make the region suitable
for settlement were focused heavily, often exclusively, on reducing the threat of Apache raids.
There were occasional conflicts between Euroamericans and the O'odham in the region, but
none compared in duration or ferocity with the conflict between Euroamericans and the
Apache, and the O'odham typically sided with the Spanish, Mexican, or U.S. forces in their
attempts to drive out or eliminate the Apache. For the Apache, raiding was a cultural tradition
and an important element in their economic survival. The villages of the O'odham, the
associated small Euroamerican settlements, and any traveling party in the region were easy and
regular targets of the Apache. It was only in the 1870s, when the U.S. Army succeeded in
driving the Apache east and north out of the Tucson Basin, that Euroamerican settlement was
able to expand significantly beyond the narrow confines of the Santa Cruz River valley (Dobyns
1976; Officer 1987; Sheridan 1995).
The Canada del Oro area was apparently devoid of O'odham settlements in the historic period,
probably because it was part of the usual range of various Apache bands. Apart from occasional
references to encounters between Apaches and Euroamericans along the Canada del Oro, there
is little evidence for how the Apache may have used the area for hunting and gathering or how
often they may have passed through the area en route to raids. As discussed in Chapter 4,
historical references to the conflict between the Apache and the people of the Tucson area
often mention the Canada del Oro crossing, but archaeological evidence for the Apache
presence in the area is entirely lacking.
A third group of Native Americans, the Yaqui, had an important presence in the Tucson Basin
relatively late in the historic period.The Yaqui speak a dialect of Cahita, a language once spoken
in a large area in what are now the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. The traditional home
of the Yaqui is along the Yaqui River in Sonora and in adjacent portions of the Sierra Madre,
where they led a primarily agricultural way of life. Because of persecution by the Mexican
government in the late nineteenth century, groups of Yaqui abandoned their traditional
territory for locations elsewhere in northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In the Tucson area,
the Yaqui eventually settled in two principal locations: Pascua Village on the near north side of
Tucson and a smaller satellite community in Marana. Although there is no evidence that the
Yaqui had a substantial presence in the Oro Valley study area, many Yaqui have worked on
farms and ranches all around the Tucson area and it would not be surprising to learn that they
also worked at places along the Canada del Oro (Spicer 1940, 1983).
CHAPTER 3
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AND SURVEYS IN THE STUDY AREA
In this chapter, we summarize the results of our search for information on previously recorded
archaeological sites and previously conducted archaeological surveys in the Oro Valley study
area. The primary source of information for both sites and surveys is AZSITE, the statewide
electronic database of archaeological sites and surveys maintained by the Arizona State
Museum (ASM) in Tucson. We also consulted the paper site and survey files of the ASM
Archaeological Records Office, as well as the archaeological reports collection of the ASM
Library. The University of Arizona Library is another important source for archaeological
reports, and we have also relied in this regard on the WSA—Tucson company library. For
information on National Register of Historic Places sites and districts in the Oro Valley study
area, we have consulted the National Register nomination forms for the individual properties.
Information on archaeological sensitivity in the study area was adapted from the Sonoran
Desert Conservation Plan, a long-term planning initiative of Pima County. Additional
information on archaeological sensitivity within the Arroyo Grande Planning Area was also
obtained from Pima County.
Archaeological Survey Coverage in the Study Area
Systematic archaeological survey, which typically consists of walking over an area at regularly
spaced intervals in search of artifacts or other archaeological evidence, has been a fundamental
part of archaeological research in the United States for over 50 years. Nevertheless, the first
recorded archaeological survey in the Oro Valley study area did not take place until 1976. This
seemingly late date is not unusual for southern Arizona (or even for most other regions in the
country) where archaeological surveys did not become common until the 1970s. It was only
then that federal, state, and many municipal agencies began regularly requiring archaeological
surveys in advance of development projects.
The sudden demand for surveys can be attributed to implementation of Section 106 of the
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which requires a federal agency to consider the
effects of its undertakings (even minor ones, such as issuing a permit) on archaeological sites
and other historic properties eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Together with related state and local legislation, Section 106 led to the emergence of contract
archaeology as an industry, and soon professional archaeological surveys—of all sizes, for
projects of all descriptions—were being conducted around the country, including in the Oro
Valley study area.
Since the first survey in 1976, 157 archaeological surveys have been carried out in the Oro
Valley study area. We have listed all of the surveys in Table 1, which is based primarily on the
information available on AZSITE. Most of these surveys have been of limited areas associated
with minor development projects, such as road widenings, linear utility installations, and small
residential tracts, but taken together these 157 surveys have covered approximately 35 percent
of the study area. Three surveys (or sets of surveys) in the study area account for a large part of
the total archaeological survey coverage and are discussed individually below. The coverage of
these three surveys within the Oro Valley study area, totaling 11,644 acres, is depicted in the
Appendix A map. Because it is difficult to accurately depict the coverage of small archaeological
surveys relying solely on the GIS data available from AZSITE, Appendix A does not include the
many smaller surveys carried out to date in the Oro Valley study area.
The total area of the Town of Oro Valley is about 22,338 acres. Of that area, about 11,644 acres
were covered in the three major surveys discussed below. Total archaeological survey coverage
within the Town of Oro Valley limits, including the many minor surveys, is about 65 percent.
Regarding previous survey coverage in both the Town of Oro Valley and the larger Oro Valley
study area, it is important to emphasize that the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office
generally requests that an area previously surveyed for archaeological sites be resurveyed
when the previous survey took place more than ten years ago. This is especially pertinent for
the major surveys discussed below, all of which took place more than ten years ago (with the
exception of small surveys representing expansions of the original major surveys).
Catalina State Park Surveys (1973-1999)
The earliest archaeological survey of what is now Catalina State Park was conducted in 1973,
when ASM was contracted by Ratliff-Miller Development Company to survey the proposed
residential development known as Rancho Romero, which encompassed seven 640-acre
sections (Roubicek et al. 1973) (see Chapter 4 of this overview for the history of Catalina State
Park and its relationship to Rancho Romero). However, the survey was limited to a cursory field
inspection of a sample area of four sections within the entire seven-section project area. A few
years later, ASM was contracted by Brown and Caldwell Consultant Engineers to provide an
archaeological assessment of 100 square miles in advance of construction of a system of
wastewater treatment plants and a gravity sewer line. The study area included the future
Catalina State Park, as well as areas to the north, south, and west (Brew 1975). The assessment
was performed by completing a records search for previously recorded sites, but no fieldwork
was carried out. At the time of the records search, 45 sites had been recorded in and around
the vicinity of Catalina State Park.
It was not until 1980 that ASM archaeologist Lisa Huckell carried out the first systematic
archaeological survey of Catalina State Park (Huckell 1980a). Huckell's project included
pedestrian coverage of over 9.7 square miles, recorded four new sites, and revisited seven
previously recorded sites. The sites ranged in dates from the Early Ceramic period to the
historic period (A.D. 650-1900). Huckell recommended that four sites, including the Romero
Ruin (AZ BB:9:1 [ASM]), be nominated to the National Register. She also noted that, with
further investigation, the whole of Catalina State Park might be eligible for listing on the
National Register as an archaeological district (Huckell 1980a; Elson and Doelle 1987a).
More recently, site-specific documentation and limited excavation of the Romero Ruin, along
with National Register eligibility documentation of the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District,
have been carried out by the Institute for American Research (later Desert Archaeology) (Elson
and Doelle 1987a; Swartz 1991, 1994). In 1994 and 1999, three small surveys were carried out
within the limits of the park in advance of road and facilities expansion and park boundary
fencing (Freisinger and Montero 1994; Schaafsma 1999; Schrager and Farrell 1994). The total
acreage for all of the Catalina State Park surveys within the study area is about 2,170 acres.
Northern Tucson Basin Survey (1980-1987)
One large survey that included part of the Oro Valley study area was prompted by an academic
research program rather than a development project. In 1980, ASM archaeologists carried out a
survey of the middle and lower Santa Cruz River valley north of Tucson. The initial phase of the
survey, completed with support from an Arizona Historic Preservation Planning and Survey
Grant, included the lower Canada del Oro in the vicinity of Marana. The results of the initial
phase served as the basis for a National Science Foundation grant, which allowed a
continuation of the fieldwork over a much larger area. Between 1980 and 1983, over 100
square miles of the northern Tucson Basin were surveyed. A year later, the Bureau of
Reclamation invited ASM to continue additional phases of survey in the vicinity of Marana,
Brady Wash, and McClellan Wash (Madsen et al. 1993). By the time these phases were
completed in 1987, over 685 square miles had been surveyed and 1,267 newly identified
prehistoric and historic sites had been recorded (Madsen et al. 1993). The Northern Tucson
Basin Survey is still the largest archaeological survey ever carried out in southern Arizona. Many
of the archaeological sites known today along the Canada del Oro, and along the eastern edge
of the Oro Valley study area were first recorded during the Northern Tucson Basin Survey. The
total acreage for the Northern Tucson Basin survey within the study area is about 2,595 acres.
Rancho Vistoso Surveys (1980-2007)
In 1977, Vistoso Partners, a Tempe-based concern, proposed a large residential and commercial
development in the area north of the recently incorporated Town of Oro Valley. Later known as
Rancho Vistoso, the project eventually grew to encompass 7,626 acres and included shopping
centers, office parks, and several retirement communities (Ezzo 2007b). Rancho Vistoso has
prompted numerous archaeological investigations in the Canada del Oro area. In 1980-1981,
the archaeological field school of Pima Community College carried out a systematic survey of
portions of the proposed development, recording for the first time the major Hohokam site
now known as Sleeping Snake Village (AZ BB :9:104 [ASM]) (Ezzo and Euler 2007). Three years
later, the Bureau of Land Management conducted a 480-acre survey in a land exchange
associated with the Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act. During the course of the survey, the BLM
identified three prehistoric sites that would later be the focus of excavations carried out by
SWCA Environmental Consultants in 2006 (Brunson et al. 1984, Ezzo 2006).
The entirety of the Rancho Vistoso property was surveyed by the Institute for American
Research (now Desert Archaeology) in 1986 (Craig and Wallace 1987). During the survey, 51
prehistoric sites and three historic sites were recorded. The prehistoric sites, all of them of
probable Hohokam association, included artifact scatters, village and farmstead sites,
procurement and processing sites (with bedrock mortars and grinding slicks), rock art, and lithic
quarries (Craig and Wallace 1987). In 2003, SWCA performed a noncollection survey of 208
acres within Neighborhood 12, at the north end of Rancho Vistoso (Hesse, I. 2003b). Five newly
recorded sites and three previously recorded sites were documented; four of the sites were
later excavated (in 2006), and one site, AZ BB:9:149 (ASM), a series of historic rock fence
segments, was thoroughly mapped and described (Ezzo 2006; Hesse, I. 2003b). Additional small
surveys in Rancho Vistoso related to telecommunications towers and substations have been
performed in recent years (Bauer and Dobschuetz 2002; Cook 2006; Erickson and Rogge 2007).
The total acreage for all of the Rancho Vistoso surveys within the study area is about 6,880
acres.
Several large excavations have been carried out at major sites in the Rancho Vistoso area,
including Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village (AZ BB:9:88 [ASM]) (Craig 1988; Ezzo
2007b). We discuss the work at these two sites later in the chapter.
Archaeological Sensitivity in the Study Area
Archaeological sensitivity, or the probability that a given location as yet unsurveyed will
preserve archaeological remains, can be estimated by considering various characteristics of the
location, including proximity to sources of food and water, suitability for building houses,
proximity to good farm land, the presence of transportation routes, and so on—the things that
matter will vary according to the economic adaptation and cultural preferences in a given time
period. Another important clue to the archaeological sensitivity of a location is the distribution
of archaeological sites already recorded in the surrounding area.
The only systematic analysis of archaeological sensitivity to include the Oro Valley study area
was carried out by the Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation Office in 2000
as part of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP). The SDCP is a comprehensive planning
document for eastern Pima County developed by biologists, ecologists, geographers,
archaeologists, and other specialists to guide the long-range planning decisions of the county
(SDCP 2009). The goal of the archaeological sensitivity analysis was to create a sensitivity map
for the eastern portion of the county that would help county planners gauge, in a general way,
the probable impacts of proposed development projects on archaeological sites. The map is
currently in use by county planners and can be viewed in its entirety on the SDCP web site
(http://www.dot.co.pima.az.us/cmo/sdcpmaps/). We have excerpted the portion of the map
covering the Oro Valley study area as Appendix B.
The SDCP sensitivity map is based on the kinds of factors already mentioned—proximity to
resources, suitability for habitation, the distribution of known sites, and so on—and defines
areas in terms of three archaeological sensitivity ratings: low, moderate, and high. As in all
analyses of archaeological sensitivity, the distinctions made between areas of different
sensitivity have to be considered rough estimates rather than precise calculations, because it is
impossible to know all of the factors affecting the use of a location in any time period. An area
characterized as having low sensitivity may well hold significant archaeological sites, and an
area of high sensitivity may well be devoid of sites. Nevertheless, the Appendix B map does
provide a useful characterization of the Oro Valley study area: about 77 percent of the study
area is rated as having high sensitivity,
about 23 percent is rated as having moderate sensitivity, and no part of the study area is rated
as having low sensitivity.
The sensitivity ratings for the study area do not take into account the impacts of recent
development. Given that much of the study area has been drastically altered through ground-
disturbing activities associated with residential and commercial development, significant
portions of the areas of high and moderate sensitivity actually have little or no potential to
preserve archaeological remains. But the impacts of development are highly variable and
difficult to know precisely without archaeological investigation. An area long used as a parking
lot, a road, or even a large building may still preserve significant subsurface archaeological
features despite the evident impacts to the original ground surface. Thus, archaeological
sensitivity ratings can be used only as an initial indication of the archaeological sites that might
be found in an area and not to predict whether archaeological remains are preserved in a
particular place.
Archaeological Sensitivity in the Arroyo Grande Planning Area
The northern portion of the Oro Valley study area includes the Arroyo Grande Planning Area,
which consists of 11,547 acres of state trust land in unincorporated Pima County, situated
between the northern boundary of the Town of Oro Valley and the Pima-Pinal county line (see
Figure 2). The Arroyo Grande Planning Area is the focus of an effort by the Arizona State Land
Department to develop a land use plan that will outline appropriate uses for the area based on
a wide range of environmental, economic, and social considerations. In response to the state
planning effort for Arroyo Grande, the Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic
Preservation Office prepared a brief overview of archaeological potential in the Arroyo Grande
Planning Area (Mayro and Rose 2008). The overview notes that Arroyo Grande includes an area
of potentially great archaeological significance, centered on a large Hohokam village site known
as Indian Town Ruin, or AZ BB:5:26 (ASM).
First recorded in 1976 in a survey by Pima Community College (Hewitt and Johnson 1978),
Indian Town Ruin is located just north of the Pima-Pinal county line. It covers at least 74 acres
and is probably much larger, extending south of the county line into Pima County. Although it
has not yet been fully documented, Indian Town Ruin includes over 100 adobe-walled
structures, pits, trash mounds, and other features, as well as petroglyphs, rock alignments, and
myriad artifacts. The site was in all likelihood the center of a complex system of settlement in
the eastern foothills of the Tortolita Mountains, a system that included a wide range of sites of
different sizes and functions. Some of these other sites have already been documented on both
sides of the county line, but the percentage of the Arroyo Grande planning area that has been
surveyed for sites is still low, less than 25 percent.
In keeping with the goals of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and the Pima County
Comprehensive Land Use Plan, the county has recommended that a contiguous parcel of about
3,500 acres encompassing the Indian Town Ruin and 31 other previously recorded sites—all
possibly related to the Indian Town Ruin—be designated a Priority Archaeological Site Complex
(see Appendix B). This designation amounts to a recommendation that the entire complex of
sites
be preserved in place as an archaeological landscape of exceptional importance. If preservation
of the entire complex is not possible, individual sites within the complex should be avoided by
proposed land uses and protected in place, and newly discovered sites in the area should be
treated in the same way. When avoidance of an individual site is not possible, the impacts
should be mitigated—in other words, the site should be excavated by professional
archaeologists following a county-approved data recovery plan. The authors of the county
overview also emphasize that a thorough reassessment of the entire Indian Town Ruin complex
is needed to determine the full extent and condition of its archaeological resources.
Previously Recorded Archaeological Sites in the Study Area
Archaeological surveys in the Oro Valley study area have recorded a total of 185 archaeological
sites, ranging in dates from the prehistoric Early Ceramic period (A.D. 100-750) to the historic
post–World War II period (1945-1960). Of the 185 sites, 160 are exclusively prehistoric in date,
17 are exclusively historic in date, and eight sites have both prehistoric and historic
components. Table 2 lists the numbers of sites in the study area by period and site function.
Table 3 provides a full list of sites with report references. The locations of previously recorded
archaeological sites are provided on the Appendix C map. Three prehistoric sites—Honey Bee
Village, Romero Ruin, and Sleeping Snake Village—have special importance both for the study
area and for the prehistory of the Tucson Basin more generally. All three sites were large
Hohokam villages that were occupied for extended periods of time. All three sites hold the
remains of numerous houses, storage and roasting pits, and a variety of other features,
including the probable remains of ball courts, which served a specialized ritual function. Each
site was the center of an organized system of smaller sites related to the large site through
social, economic, and political connections.
Honey Bee Village (AZ BB:9:88 [ASM])
Honey Bee Village covers an area of about 75 acres on the west side of Honey Bee Wash, one of
the main feeder washes draining from the north into the Canada del Oro. The site was first
recorded in 1980 by archaeologists and field school students from Pima Community College in a
survey of the eastern Tortolita Mountains. The fieldwork consisted of sketch maps and limited
surface collections of artifacts (Hewitt and Johnson 1978). The site was revisited in 1986 by the
Institute for American Research (later Desert Archaeology) during the Rancho Vistoso Survey
(Craig and Wallace 1987). Detailed maps were made and an intensive surface collection yielded
more than 6,000 Hohokam-associated artifacts. Preliminary analysis of the surface artifacts
indicated an occupation from the Colonial period through the Rincon phase of the Sedentary
period. In 1989, the Institute for American Research conducted archaeological testing at the
site within a 12-acre area believed to represent the central part of the site (Craig 1989). The
area included large trash mounds, a ball court compound, and other rock-walled features
visible on the modern ground surface. The test excavations, which revealed architecture and
artifacts consistent with the range of dates established for the site in the previous surveys,
focused on questions of community organization. The results showed that the trash mounds
were arranged around areas of intensive habitation, which were arranged in turn around a
central plaza or open area.
In 2006-2007, Desert Archaeology carried out large-scale excavations at Honey Bee Village,
recording nearly 800 pit houses, 206 human burials, and the burials of several dogs, a hawk,
and a golden eagle; the total number of artifacts recovered from the site exceeds 73,000
(Medrano 2008). Preparation of a final report on the excavations is still in progress, but Honey
Bee Village has already become an important example of the wealth of information that
prehistoric sites in the Oro Valley area can provide when they are the focus of systematic
archaeological investigation. The final treatment of Honey Bee Village is also a landmark in the
protection of archaeological resources. In an agreement among the various stakeholders in the
project—the developer, the Town of Oro Valley, Pima County, ASM, and the Tohono O'odham
Nation (which considers Honey Bee Village an ancestral site)—the developer donated 13 acres
at the core of the site to be protected in perpetuity as an archaeological preserve. The
protected parcel includes several large mounds, a plaza, a ball court, and various other
features, all of which are protected from development (OVHS 2009e).
Romero Ruin (AZ BB:9:1 [ASM])
Romero Ruin is a 15-acre Hohokam site with a later historic component located within present-
day Catalina State Park. It sits on a ridge above Sutherland Wash, with an associated field
system that extends from the southern edge of the site toward the adjacent Santa Catalina
Mountains. Professional archaeologists consider Romero Ruin "one of the most significant sites
in the Tucson Basin" (Elson and Doelle 1987a:1). The Romero Ruin is also part of the Sutherland
Wash Archaeological District, which was listed on the National Register as an archaeological
district in 1987 (Elson and Doelle 1987b).
Elson and Doelle (1987a) provide the most detailed summary of the history of investigations at
Romero Ruin, as well as a comprehensive discussion of the site itself; we follow their summary
here. Romero Ruin, originally called Pueblo Viejo, was identified as early as 1915 by Robert
Forbes, an early president of the University of Arizona and an avid explorer of southern
Arizona's wilderness areas. The earliest scientific investigation of the site was by Ellsworth
Huntington (1910), who was interested in human adaptations to arid climates and used the
Hohokam as a case study. Huntington recorded the two ball courts at the site as reservoirs, but
correctly identified the occupation sequence at the ruin (Elson and Doelle 1987a:6-8).
From 1973 to 1980, archaeologists working with ASM conducted two surveys and an overview
of Romero Ruin and the surrounding area. Roubicek and others (1973) resurveyed the area
including Romero Ruin for the Ratliff-Miller Development Company, and recommended further
intensive survey. Brew (1975) conducted a records search on behalf of Brown and Caldwell
Consultant Engineers. Brew was among the first archaeologists to note the importance of the
historic component of Romero Ruin in addition to the Hohokam component. Huckell (1980a)
assessed the Catalina State Park area for impacts of park development, examined the outlying
area, and reassessed all previously known sites to update the ASM files. Huckell recommended
Romero Ruin for National Register nomination in addition to more intensive investigations.
In early 1987, Elson and Doelle (1987a) conducted a survey of the Catalina State Park centered
on Romero Ruin. They collected diagnostic surface artifacts, then mapped and described all of
the surface features. They collected a total of 11,499 artifacts from the site surface and
analyzed a sample, including 1,659 decorated ceramic sherds, 339 flaked stone tools, and 126
pieces of ground stone (Elson and Doelle 1987a:14-18). The same year, the National Register
nominations for the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District (Elson and Doelle 1987b) and the
adjacent Sutherland Wash Rock Art District (Farrell and Burton n.d.) were prepared and
submitted. In the fall of 1990, test excavations were carried out at Romero Ruin (Swartz 1991),
providing the largest early red ware assemblage from a stratigraphic context at the time and
establishing the Tortolita phase (A.D. 450-650) occupation at Romero. In 1993, additional
limited archaeological testing was conducted by the Center for Desert Archaeology at Romero
Ruin to make way for an interpretive trail (Swartz 1994).
The archaeological features at Romero Ruin include 17 trash mounds, 12 trash concentrations,
two ball courts, three possible cremation areas, a masonry compound, a plaza area, a large field
system for agriculture, and 37 other prehistoric cultural features; the site also has the visible
remains of four or five masonry rooms from historic times. Romero Ruin was occupied
prehistorically from around A.D. 550 through the Tucson phase (A.D. 1300-1450) of the
Hohokam Classic period, and likely during some part of the Protohistoric period (A.D. 1450-
1692), though the intensity of occupation in the latter period is unknown. The site was
reoccupied in the late 1860s as a cattle ranch by Francisco Romero and his family (see the
discussion of the Romero family in Chapter 4). The Hohokam occupation of the site led to a
series of mound groups at the site, each mound representing a combination of trash, building
rubble, and living space surrounded by trash. Elson and Doelle (1987a:47) have argued that the
mounds were placed deliberately, in order to define social space at the site; this is supported by
the placement of two ball courts, one at either end of the site. There is evidence of continuous
occupation of the site as a whole, and periodic reoccupation of individual mound areas.
Sleeping Snake Village (AZ 66:9:104 [ASM])
Sleeping Snake Village is an extensive Hohokam site covering about 99 acres at the eastern foot
of the Tortolita Mountains, in the northern portion of the Oro Valley study area. Like Romero
Ruin and Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village is a ball court site with evidence of a long,
continuous occupation. The site dates to the middle Sedentary through early Classic periods of
the Hohokam chronology, with its most intensive occupation occurring during the Sedentary
period (A.D. 950-1150). The site was first recorded in 1980 by archaeologists and field school
students from Pima Community College during a survey of the eastern Tortolita Mountains
(Ezzo and Euler 2007). This initial survey included the preparation of sketch maps of the site and
a limited surface collection of artifacts. The site was revisited in 1986 during the Rancho Vistoso
survey carried out by the Institute for American Research (Craig and Wallace 1987). The Rancho
Vistoso survey included the first systematic investigation of Sleeping Snake Village: a site grid
was established, five mound areas (called site loci) were defined, and more than 100 features
were tentatively identified, including the ball court and 30 trash mounds. The ball court was
mapped in full cross section (Ezzo 2007b:53).
In 1994, SWCA began test excavations at Locus B for Vistoso Partners. A total of 380 linear
meters of backhoe trenches exposed 24 features, and diagnostic artifacts were collected from
the site surface, the trenches, and a hand-excavated test unit. In the SWCA report (Roberts et
al. 1995), the archaeologists recommended data recovery excavation under eight research
themes: site structure, household economy, socioeconomic relations, chronology, subsistence
and resource exploitation, mortuary practices, paleoenvironment, and settlement patterns
(Ezzo 2007b:53). In 1995, 1996, and 2000, SWCA carried out additional test excavations and
then phased data recovery excavations at all five original loci (A–E), identifying another mound
area (Locus F). Additional trenching (3,481 linear meters), feature mapping, excavation, and
sampling allowed SWCA to identify a total of 520 previously unrecorded features. Of these, 267
were more intensively investigated (Ezzo 2007b:53-70).
The results of the work at Sleeping Snake Village, combined with the results from Los Venados
(AZ BB:9:186 [ASM]), a nearby site of the same age also investigated by SWCA, has provided
valuable information about community structure, settlement patterns, and other aspects of the
Hohokam culture of the northern Tucson Basin. Ezzo (2007c:779) has concluded that
households at Sleeping Snake Village were tightly linked in courtyard groups, in contrast to the
more loosely connected households at Los Venados. This suggests a difference in social
organization at the two sites even though many inhabitants of the area likely used both sites.
Sleeping Snake Village held little evidence for the manufacture of goods beyond items relating
to the basic activities of hunting, gathering, and growing maize and other foods. Instead, the
people who lived at the site seem to have imported the pottery, obsidian projectile points, and
shell ornaments that they used (Ezzo 2007c:779).
The layout of Sleeping Snake Village matches the dispersed rancheria plan typical of Hohokam
sites in the Tucson Basin: a nucleated center surrounded by numerous smaller clusters of
features, all of it distributed across a large open space (Ezzo 2007d:795; Fish and Fish 1994).
The smaller clusters represent multiple site types—procurement areas, food-processing loci,
individual pit houses, and hamlets. Rock art, which is common in the area, may have played an
integrative role for the site center and the outlying clusters. Ezzo (2007e:805) has suggested
that rock art in the area "layered the landscape with ritualistic, shamanic, territorial,
cosmological, and informational meaning." There is some evidence that the vicinity of Sleeping
Snake Village, including Los Venados and Honey Bee Village, was occupied by two distinct
cultural traditions in succession: the Pioneer-period Cochise tradition, then the Sedentary-
period Hohokam tradition, which became the primary cultural presence in the region. There is
little to no evidence of a Classic period occupation at Sleeping Snake Village, which suggests
Classic-period resettlement to larger aggregated settlements such as the Marana Community
near the Santa Cruz River (Ezzo 2007e:805-806).
Historic Archaeological Sites in the Study Area
As Table 2 indicates, far fewer historic archaeological sites have been recorded in the Oro Valley
study area than prehistoric sites. This circumstance relates in part to the relatively brief period
of settlement in the historic period-150 years or so—compared to the relatively long period of
settlement in the prehistoric period-2,000 years or more. But it also relates to a bias toward
prehistoric sites on the part of archaeologists during the past 35 years of systematic surveys in
the study area. As elsewhere in the United States, the archaeological remains of historic-period
settlement in southern Arizona, particularly the unexotic, relatively recent remains of ordinary
houses and other features from the early twentieth century (not to mention the remains of
even more recent settlement), were long overlooked by archaeologists or given less priority
than prehistoric sites or simply dismissed as unimportant. In recent years, this bias has waned
significantly and archaeological surveys now regularly record historic sites that would have
been neglected in earlier surveys.
Not withstanding the increased attention that archaeologists now pay to historic archaeological
sites, the number of such sites recorded in the Oro Valley study area is still low. Ironically, the
two historic sites that have received the most attention owe that attention to other aspects of
their identity. The archaeological component of the Steam Pump Ranch, AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), has
been recommended as eligible to the National Register (Thiel 2007), but the site is best known
for its architectural and other surviving ranching-related features, and its recent listing on the
National Register is based on those features rather than its archaeological potential (Barker
2009). Similarly, the historic component of Romero Ruin, AZ BB:9:1 (ASM), is recognized by
archaeologists (e.g., Brew 1975) as an important part of the site, but one wonders if the
remains of Francisco Romero's early ranch house would have even survived if he hadn't built it
directly atop an important Hohokam site.
The GLO survey plats and other early maps discussed in Chapter 4, along with the large number
of homesteads patented in the Canada del Oro area, suggest that plenty of other historic
archaeological sites await discovery in Oro Valley, even if many others have already been
destroyed by development.
Sites and Districts on the National Register of Historic Places
Currently, the Oro Valley study area has only two historic properties listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. The first to be listed was the Sutherland Wash Archaeological
District, a large area in Catalina State Park that includes the lower portion of Sutherland Wash
and the vicinity of its junction with the Canada del Oro. Listed in 1987, the district consists of 38
mostly undisturbed archaeological sites ranging in age from the Archaic period to the historic
period of the late nineteenth century (Elson and Doelle 1987b). A portion of the district,
including its largest site, Romero Ruin, or AZ BB:9:1 (ASM) falls within the Oro Valley study area
(see earlier in this chapter for a description of the site). A plot of the boundary of the
Sutherland Wash Archaeological District is included on the Appendix C map.
The other National Register—listed property in the Oro Valley study area is the Steam Pump
Ranch, or AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), which was listed just this year (Barker 2009). The home of early
settler George Pusch and his family during the approximate period 1874-1931, the Steam
Pump Ranch is located along the west side of Oracle Road just north of its intersection with
First Avenue. The ranch was owned by the John Procter family from 1933 until 2005, and the
Procter family is as important to the ranch's historic identity as the Pusch family. Twenty
structures still stand on the property, 13 of which are considered contributing elements of the
historic ranch. Of the 20 structures, 9 are buildings and the rest are ranching-related structures.
The period of significance
for the Steam Pump Ranch nomination is 1874-1962, for which the ranch is considered to
retain integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
The ranch has undergone various changes over the years, but the "essential physical features"
of the ranch in the period of significance are still readily appreciated.
Another National Register—listed property falling just outside the Oro Valley study area is worth
mentioning because of its connection to the Sutherland Wash Archaeological District. The
Sutherland Wash Rock Art District, located just east of the study area, was also listed in 1987
(Farrell and Burton n.d.). It consists of a 30-acre area along Sutherland Wash that holds an
estimated 1,500 petroglyph elements, one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric rock art
documented in southern Arizona. The petroglyphs represent two principal traditions: the
Hohokam tradition, usually dated to A.D. 600-1450; and the earlier Western Archaic tradition.
The boundary of the Sutherland Wash Rock Art District is just east of the area covered by the
Appendix C map.
As Table 3 makes clear, the small number of properties in the Oro Valley study area that are
currently listed on the National Register belies the number of important archaeological and
historic sites previously recorded in the area. Of the 185 previously recorded sites in the study
area, six others have been determined eligible for listing and another 29 have been
recommended eligible for listing by their recorders. Many of the recorded sites have never
been evaluated, and many have probably been destroyed by development since they were
recorded. There is little question that other sites in the study area, both previously recorded
sites and sites yet to be discovered, are eligible for listing on the National Register.
A final note regarding historic district designations in the Oro Valley area: the entire cultural
resources inventory study area is included in the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage
Area, which encompasses the portion of the Santa Cruz River watershed from the international
border with Mexico to the Pima-Pinal county line (Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance 2009).
The National Register sites and districts already designated in the study area, along with
additional sites and districts designated through future work, will be an important part of the
National Heritage Area and contribute to the attraction of the Oro Valley area for both local
residents and visitors.
CHAPTER 4
HISTORY IN THE ORO VALLEY STUDY AREA, 1539-1974
In southern Arizona, the beginning of the historic period is conventionally placed at 1539, the
year of the first entrada (exploratory expedition) to the region sponsored by the Spanish
colonial government in Mexico City. The end of the historic period is often placed, more
arbitrarily, at 50 years ago—currently 1959—in conformance with the usual practice of the
National Register of Historic Places not to consider a property historically significant until it is at
least 50 years old. Archaeologists and historians, who are often called on to evaluate properties
for National Register eligibility, usually refer to anything less than 50 years old as modern, but
in southern Arizona such a distinction between historic and modern is not always a meaningful
one. In Oro Valley, where the modern landscape is above all a product of post–World War II
suburban development, a more useful distinction is the one between the postwar period, or
1945 to the present, and the four centuries of history that preceded it. The first three decades
of postwar development in Oro Valley culminated in the incorporation of the Town of Oro
Valley in 1974, the year that marks the limit of our concern for the cultural resources inventory.
In this chapter, we survey the history of the study area in two pieces. First we look at the long
period from the earliest Spanish entrada into southern Arizona to the end of World War II, or
1539-1945. Then we look at the much shorter period from the end of the war to the
incorporation of the town, or 1945-1974. Throughout the chapter, we try to link the regional
history of southern Arizona to the particular history of the Canada del Oro area, but this is not
always easily done. Before the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated, the history of the area
was mostly peripheral to the history of Tucson, which was the cultural and economic center of
southern Arizona throughout the historic period. Tucson was itself, for most of the historic
period, a place on the periphery of a much larger entity, first the Spanish colonial empire, then
the newly independent Mexican republic, then the large, sparsely populated area added to the
United States well before social and economic ties made it a recognizable part of the country.
Thus, the place that became Oro Valley was long a peripheral part of an already peripheral
place, which means that much of Oro Valley's history is undocumented, or approachable only
through the history of southern Arizona as a whole. The first few sections below review a
regional history with little direct mention of the Canada del Oro or its vicinity, but it is all useful
background for the later sections dealing directly with the study area.
Southern Arizona History in Brief
The history of southern Arizona can be divided into three periods, corresponding to the three
political entities that have encompassed the region in succession: the Spanish Colonial period
(1539-1821), the Mexican period (1821-1854), and the U.S. period (1854—present). The
transition from one period to the next was not as neat as these precise year dates suggest, but
each period was characterized by distinctive social and economic patterns that left lasting
impressions on the region. The following discussion of the three periods is based on syntheses
of Arizona and regional history by Bolton (1984), O'Mack and others (2004), O'Mack and Toupal
(2000), Sheridan (1988, 1995), Weber (1982, 1992), and Whittlesey and others (1994).
Spanish Colonial Period (1539-1821)
The earliest documented entrada into what later became Arizona was made by the Franciscan
friar Marcos de Niza in 1539. With the support of the Spanish colonial government, Niza led a
small expedition northward from the town of Culiacan, in what was then northernmost New
Spain, to the vicinity of the pueblo of Zuni, in what is now western New Mexico. It is uncertain
whether Niza himself made it as far north as Zuni, but he and his companions probably passed
through southern Arizona along the San Pedro River, reaching at least as far north as the Gila
River before returning to Culiacan. One member of Niza's expedition, a North African called
Esteban, reportedly did reach Zuni but died there at the hands of the suspicious residents.
Niza's report of a fabulously wealthy place called Cibola (inspired by what he had heard of Zuni)
prompted a more substantial entrada in 1540, led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and
consisting of some 300 Spaniards, 1,000 Native American guides and porters, and 1,500 head of
cattle, horses, and mules. Much of Coronado's route, which eventually led him as far north and
east as the Great Plains, is difficult to reconstruct, but he, too, passed through southern
Arizona, probably also traveling along the San Pedro River. Over the next two years, Coronado's
lieutenants made numerous exploratory side trips, including at least a dozen into Arizona, but
none of these trips included any further exploration of the southern portion of the state.
Coronado never did find Cibola or anything remotely like it, and southern Arizona remained
essentially unexplored and uninhabited by Europeans for the next 150 years.
A sustained Spanish presence in southern Arizona did not begin until 1691, when Eusebio
Francisco Kino, a Jesuit priest, led a small expedition from an established Jesuit mission in what
is now Sonora, Mexico, to an O'odham (Pima-speaking) settlement at Tumacacori on the Santa
Cruz River. Kino's purpose was to spread the Catholic faith to the inhabitants of the region,just
as he and his Jesuit colleagues had already done at their missions in Sonora. His many
subsequent trips to the region over the next two decades led to the establishment of missions
at several O'odham settlements on the Santa Cruz, most notably San Xavier del Bac, nine miles
south of modern Tucson. Kino also established a number of visitas—secondary mission sites
without resident priests—at smaller O'odham settlements along the Santa Cruz north of San
Xavier, including San Cosme de Tucson, on the west bank of the river and across from the
eventual site of the Tucson presidio.
In 1752, in response to a rebellion by the O'odham the year before, the Spanish government
established a presidio at Tubac on the Santa Cruz River near Tumacacori. This was the first
permanent Spanish settlement in Arizona. The presidio afforded some protection to the
missions along the river and served as a base for further explorations of southern Arizona.
Following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the New World in 1767, care of the missions along
the Santa Cruz fell to the Franciscans, who continued the efforts of the Jesuits despite a
declining O'odham population and an increasing incidence of Apache raiding. Bands of Apaches
lived in mountain strongholds to the north and east of the Santa Cruz Valley, descending
regularly on the sedentary O'odham population to carry off food and livestock, and disrupting
the efforts of the missions. In 1776, with the hope of better protecting the settlements and
missions of the northernmost frontier of the colony, the colonial government closed the Tubac
presidio in favor of a new presidio at Tucson, and for the remainder of the colonial period,
Tucson represented the maximum northern extent of the Spanish colony in what later became
Arizona.
The Tucson presidio held a small, permanent contingent of soldiers and officers, which afforded
enough protection from Apache raids to allow the development of a small community of
settlers outside its adobe walls. This community, the beginning of modern Tucson, consisted
mostly of Spanish-speaking settlers from other parts of New Spain, but it also included Tohono
O'odham from places in the surrounding desert and a small enclave of pacified Apaches. The
presidio community, located at the tail end of colonial supply lines, largely supported itself,
farming the adjacent Santa Cruz River floodplain and grazing cattle and other stock on the lands
around the presidio. Mining was pursued on a small scale, but the places suitable for mining
were in the mountains, where travel was too dangerous to allow any sustained effort at mining.
Mexican Period (1821-1854)
When Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the Spanish presence in southern
Arizona was limited to the Tucson presidio with its small dependent community of settlers and
the two Franciscan missions at San Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. At first, little changed under
the newly formed Mexican government, except that daily life for both the Spanish and the
O'odham residents of the Santa Cruz Valley became even less secure. The remoteness of the
administrative center of Mexico, along with the instability of the Mexican government in the
early decades of independence, led to a neglect of the northernmost frontier, which led in turn
to an increase in the incidence of Apache raids, further isolating the already remote outpost of
Tucson. In 1828, uneasy with the power of the Catholic Church in remote parts of the republic,
the Mexican government ordered the withdrawal of the Franciscans from the northern
missions, leaving the O'odham community and the recently built mission churches at San Xavier
del Bac and Tumacacori without their longtime advocates in the region.
In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, the Gila
River became the new boundary between Mexico and the United States. The region south of
the river remained a part of Mexico, but the new proximity of the United States fostered a
significant increase in the social and economic interaction of the region with the rapidly
expanding country to the north. In 1849, the California gold rush brought an influx of Anglo-
American and other Euroamerican immigrants to southern Arizona, following long-established
but never heavily used trails across the region.
U.S. Period (1854—present)
In 1854, the Gadsden Purchase made the rest of what is now southern Arizona, from the Gila
River to the modern international border, a part of the United States. The Gadsden Purchase
was prompted in part by U.S. interest in securing a suitable right-of-way for a southern railroad
route to California, and it was immediately followed by topographical surveys searching for the
most practical route. Small U.S. Army posts were also established in the region shortly after its
purchase, and soon more Anglo-Americans and others were entering the region, first as traders
and merchants, and later as farmers and ranchers. The Homestead Act of 1862 made it easy for
ordinary citizens to file claims on recently acquired government lands, and the end of the Civil
War sent a new generation of immigrants to the west in search of economic opportunities in
farming, ranching, and mining. Tucson was still the only substantial settlement in southern
Arizona at the start of the U.S. period, but within a decade new settlements were taking shape
in the region, including along the Salt and Gila rivers to the north.
The Civil War made southern Arizona an area of Union-Confederate contention for a brief time
in 1861-1862, which temporarily inhibited Anglo-American settlement, but a far more
substantial obstacle was posed by the Apaches, who were a relentless threat in southern
Arizona for another two decades. Arizona, a part of New Mexico Territory since the Gadsden
Purchase, became its own territory in 1863, but it was not until 1870 that U.S. Army Gen.
George Crook arrived in southern Arizona to begin the final campaign to subdue the Apaches.
By 1873 he had pushed the Apache frontier far enough eastward from Tucson to allow both
Mexican- and Anglo-Americans to ranch with some success along the Santa Cruz River. Other
ranchers soon followed with successful operations in the Arivaca area to the west of the Santa
Cruz, along Tanque Verde Creek to the east, along Sonoita Creek to the southeast, and along
the Canada del Oro to the north.
The Southern Pacific Railroad was built across southern Arizona, from west to east, in 1878-
1880. Following the same corridor along the Gila and Santa Cruz rivers used for many years by
foot and wagon traffic, the railroad reached Tucson in March 1880. Its arrival led to an even
greater influx of Anglo-Americans and others to southern Arizona and marked southern
Arizona's complete integration into the national economic system. The political integration of
Arizona into the United States became similarly complete when the territory finally achieved
statehood in 1912.
Sources on the Early History of the Study Area
Aside from its occasional mention as a place along the road north from Tucson, the Canada del
Oro area did not appear often in documentary sources until a few people began to live there on
something like a regular basis, which happened no earlier than the late 1860s. If the earliest
fitful attempts at settlement are excluded, the history of the area is not substantially
documented until the late 1870s, when George Pusch and his business partner, John Zellweger,
began raising cattle at the place later known as the Steam Pump Ranch. An abundance of
documentation is available for the late 1870s and later, including articles in the Tucson
newspapers; federal census records; federal land patents; county land records; birth, death,
and marriage records; and so on. Thiel's recent study of the Steam Pump Ranch (2007) is a good
example of the kind of detailed information on a particular place that can be gathered from
these sources. Many other places in the study area, not settled or used quite as early as Pusch
and Zellweger's ranch, could be studied in similar detail using the same kinds of sources.
George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch have been the focus of all or part of several other
works (Allen-Bacon 1997; Jeffery 2003; Marriott 2005, 2008; OVHS 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Zipf
1988-1989), but the subject is far from exhausted. Henry Zipf, a grandson of George Pusch and
a resident of Oro Valley, has donated to the Oro Valley Historical Society twenty banker boxes
full of documents and other items relating to his grandfather's business and private life. These
materials have not been fully inventoried but will undoubtedly provide much new information
about the George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch. The Town of Oro Valley will also soon
donate to the Oro Valley Historical Society the collection of early photographs found recently in
the ruins of the chicken coop at the Steam Pump Ranch. These photographs date to the period
when John Procter and his family owned and lived on the ranch, a period already examined in
some detail by Thiel (2007).
The following paragraphs discuss the history of the Canada del Oro from the days of the earliest
settlers to the mid-twentieth century, as it can be approached using two sources, early maps
and homesteading records. This is not a comprehensive study of either the period or the two
kinds of sources, but hopefully it provides a sense of the relevant sources that exist for the
study area and of the interesting, unanswered questions that these sources can raise.
Early Map Research
Because of its proximity to Tucson, the land encompassed by the study area is included on most
early maps of southern Arizona, but it was not until the early U.S. period that maps of the
region were prepared with enough detail to show features such as settlements or roads in the
area just west of the Santa Catalina Mountains. A good example from the early U.S. period is
the Map of the Military Department of New Mexico, prepared during the Civil War by a U.S.
Army engineer (Anderson 1864). The map covers both New Mexico and Arizona territories (the
latter created just a year before), but it is nonetheless fairly detailed, with an emphasis on the
locations of military posts and the routes that connected them (Figure 4). The map has certain
shortcomings (among them, miscomprehensions of Spanish place names: the Tortolita
Mountains are labeled "Sierra Tortillista"), but it accurately shows the army posts at Tubac
("Tabac") and Tucson, and the wagon road that connected them paralleling the Santa Cruz
River. It also shows Fort Grant, recently established northeast of the Santa Catalinas near the
point where Aravaipa Creek enters the San Pedro River. A trail (not a wagon road) extends
north from Tucson to Fort Grant, skirting the west side of the Santa Catalinas then heading
northeast to the San Pedro River. This is one of the earliest depictions of the route that
eventually became modern Oracle Road. (The place labeled "Charles de los Pimas" north of
Tucson and west of the Tucson—Fort Grant Road is probably the place known as Charco de
Yuma or Charco de las Jumas, a large Hohokam ruin better known as Los Morteros, in present-
day Marana; see Wallace 1996).
Most other nineteenth-century maps of southern Arizona show little else along the west side of
the Santa Catalinas other than the road between Tucson and one or another named destination
on the San Pedro River. An important exception is the Official Map of Pima County prepared in
1893 by a former county surveyor, George Roskruge (Roskruge 1893). Roskruge's map includes
a wealth of detail for the Tucson area but also for other parts of Pima County where settlement
was still sparse. His depiction of the area between the Santa Catalina and Tortolita Mountains
(the latter labeled "Tortillita Mountains") shows the Canada del Oro, the road from Tucson to
Mammoth (a mining settlement on the lower San Pedro), and three locations where early
settlers had established ranches, labeled Steam Pump, Romero, and Charouleau (Figure 5).
Roskruge also included the surveyed route of the proposed Tucson, Globe, and Northern
Railroad, which roughly paralleled the Tucson-Mammoth road. All of these features, which
played different roles in the history of the area, are discussed below.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Roskruge's map is the contrast between the large
number of settlers shown along the Santa Cruz and Rillito rivers, just outside Tucson proper,
and the near-absence of settlers along the Canada del Oro. Within a decade after the map
appeared, the Canada del Oro area would see the steady spread of homesteading north from
Tucson, but at the end of the nineteenth century it was still largely without settlement. The
relatively late beginning for settlement along the Canada del Oro can be attributed in large part
to a continuing perception of the area as dangerous: it was still considered a place too far from
Tucson and too close to the usual range of the Apaches.
General Land Office Survey Plats
In the early twentieth century, as settlement in the Tucson area began to expand northward
into the Canada del Oro area, the first formal surveys of the area were carried out by the U.S.
Surveyor General's Office in Phoenix. Prior to the surveys, all of the lands in the Canada del Oro
area, like the lands in any other unsettled part of the West, were part of the public domain and
regulated by the federal government. Surveying the land was a necessary step in making the
land available for homesteading and other claims by private parties. The maps (called plats) and
notes from these early surveys, all of which were eventually filed with the General Land Office
(GLO) in Washington, D.C., are often uniquely detailed sources on the cultural and natural
features in an area early in its settlement history.
The typical plat covers a township, or an area six miles square, designated with Township and
Range numbers that indicate the place of the township in a large survey grid established for the
given region. The grid itself is defined by a baseline (or east-west line) and a meridian (or north-
south line) that intersect at a specified point. A standard township contains 36 one-mile-square
sections. The Oro Valley study area encompasses portions of four townships, all part of the
survey grid defined by the Gila and Salt River Baseline and Meridian, which intersect at a point
near the confluence of the two named rivers. The earliest GLO plats for all four townships in the
Oro Valley study area are listed in Table 4.
We reviewed the portion of each survey plat that falls within the Oro Valley study area for
cultural features. The resulting list of features, arranged by township and section, is presented
in Table 5. The list does not include roads or trails, which are too numerous and extensive to list
and describe in this way. The portions of each township plat falling within the Oro Valley study
area are reproduced in Figures 6-11. All of the features depicted on these early maps represent
potential historical-archaeological sites, although modern development has undoubtedly
destroyed many of them.
United States Geological Survey Topographic Maps
Around the same time that the earliest GLO survey plats of the Canada del Oro area were being
drawn, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was preparing the first detailed topographic
maps of southern Arizona. Like the survey plats, the early USGS maps are generally accurate
and useful records of the settlements, transportation routes, and other features that existed in
an area at the time a given map was prepared. The earliest USGS maps that include the Oro
Valley study area are the 1:125,000-scale maps in the 30-minute topographic series, most
notably the 1905 Tucson quadrangle, which encompasses most of the study area (USGS 1905).
A thin slice of the northernmost portion of the study area falls on the adjacent Winkelman 30-
minute quadrangle (USGS 1911).
On the 1905 Tucson quadrangle (Figure 12), some of the same names appear that are also seen
on the Roskruge map and the GLO plats—Pusch, Sutherland, Romero, Lockas—but a few are
shown in unexpected places. "Pusch's Steam Pump" is shown at its well-known location along
the Canada del Oro, but the 1905 map also shows a "Pusch's Ranch" several miles to the north,
near the foot of the Tortolita Mountains. This second location, on a parcel apparently never
officially owned by Pusch and part of a land claim patented many years later (1935) by Warren
Stewart, was evidently part of the Pusch ranching operation at an early date. Similarly, the Matt
Lockas homestead, settled around 1912 a few miles downstream from Pusch's Steam Pump,
was evidently preceded by a Lockas Ranch located in 1905 a full township to the north, also at
the foot of the Tortolitas. This earlier Lockas property was never patented by anyone and
became state property in 1937. (See below for more discussion of these and other early
homesteads in the study area.)
The next USGS maps to include the study area are the 1:62,500-scale, 15-minute topographic
quadrangles. The 1957 Mount Lemmon quadrangle (USGS 1957) includes most of the study
area; smaller portions of the area fall on the adjacent Cortaro, Oracle, and Tortolita Mountains
quadrangles (USGS 1947, 1959a, 1959b). The larger-scale 15-minute quadrangles are notably
more detailed than the 30-minute quadrangles but do not label as many isolated properties as
the earlier maps. The 1957 Mount Lemmon quadrangle (Figure 13) is especially interesting for
its depiction of the study area just before it experienced the development boom that began in
the 1960s. In the southern portion of the study area (Figure 14), the Steam Pump Ranch is still
prominently depicted, but so are the beginnings of some of the earliest subdivisions in the area:
Campo Bello, platted in 1946 but its distinctive radial street layout still only partially in place,
showing 14 houses (section 23, right-center of Figure 14); and Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, just to
the north of Campo Bello, showing a half dozen houses, including one surrounded by an
orchard (depicted as a small rectangle of green dots).
The successor to the 15-minute series of USGS topographic maps is the 1:24,000-scale, 7.5-
minute series, which is the most recent USGS series. Six quadrangles in this series cover
different portions of the study area (USGS 1981, 1988a, 1988b, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c). Each
quadrangle has seen several revisions over the years, to keep pace with the rapidly changing
landscape of metropolitan Tucson. All of the quadrangles were originally based on aerial
photography ranging in dates from 1958 to 1975, with later revisions based on more recent
aerial photography. The 7.5-minute quadrangles are of less interest for the pre-development
historic period in the study area and are not discussed here, but their sequence of revisions are
a potentially valuable source for a closer look at the progression of suburban development in
the study area.
Early Historic Settlement in the Study Area
When the Gadsden Purchase made southern Arizona a part of the United States in 1854, almost
all of the land in the region became part of the public domain, subject to federal laws regarding
its appropriate use, including the laws that regulated the transfer of public land to private
parties. An important exception to the status of public domain was any grant of land made by
the Mexican government or its predecessor, the Spanish colonial government, to a private
citizen before southern Arizona became U.S. territory. Under the terms of the Gadsden
Purchase, the United States agreed to honor any existing Spanish or Mexican land grant that
could be confirmed as legitimate. The same terms were part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War and transferred most of what is now the U.S.
Southwest (except for the Gadsden Purchase) from Mexico to the United States (Mattison
1946).
In southern Arizona, Spanish and Mexican settlement was restricted mostly to the Santa Cruz
River valley in the vicinity of Tucson and never extended at all to the north of Tucson, so the
number of Spanish and Mexican land grants in the region was relatively small compared to the
much larger number of such grants in New Mexico and California. Most grants in southern
Arizona were nevertheless large-17,000 acres was typical, and a few were much larger—and
the legal wrangling over these grants in the second half of the nineteenth century was often
long and involved, tying up large tracts of choice land for decades and having enduring effects
on land tenure in the region. But none of this had any direct effect on the Canada del Oro area,
where the land suitable for agriculture was minimal and settlement in the Spanish and Mexican
periods was nonexistent because of the nearly constant threat of Apache raiding.
It was not until the 1870s, two decades after the Gadsden Purchase, that Euroamericans began
settling with any permanency near the Canada del Oro. By that time, the staking of claims on
public land was governed by a series of federal laws passed to promote settlement in previously
unsettled areas, most notably the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act provided that an
adult head of a family could claim and receive title to 160 acres of surveyed land if the claimant
built a house on the property, cultivated a portion of it, lived there continuously for five years,
then paid a small registration fee per acre (Stein 1990). During the later nineteenth century and
the first decades of the twentieth century, various other acts were passed that represented
modifications of the original Homestead Act, such as the Desert Land Act of 1877, intended
specifically to promote the irrigation of arid lands, and the Stock Raising Homestead Act of
1916, which increased the acreage of the original Homestead Act to a maximum of 640 acres to
allow claims large enough to support grazing in arid areas. The latter act became the most
important and commonly used authority for claiming land in the Oro Valley study area before
1945.
Homesteaders and Other Early Settlers
To get an idea of the nature of settlement in Oro Valley during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, we compiled a comprehensive list of patents granted by the General Land
Office (GLO) before 1945 to private individuals for homesteads and other land claims within the
limits of the study area (Table 6). From 1945 to 1959, many more private claims were granted
by the Bureau of Land Management (the successor to the GLO) in the Oro Valley area, but most
were cash sales of small tracts and were not part of the traditional pattern of homesteading
that prevailed before the end of World War II. Our list also excludes lands granted by the
federal government to the State of Arizona either before or after World War II, because such
grants were similarly unrelated to the homesteading tradition.
Table 7 lists the legal authorities used in the study area to claim and patent public lands before
1945, including the total number and acreage of patents granted under each authority. Of the
72 patents, the majority (45) were made under the Stock Raising Homestead Act in the period
1920-1944. Only 14 patents were granted under the original Homestead Act, all in the
relatively early period 1908-1926. Another 10 patents were Cash Sale entries in the period
1919-1939. Two patents were Forest Lieu Selections in the period 1903-1904, both
undoubtedly prompted by the creation of national forest reserves after 1891, such as the Santa
Catalina Forest Reserve in 1902 (see below). And one patent was a Forest Service Exchange
granted to the Arizona Desert School in 1939. The large number of patents granted in the study
area after 1920 under the Stock Raising Homestead Act is notable and undoubtedly reflects the
perception of most settlers by that year that the land in the area was suitable for grazing
livestock but mostly unsuitable for farming. The impact of the act on the privatization of public
land in the study area is remarkable: of the approximately 49,000 acres in the study area,
22,640 acres became private land through the Stock Raising Homestead Act.
Although the appearance of a name in Table 6 does not necessarily mean that the claimant held
on to his or her property any longer than it took to receive a patent, a look at the list of 72
patentees does give a sense of the farming and ranching community that took shape in the
study area during the first half of the twentieth century. Much like the rest of southern Arizona
in the same period, the study area was a mix of Anglo-Americans and Mexican Americans, with
the occasional recent European immigrant. A few of the names—Romero and Pusch—have
become closely associated with Oro Valley's early history, while others—Hardy, Magee,
Overton, Rudasill—survive in the modern names of streets and roads in the study area. Some
patentees later subdivided their property for residential development. As a notable example,
Lue W. G. Skinner, who patented two Stock Raising Homestead claims totaling about 600 acres
in 1926-1929, almost immediately
subdivided the claims as the Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, obtaining county approval of his plat in
1930 (see the discussion of residential development below). The actual construction of houses
in the subdivision did not begin until after World War II, but Skinner was clearly interested in
using his claims for something other than raising stock shortly after he received them, if not
before.
Limiting our coverage of GLO patents to the Oro Valley study area excludes some homesteads
just outside the area that were nonetheless influential in Oro Valley history. For example,
William Sutherland and his family patented a series of homesteads in the early 1920s just east
of the study area, along the upper Canada del Oro and what is now known as Sutherland Wash,
including parts of sections 1, 2, 10, 14, 15, 23, and 26 of Township 11 South, Range 14 East.
Most of this land later became part of Catalina State Park. Similarly, Pierre (Pedro) Charouleau,
a prominent Tucson-area rancher in the early twentieth century, patented claims in section 35
of Township 10 South, Range 14 East, and sections 1 and 2 of Township 11 South, Range 14
East, immediately north of the study area. His first patent was obtained in 1904, but
Charouleau was settled in the area many years earlier. His property appears on the 1893
Official Map of Pima County (Roskruge 1893) along the Tucson-Oracle Road, right where the
road crosses into Pinal County (see Figure 5).
Francisco Romero and Descendants
A notable characteristic of the list of patented claims in Table 6 is the relatively late date of the
earliest patents—none is earlier than 1903—compared with the earlier dates for the initial
settlement of the Canada del Oro area known from other sources. Federal laws governing and
promoting claims on the public domain were fully in place when Euroamericans first settled the
area, but the earliest settlers were apparently not much concerned in the early days with
formalizing their ownership of lands in the public domain, perhaps because of more pressing
concerns. Francisco Romero, a member of an old Tucson family that first came to southern
Arizona as part of a Spanish presidio force in the late eighteenth century, was probably the first
settler of the Canada del Oro area. Romero established a ranch near the confluence of the
Canada and Sutherland Wash, probably in the late 1860s though a Romero descendant once
claimed the original attempt took place as early as 1828 (Mabry 1991:62). Another source
(Hayden n.d.) puts it at 1844, but Sheridan (1986:280, n. 7, citing a personal communication
with James Officer) has noted that Romero is unlikely to have been ranching in the Canada del
Oro area even as early as the 1840s: "[I]t would have been almost impossible . . . to run cattle
that far north of [Tucson] at a time when Apache raiding was at its most intense, especially
since the Canon was located along one of the Pinal Apaches' primary raiding routes." In 1871,
Romero complained to the territorial legislature that his Canada del Oro ranch had been raided
by Apaches several times in 1869-1870, which prompted him and his family to abandon the
property in 1870 (Mabry 1991:64). This suggests that he was living on the ranch at least as early
as 1869, which, regardless of his lack of success, made him the earliest known Euroamerican to
settle in the area.
Francisco Romero's ranch centered on an enclosed house compound that he built atop the
ruins of a large prehistoric archaeological site known at the time as Pueblo Viejo. The site is
better known today as the Romero Ruin, or archaeological site AZ BB:9:1 (ASM) (see the
discussion in Chapter 3). The Romero compound was probably a ruin itself by the time
Romero's only son, Fabian Romero, returned to the Canada del Oro and built a new ranch
house in 1889, just below the ridge where his father's house had stood; the remains of the
younger Romero's house also survive today as an archaeological site, AZ BB:9:52 (ASM) (Mabry
1991:68-69). It is not clear how much of a presence the Romero family had along the Canada
del Oro between the abandonment of the first Romero house and the building of the second,
but after the family first left the area they lived for many years along the Santa Cruz River near
Tucson; perhaps they continued to run cattle in the Canada del Oro area when conditions
permitted. Mabry (1991:68) cites a source on Fabian Romero that gives the eventual acreage of
his Canada del Oro ranch as 4,800 acres, an acreage accumulated before 1900. A house labeled
Romero appears on George Roskruge's 1893 map of Pima County (Roskruge 1893), in about the
location of the Romero Ruin (Township 12 South, Range 14 East, Section 4), but Fabian
Romero's house, located in the next section north, was presumably the only one standing by
that time.
Francisco Romero eventually patented a 160-acre homestead in the vicinity of Romero Ruin in
1911 (see Table 6), but since he died in 1905 (Hayden n.d.), the patent was probably issued
posthumously in his name to an heir. Interestingly, this homestead did not include Romero
Ruin, though it did include the parcel where Romero's son, Fabian, had built his house in 1889.
Fabian himself never patented any land in the area. In 1924, a patent was issued to Fabian
Romero for a stock-raising homestead of 640 acres (see Table 6), but this was probably Fabian
Romero, Jr., a son of the original Fabian Romero. This homestead did include the Romero Ruin
and thus the remains of Francisco Romero's original house. Also in 1924, Bernardina Romero,
the wife of Fabian, Jr., patented a 600-acre stock-raising homestead just to the north of her
husband's claim. Without knowing more about the history of the family, it is hard to say what
prompted this particular sequence of claims by the Romeros, but they clearly had a history in
the area that long predated their official ownership of the land.
George Pusch and the Steam Pump Ranch
Another settler along the Canada del Oro whose presence long predated his official ownership
of the land was George Pusch, a German immigrant who came to Tucson from California in
1874. Shortly after he arrived, Pusch and his friend John Zellweger, a Swiss immigrant, pooled
their resources and acquired a ranch along the Canada del Oro, soon to be known as the Steam
Pump Ranch after Pusch dug a well there and installed a steam-powered pump, probably the
first such pump in Arizona. The exact year the pump was installed is uncertain, but the property
was apparently well known as the Steam Pump Ranch by the early 1880s. In 1883, Pusch
became sole owner of the ranch when he bought Zellweger's share in it. Both he and Zellweger
were successful businessmen apart from their joint interests, and Pusch also became politically
active, eventually serving in the territorial legislature. The Steam Pump Ranch was for many
years a much-used watering place and stopover for cattlemen moving stock along the road
between Tucson and the San Pedro River, where Pusch and Zellweger also had a large
operation known as the Feldman Ranch. Pusch operated the Steam Pump Ranch until his death
in 1921. The ranch was acquired from his estate by another rancher, John Procter, in 1933
(Allen-Bacon 1997:2; OVHS 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Thiel 2007:13-20; Zipf 1988-1989).
The reference to Pusch and Zellweger acquiring what became the Steam Pump Ranch in 1874
raises a number of questions that we have been unable to answer with the sources we have
consulted. First, who did they buy the ranch from? It is hard to imagine that someone had
established a ranch on the Canada del Oro by 1874, just five years after Romero had given up
on the area because of difficulties with the Apaches. Second, what was the legal basis for the
original ownership? The area was part of the public domain in 1874, still unsurveyed by the GLO
and, technically at least, not subject to claims much less prior ownership. Indeed, Pusch himself
did not receive a patent for the 40-acre parcel where the Steam Pump Ranch was centered until
1903 (see Table 6), and his receipt of the patent implies that the land was previously unclaimed
and unowned. If Pusch and Zellweger really did buy the ranch in 1874 from someone they
believed owned it, it may mean that private parties at the time were buying and selling land in
the public domain before anyone had an actual legal claim to it. Unfortunately, research into
the history of the Steam Pump Ranch by Marriot (2005, 2008), the Oro Valley Historical Society
(OVHS 2009b, 2009c), Thiel (2007), and others has not uncovered any information in this
regard. This is a worthy subject of further research, since it would undoubtedly involve not only
Pusch but other early settlers in the area.
Whatever the circumstances, it is clear that by 1903, the year he received his patent, Pusch was
well established in the Canada del Oro area and was undoubtedly also using other parcels in the
general vicinity for his ranching operation. Marriott (2005:61) has published a map of the
eventual extent of Pusch's holdings in southern Arizona, which covered a vast area in Pima and
Pinal counties, dwarfing the one 40-acre parcel he obtained directly from the public domain.
(Henry Zipf, the grandson of George Pusch, is the principal source for the depiction on the
Marriott map.) Pusch's early use of other lands in the Canada del Oro area might also seem to
be indicated by the type of patent he received for his Steam Pump Ranch parcel: a Forest Lieu
Selection, which means he was granted the patent in exchange for a parcel he had previously
been using within an area later designated as a national forest reserve. The nearby Santa
Catalina Forest Reserve, designated in 1902 and incorporating a large portion of the Santa
Catalina Mountains (the reserve became part of the newly created Coronado National Forest in
1908 [Coronado National Forest 2009]) seems the most likely location, but Pusch actually
received his Forest Lieu Selection in exchange for a 40-acre parcel he owned in what became
the San Jacinto Forest Reserve in southern California (GLO 1903), a reserve that is now part of
the Cleveland National Forest near San Diego. Pusch lived for a short time in California before
coming to Tucson (Zipf 1988-1989). Either he claimed the forest parcel himself while he was in
California or he acquired it secondarily from someone else.
A Possibility for Further Homestead Research
The scope of work for this overview did not allow for it, but additional information on patented
GLO claims can be obtained by contacting the National Archives and Records Administration in
Washington, D.C., which keeps the land-entry case files for individual claims. These files, copies
of which are currently available by mail at $40.00 per land entry (http://www.archives.gov/),
typically include the original claim filed by the patentee, the written testimonials of witnesses in
support of the claim, other documents related to the verification of the claim or any dispute it
may have prompted, and the final claim decision. Some case files include descriptions of the
property, including the improvements made by the claimant to satisfy the requirements of the
claim, such as buildings and irrigation ditches. Land-entry case files are almost always useful to
a historian or archaeologist interested in the early history of a property, but the amount of
information they provide varies considerably. Some case files contain a surprising amount of
detail while others hold very little information, and it is impossible to know what a particular
case file might hold before examining it.
Mining, Farming, and Ranching in the Study Area
The historic period in Arizona was dominated by three economic pursuits—mining, farming,
and ranching (see especially Sheridan 1995:103-227)—but the amount of emphasis placed on
each pursuit varied by the circumstances in a given location. In the Oro Valley study area,
mining was important early on, but only as something carried out in the nearby mountains by
settlers who were sometimes also busy with other pursuits directly in the study area, notably
ranching. The Canada del Oro (Canyon of Gold) was called by that name at least as early as the
1850s, but the name was probably originally applied because of what was going on in its
uppermost reaches. The stream begins on the northern slope of Mount Lemmon in the Santa
Catalina Mountains, about 10 miles south of the modern town of Oracle; it flows directly north
for several miles before turning west and southwest to eventually pass through the study area.
The history of mining in the Santa Catalinas has been summarized by Wilson (1995a:161-162;
1995b:16-17), who mentions efforts to exploit the gold placer deposits in the gravels of the
upper Canada del Oro in 1858-1859, and possibly earlier. The same placers continued to be
exploited occasionally into the 1930s, but the yields were always small.
Ranching was the most important pursuit drawing people to the Canada del Oro area in the late
nineteenth century, as is clear from our discussion of the earliest families settling in the study
area. It was also the most important factor in drawing people to the area well into the
twentieth century, as the large number of stock-raising homestead claims made in the period
1900-1944 indicates (see Table 7). But much about ranching in the area has yet to be studied
systematically. For example, how much land was required for a successful ranch? How were
sources of water developed and controlled? What kinds of facilities were built by ranchers, and
how did this vary in relation to different factors, such as the ethnic background of the rancher?
And what role did farming, always a minor pursuit in the area, have in the ranching economy?
Details on the early GLO plats of the study area point to the kinds of information that might be
gathered to answer these questions. First is the depiction of the Steam Pump Ranch property
on the 1902 plat of Township 12 South, Range 14 East (Figure 15). Pusch's property sat close to
another property, labeled "Mexican Ranch," just to the north. This was probably the land later
patented by Francisco Marin in 1908 (see Table 6) and may have been settled by him long
before that year, much as Pusch was operating the Steam Pump Ranch long before he patented
it. In fact, according to the Oro Valley Historical Society (Patricia Spoerl, personal
communication 2009), an Oro Valley resident recently suggested to the society that the land
that became the Steam Pump Ranch was originally owned by the Marin family and bought from
them. We have not yet been able to evaluate this information, but if that was indeed the case it
raises the interesting question of how Pusch and Zellweger learned about their property and its
availability, and what arrangements they may have made with the family that suddenly became
their close neighbor. For that matter, how much did Pusch and Zellweger, recent immigrants to
an environment they must have found very unfamiliar, rely on the local knowledge of Francisco
Marin and other Mexican-American ranchers with long experience in the region to get their
own ranch up and running?
Other GLO plat details similarly emphasize the proximity of Anglo-American and Mexican-
American ranches in the study area, which continued after the earliest settlers in the area had
sold their claims. A detail from the 1921 plat of Township 11 South, Range 13 East (Figure 16)
shows two houses labeled Jimenez, about a half mile apart and probably representing two
generations of a Mexican-American family, and another house labeled Trevan, a half mile from
one of the Jimenez houses and probably representing an Anglo-American settler. Neither the
Jimenez or Trevan name is among the names of the original GLO patentees in the area (see
Table 6), which means both must have acquired their land from earlier owners. By itself, the
map depiction means little, but it suggests the continuing multicultural (or at least bicultural)
nature of ranching in the study area during the early twentieth century.
The question of water and its relationship to ranching in the study area is also hinted at in GLO
plat details. On the plat just mentioned, the Trevan house and one of the Jimenez houses are
both shown with wells. Having a well was undoubtedly indispensable for watering livestock in a
place where the most substantial watercourse, the Canada del Oro, was miles away and in any
case altogether dry for most of the year, but some early settlers in the study area also built
small dams on the seasonal washes that crossed their property. On the 1921 plat of Township
11 South, Range 13 East, the Nelson Ranch is shown with a house and well, but there is also a
dam shown just northwest of the ranch, on the small wash that passes north-south along the
foot of the Tortolita Mountains (Figure 17; the wash is labeled Sausalito Creek on modern
maps). Nelson, a Swedish immigrant who first ranched near the Tortolitas in the 1890s, later
bought the large ranching operation of William Sutherland near the Santa Catalinas; he became
well known in Pima County when he was elected sheriff in 1908 (Willson 1956:30). The purpose
of the small dam on his Tortolita Mountain property is uncertain, but it would only have
functioned during rains, routing the flow in the wash either onto fields to irrigate crops or into
an earthen tank for watering livestock. This particular location probably lacked land appropriate
for farming, so the dam probably served to fill a tank, though it is not depicted on the plat. The
extent to which ranchers like Nelson relied on dams rather than wells to water their stock is an
interesting question for future research.
Early Roads in the Study Area
Transportation in the study area before 1945 centered on a single route, the road variously
labeled on early maps as the Tucson—Camp Grant road, the Tucson-Mammoth road, the
Tucson-Florence road, and the Tucson-Oracle road. It is the direct predecessor of modern
Oracle Road, which is also a portion of modern State Route 77. In 1961, the road was
designated with an archaeological site number, AZ BB:9:41 (ASM), but the designation was
based solely on early map depictions and historical references and not on an actual field
recording. Aside from its frequent appearance on modern maps, the road is not documented as
a historic property and today bears no resemblance to its earlier self.
As noted above, one of the earliest depictions of Oracle Road is on the Map of the Military
Department of New Mexico, which dates to the Civil War (Anderson 1864). This map was
prepared not long after the only encounter of Union and Confederate troops in Arizona, the
brief skirmish known as the Battle of Picacho Pass, which was fought on April 15, 1862,
between a small force of Confederates, sent west to occupy Tucson, and the California
Volunteers, a Union force sent east from California to chase the rebels out of the Southwest.
After the indecisive skirmish at Picacho, the California Volunteers regrouped on the San Pedro
River at what soon became Fort Grant, then entered Tucson from the north via the Canada del
Oro (Wilson 1995a:91-92).
On their way from the San Pedro River to Tucson, the California Volunteers followed a road that
had long played an important role in the history of the region. Especially important was the
point where the road crossed the Canada del Oro, a location that seems to have served as a
kind of entry point to the Tucson Basin. Officer (1987:257) describes a moment in 1850, during
the late Mexican period, when several bands of Apaches, including the Pinal Apaches, joined
forces to attack the presidio at Tucson. The Pinal band had second thoughts and decided not to
join the attack, waiting instead at a point just north of the Canada del Oro. Officer (1987:264)
also describes a second incident, a year later, when an Apache attack was repelled and the
attackers were pursued fruitlessly by a presidio force as far as the Canada del Oro, where the
chase was abandoned.
The Canada del Oro crossing continued to serve a similar role in the early U.S. period. The Oro
Valley Historical Society has gathered several secondary references to interactions between
Apache bands and the earliest representatives of the U.S. government (military men, Indian
agents, and settlers) in the late 1850s, enough to suggest strongly that the wash and its crossing
were seen by the Apaches as a good site both for raiding travelers and for negotiating a truce.
In 1871, the Canada del Oro crossing also apparently played a role in the infamous Camp Grant
massacre, when a group of about 150 Tucsonans, including Anglo-Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Tohono O'odham, attacked an Apache camp near Fort Grant, ostensibly in
retaliation for a series of recent Apache raids in the Tucson area. More than 100 Apaches were
killed in the attack, including many women and children, and the event became a notorious
example of unnecessary brutality in the treatment of Native Americans by settlers in the
Southwest. According to one source, the attackers stationed men at the Canada del Oro
crossing to turn back messengers from Tucson who might have alerted the Apache camp of the
impending attack (OVHS 2009d; Spoerl n.d.).
It is hard to tell from early map depictions whether the most suitable point to cross the Canada
del Oro was always the same or whether it shifted from time to time depending on conditions
in the wash. Today Oracle Road crosses the Canada del Oro just upstream of its junction with
Big Wash, which does not seem much different from the alignment of the road on the 1902
GLO plat of the area (see Figure 15). But earlier maps, notably the 1893 Roskruge map (see
Figure 5), show the road heading due north from the Steam Pump Ranch, which would put the
crossing almost a mile southwest of its location today. The 1902 GLO plat does show another,
presumably secondary road crossing the wash directly at the Steam Pump Ranch, which may
indicate that a crossing was maintained at the ranch even when the principal crossing for the
main road was well to the northeast. On all of the early GLO plats that show it, the road is
accompanied by what seem to be short, alternative routes diverging from it, then roughly
paralleling it for short distances, then returning to join it again. These lesser routes may have
simply been roads to access particular properties, or they may have been temporary
realignments prompted by difficulties in the main road caused by weather or other factors.
All of the GLO plats of the area also show numerous trails (dashed lines) and other roads (solid
lines), most trending northeast-southwest, parallel to the drainages that cross the area,
including the Canada del Oro (see Figures 6-11). Some connect individual homesteads with
other properties or with Oracle Road. Unlike Oracle Road, most of these trails and roads have
disappeared with development.
The Tucson, Globe, and Northern Railroad
The other early transportation feature of note in the study area was never actually completed
or used. Myrick (1975:258-262) has summarized the history of the ill-fated project (also see
McClintock 1916:299-230; Robertson 1986:109). In 1882, two years after the Southern Pacific
Railroad reached Tucson, a group of local businessman organized to build the Arizona Narrow
Gauge Railroad, which would run north from Tucson through Oracle to the Gila River, then
eastward to New Mexico. The project was troubled from the start with political wrangling and
the dubious motives of investors, but the company was nevertheless able to convince Pima
County to provide substantial funding through bonds. Construction began in 1883 when a grade
was raised for several miles extending north from Tucson. Some track was also eventually laid,
but the effort was repeatedly stalled by difficulties in funding and organization. In 1887, the
name of the railroad was changed to the Tucson, Globe, and Northern to reflect revised plans
and a renewed construction effort, but by 1894 the project had been abandoned altogether
and the company was sold off.
The proposed route of the Tucson, Globe, and Northern through the study area is shown on the
1893 map of Pima County prepared by Roskruge (see Figure 5), who in 1886 surveyed part of
the line in his capacity as county surveyor. The extent of the completed portion of the railroad
is uncertain, but Myrick has suggested Magee Road as the northern limit of laid track. The
grade itself was probably completed at least as far north as the Steam Pump Ranch, where a
grading camp was established with the consent of George Pusch, who stood to benefit from a
railroad passing through his property. The track was removed when the railroad went out of
business, but the grade was left in place and may still survive today in a few places. In our
review of the early GLO plats of the study area, we noticed a probable remnant of the grade on
the 1913 plat of Township 12 South, Range 13 East (Figure 18). This remnant, mostly in section
24 of the township, ran immediately northwest of the future site of Canyon del Oro High
School. Today this is part of a residential area of large lots, large enough to offer hope that
some part of the remnant still survives, but nothing like it is discernible in modern air photos of
the location.
The Postwar Period, 1945-1974
From the end of World War II to the incorporation of the Town of Oro Valley in 1974, the study
area changed from an expanse of open land used mostly for grazing to the nucleus of a
suburban community that soon had little room for grazing. A detailed history of the period has
not yet been written, but some of its main features have been recounted by Marjorie Kriegh
(OVHS 2009e), Barbara Marriott (2005, 2008), Henry Suozzi (1999), and Henry Zipf (1989-
1990). Much useful information is also preserved in the county records that were created as
new subdivisions were planned and approved, and in the records of county tax assessments of
individual properties. Because part of our task in the cultural resources inventory has been to
identify and evaluate residential neighborhoods in the town that are of potential historic
interest, we have looked closely at some of these county records, including the original plats
submitted to the county for proposed residential developments and the information on
individual houses maintained by the county assessor. The Pima County Assessor's Office has
helped by providing digital data on houses in the study area, including construction dates.
Other sources on the recent history of Oro Valley exist that we have not consulted for this
project. The Oro Valley Town Clerk, Ms. Kathryn Cuvelier, provided us with a comprehensive list
of governmental records maintained by the town and available to the public, all potentially
useful sources for a study of the history of Oro Valley after incorporation. The town also has a
complete set of Oro Valley newspapers, most notably the Oro Valley Voice, originally collected
by town resident Jim Kriegh and donated to the town. The Oro Valley Public Library also has a
collection of newspaper clippings about the town donated by Marjorie Kriegh.
Early Residential Development in Oro Valley
Although much of Oro Valley's growth came after the town was incorporated in 1974, interest
in the residential development of the area actually began well before World War II. The most
obvious indication of this early interest is the range of years that plats were originally filed with
Pima County for the subdivisions that are now within the Town of Oro Valley. Table 8 lists the
19 subdivisions with original plats approved before 1974. (As the names indicate, several of the
19 subdivisions are later phases of an originally smaller subdivision.) The fact that two plats
date to before 1945, and the earliest plat dates to 1930, attests to the early development
ambitions of private landowners in the Oro Valley area, even at a time when the economic
circumstances of most people made the successful development of a still relatively remote part
of suburban Tucson a long shot. Not surprisingly, the year the first house was built in any one of
these 19 subdivisions was usually much later than the year of the plat, and in no subdivision
was the first house actually built before 1945.
In the first 20 years after the war, 1945-1964, construction within the platted subdivisions was
limited largely to a handful of subdivisions: Oro Valley Estates, Shadow Mountain Estates,
Campo Bello, and Suffolk Hills (first two phases). With the exception of Suffolk Hills, these
subdivisions would form the core of the area incorporated as the Town of Oro Valley in 1974.
The new town also included Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, which was essentially undeveloped at the
time despite its early plat date.
As related in interesting detail by Zipf (1989-1990), Oro Valley Estates was part of an ambitious
development project conceived in 1958 by Louis F. Landon, a Chicago businessman and avid
golfer who had wintered in Tucson for many years. Landon was convinced that the Tucson area
could support another golf course—there were just three at the time—so he assembled a
group of investors in Chicago and began shopping for a suitable building site. In a deal that
reflects the enduring influence of George Pusch on the area, Landon contacted Hank Lieber, a
former professional baseball player and University of Arizona athlete who had a real estate
office in downtown Tucson's Pioneer Hotel. The Pioneer was owned at the time by Lieber's
father-in-law, Jack (John) Procter, the man who had bought the Steam Pump Ranch from the
Pusch estate. Lieber and Landon were interested in land along the south bank of the Canada del
Oro, an area that was then a part of the Canada del Oro Ranch, just down the wash from
Procter's property. The Canada del Oro Ranch was owned by Francis Rooney, president of the
Manhattan Construction Company (of Oklahoma) and managed by George Pusch, the son of
the original owner of the Steam Pump Ranch.
Unfortunately for Landon, Rooney sold the desired portion of the Canada del Oro Ranch to
another investor, Joseph Timan, before Landon could make an offer. Timan went on to found
the enormously successful Horizon Land Company, which was later involved in large land deals
in several other states. Undaunted, Landon soon persuaded Timan to sell 375 acres of the
Canada del Oro property to Landon's newly created corporation, Oro Valley, Inc. The sale was
made official on May 14, 1958, with Landon required as part of the deal to build a golf course.
Later that year, Timan and Landon announced plans to build an elaborate resort on the Canada
del Oro property, with a vast artificial lake, luxury hotels, health spas, swimming pools, tennis
courts, and other amenities. Most parts of the plan never materialized, but Landon did build his
golf course, designed by the noted golf-course architect Robert Bruce Harris; it opened in
February 1959. In October of the same year, Landon and a few others incorporated the Oro
Valley Country Club, which has operated the golf course ever since. Landon also developed Oro
Valley Estates on the land surrounding the golf course, and Timan developed The Highlands, a
mobile home park on the other side of the wash from the golf course. Timan also built a large
apartment complex on Greenock Drive at the Oracle Road entrance to Oro Valley Estates.
According to a longtime Oro Valley resident, the apartments were completed before
construction in Oro Valley Estates had gotten far and were initially rented to people waiting for
their houses to be completed (Lois Nagy, personal communication 2009).
Landon's use of the name Oro Valley both for his development company and his subdivision
project seems to have been the earliest use of the name later adopted by the Town of Oro
Valley. Although incorporation of the town did not take place until 1974, the idea of
incorporation dated to at least as early as 1968, just 10 years after Landon acquired the land to
build his golf course and subdivision. According to Marjorie Kriegh (OVHS 2009e), the original
impetus for incorporation was the mayor of Tucson's strongly expressed desire to extend
Tucson's corporate limits to include all such outlying developments. Many of the residents in
Oro Valley Estates and the immediately adjacent subdivisions felt strongly that the area should
not be absorbed by Tucson and began organizing to incorporate their own town, which they
planned to call Palo Verde. State laws on incorporation, written primarily to protect large
municipalities from the adjacent proliferation of small municipalities, allowed for incorporation
of areas located at least six miles from an existing corporate boundary and having a minimum
of 500 like-minded inhabitants. It took six years and a protracted court battle—finally resolved
in the Arizona Supreme Court—but the Town of Oro Valley, encompassing about 2.5 square
miles and holding just 800 residents was officially incorporated on April 15, 1974. (The town's
birthday is celebrated today on April 17, the day in 1974 when the first mayor and town council
were appointed). The new town included parts of the early subdivisions of Campo Bello, Linda
Vista Citrus Tracts, Shadow Mountain Estates, and Shadow Mountain Estates East, and all of
Oro Valley Estates. The switch from Palo Verde to Oro Valley for the name of the town was
made to encourage the residents of a key component of the new town, Oro Valley Estates, to
support incorporation.
Organization of the incorporation effort was taken on by two presidents of local homeowner
associations, Jim Kriegh of Shadow Mountain Estates, and Steve Engle of Oro Valley Estates.
Kriegh, who died in 2007, was a native of Kansas and a retired professor of civil engineering at
the University of Arizona. He was long interested in the history of the Oro Valley area and was
later a co-founder the Oro Valley Historical Society (in 2005). Because of his efforts in pursuing
incorporation, he is considered by many town residents to be the founding father of Oro Valley.
In 1995, when the Town of Oro Valley assumed ownership of Dennis Weaver Park from Pima
County, it renamed it James D. Kriegh Park. The park is located just west of Oracle Road, on the
north side of Calle Concordia and adjacent on the east to Canyon del Oro High School. Jim
Kriegh and his family lived just across the street from the park in Shadow Mountain Estates
(Sottosanti 2007).
Citrus Groves in the Study Area
The names of some of the earliest subdivisions in the Oro Valley area include references to
citrus—for example, Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, Catalina Citrus Estates—as do the names of some
of the major streets in the study area—for example, Tangerine Road and Naranja Drive (naranja
is Spanish for orange). We have not been able to investigate the history of citrus farming in the
study area in any detail, but all of these names probably relate to an interest on the part of
early landowners to promote the area as a suitable location for small-scale citrus farming, in
response to the successful development of citrus groves just south of the study area in the
1920s and 1930s. Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, originally platted in 1930, did not see residential
development until decades later, but the land apparently had a citrus orchard of some size by
the 1950s, as can be seen on the 1957 USGS 15-minute Mount Lemmon topographic
quadrangle (see Figure 13 and the Early Map Research section above).
As surveyed by Parkhurst (2000:2-8), citrus farming in the area northwest of Tucson began in
the late 1920s, had a period of relative success after World War II and into the 1950s, then
declined steadily until its virtual disappearance in the 1970s. The largest citrus operation in the
area, and the only one to have substantial commercial success, was Reid Farms (also known as
Reid's Citrus Gardens, then Rancho Palos Verdes) which included about 1,500 acres in the area
bounded by Orange Grove Road on the south, Ina Road on the north, Oracle Road on the east,
and La Cholla Road on the west. The owner, Maurice Reid, defied the many skeptics who
considered the Tucson area too prone to winter frost to allow for successful citrus farming. He
learned through his own study of temperature patterns that certain areas north of the Rillito
River and west of the Santa Catalina foothills constituted a "thermal belt" where higher areas
were protected from frost by the drainage of cold air through adjacent lower areas.
Reid sold off his citrus farms in the 1950s, prompted by the lowering of the water table, which
made pumping irrigation water for citrus trees too expensive, and by the expansion of
suburban Tucson, which was quickly making land more valuable for housing than for farming.
But Reid's demonstration that citrus could be raised successfully in the foothills north of Tucson
led to an interest in the "gentleman's orchard estate," or the establishment of small citrus
groves by individuals who were interested as much in having a rural lifestyle as in the actual
commercial viability of citrus. "Citrus farming," Parkhurst (2000:5) writes, "was considered to
be an occupation which combined the aesthetic and practical values of life." As early as 1935,
Reid had begun to supplement his citrus business with a second career as a real estate
developer, selling small orchard estates and promoting them with large advertisements in the
Arizona Daily Star(see especially Bowen 1935 and the advertisement following the article).
In the Oro Valley study area, the platting and development of subdivisions with names like
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts were apparently related to the success of Reid (and perhaps others) in
promoting these small-scale orchard estates and not to the presence of large-scale citrus farms.
Aerial photographs from 1945 and ca. 1953 included by Parkhurst (2000; she reproduces
photographs by Gene Magee published by Glinski 1995:58, 60) show the area of Reid's citrus
operation in the Oracle—Orange Grove area, with a good view of the southern portion of the
Oro Valley study area just to the north. In contrast to the large rectangle of irrigated orchards
belonging to Reid, the area to the north has only a few small areas of irrigated growth that
probably represent small orchards, including what is probably a part of Linda Vista Citrus Tracts.
Rancho Romero and Catalina State Park
A few years before the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated, the proposed development of a
large area along the western foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains came close to radically
changing the appearance of the east side of the Oro Valley study area. Price (2004:103-108)
has traced the history of Rancho Romero, a planned community of 17,000 residents, that was
almost built on the land between Oracle Road and the Coronado National Forest, land that
instead became Catalina State Park.
Rancho Romero was conceived by the developer John Ratliff, perhaps better known today as
the developer of Rancho Vistoso. Ratliff named his earlier project after the historic ranch of the
Romero family, discussed earlier in this chapter. By 1972, the project had caught the attention
of a diverse group of environmental organizations in the Tucson area, all of whom viewed the
proposed development as an unacceptable use of a pristine tract of the Santa Catalina foothills.
Through the efforts of these organizations and a series of umbrella organizations, enough
public outcry was raised against Rancho Romero to convince the Pima County Board of
Supervisors to vote against approval of the project in September 1973. The subsequent effort
to preserve the undeveloped land eventually led to the establishment of Catalina State Park,
but it involved a long and complicated process of acquiring land for the state from numerous
landholders by purchase or exchange. It was only in 1981 that the full, 5,500-acre park parcel
became state trust lands, and it was not until 1983 that Catalina State Park finally opened.
In the beginning, Arizona State Parks leased the land for Catalina State Park from the Arizona
State Land Department, but as land values quickly rose in the surrounding area, the land
department was required by law to raise its lease rate. By 1987, the rate was beyond what
Arizona State Parks could pay, which threatened the existence of the park. The park was
rescued when the land it occupied became part of the Coronado National Forest through the
Santa Rita Land Exchange Project, which involved a complicated exchange of federal lands for
state lands at several locations around Arizona. In 1991, most of Catalina State Park became the
property of the U. S. Forest Service, which remains the owner today (except for 19 acres still
owned by Arizona State Parks). The park is leased from the Forest Service by Arizona State
Parks at a much lower rate than would have been possible if the park had remained with the
Arizona State Land Department.
CHAPTER 5
HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE STUDY AREA
An important goal of the Oro Valley cultural resources inventory has been to gather basic
information about the extent and nature of potentially historic architecture in the study area.
As discussed in Chapter 4, residential development in the Oro Valley area did not begin until
after World War II, and the first subdivisions, though originally platted as early as the 1930s, did
not see the construction of significant numbers of houses until the late 1950s. Even so, the
study area holds at least two important examples of residential architecture built before the
war, and several of the earliest subdivisions in Oro Valley are now of an age to merit
consideration as historic districts (Figure 19). The following paragraphs describe the two
notable architect-designed residences in the study area and summarize the results of our initial
survey of early residential subdivisions.
Countess of Suffolk Forest Lodge
In 1935, Margaret Howard, a wealthy American also known as the Countess of Suffolk because
of her marriage to the Earl of Suffolk (the Englishman Henry Molyneaux Paget Howard), came
to Tucson to establish a winter residence. She was a widow by that year, her husband having
died in combat years earlier in World War I. The Countess hired noted Tucson architect Richard
A. Morse to design a house for a property she had bought in the foothills of the Santa Catalina
Mountains north of Tucson. The result was the spacious and distinctive Forest Lodge, a pure
example of the Modern style (Figure 20; and see Figure 19).
The Forest Lodge, 410 East Magee Road, is today a part of the Suffolk Hills subdivision, which
occupies the southeasternmost corner of the Town of Oro Valley.The house, mostly unchanged
from its original construction, is owned by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a
religious order of the Roman Catholic Church (Figure 21). The order operates Immaculate Heart
Academy and Immaculate Heart High School on the former property of the Forest Lodge and
uses the house itself as a residence for the members of the order. The house is well maintained
and the residents recognize its importance as a historic architectural property.
The spare, uncluttered Modern (or International) style exemplified by the Forest Lodge was
popular in the upscale residential architecture of Los Angeles and a few Eastern cities in the
1930s, but it was unusual for Tucson. Not long after it was built, the house appeared in a
number of architectural publications as a notable example of the Modern style. James Ford and
Katherine Morrow Ford included it in The Modern House in America (1940), a compendium of
residential architecture in the Modern style in the United States (Ford and Ford 1989:80-81).
The Fords included in their book floor plans and three photographs of the Forest Lodge, along
with a brief description of its construction and fixtures. The spacious, two-story house included
multiple servant quarters and expensive materials like travertine floors, but it also had the
pronounced austerity of its style: "Trim as far as possible has been eliminated and all built-in
fittings, such as cabinets, bookcases, and window seats are of plain design" (Ford and Ford
1989:81). Some local residents failed to appreciate these aesthetic virtues. An interior
decorator familiar with the house thought it looked like "an institution or a hospital" (Needham
n.d.:2).
Richard Morse, educated at Harvard University and a native of Massachusetts, came to Tucson
in 1932. He established his own architectural firm and worked with success in a variety of styles
in the course of a long career. He and one of his Tucson protégés, Arthur T. Brown, who
became successful in his own right, designed another residence in the Modern style for a
Tucson client, built in 1939 near the University of Arizona. Morse was the first president of the
Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects, serving in 1941-1942. He died in 1982
at 84 years of age (Brown 1982; Ford and Ford 1989:82). The Arizona Architectural Archives at
the University of Arizona holds the complete set of Morse's architectural drawings for the
Forest lodge, which are in excellent condition, if fragile. The plans show that the original Forest
Lodge grounds were much larger than the property that survives. Morse drew plans for the
grounds, including an elevation drawing of the gate, which had the words "Forest" and "Lodge"
prominent at either side.
In 1957, the Countess decided to relocate farther from the growing Tucson metropolitan area
and had a new house built near Oracle; the house is now part of the University of Arizona's
Biosphere II. She sold the Forest Lodge residence and associated buildings to the Catholic
Church, which established Immaculate Heart Academy on the property in 1962. The Sisters of
the Immaculate Heart of Mary have operated the school ever since. The land around the Forest
Lodge was sold to a developer who platted the Suffolk Hills subdivision, named for the
Countess, in 1958. Suffolk Hills is one of the earliest subdivisions in Oro Valley and is discussed
below.
Joseph E. McAdams House
In 1940, noted Tucson architect Josias Joesler was hired by Joseph E. McAdams of Springfield,
Ohio, to design a residence for a parcel McAdams owned just east of Oracle Road, near what is
now its intersection with Tangerine Road (Figure 22; and see Figure 19). The house was built
the same year by Tucson builder John Murphey, whose company was responsible for several
notable residential developments in the Tucson area, including Catalina Foothill Estates.
Joesler, born in Switzerland and educated in Europe, had come to Tucson in 1926, teaming with
Murphey for the next 30 years and designing a wide range of distinctive residences for
Murphey's affluent clients, as well as other buildings (Nequette and Jeffery 2002:258-259).
The McAdams residence is Contemporary Ranch in style and has a separate garage and guest
house in the same style, also designed by Joesler. The three buildings occupy the top of a hill
and are surrounded by a mostly natural desert landscape. Joesler's complete drawings for the
house, on file at the Arizona Architectural Archives at the University of Arizona, show the main
house with adobe brick construction, a clay tile roof, and a C-shaped floor plan around an open
courtyard (Figure 23). As Joesler-designed residences go, the McAdams house is a modest
example, but it retains most of its original materials and exterior appearance, and the desert
setting is still much as it was when the house was built. The project architects visited the
property during the initial survey but were unable to access the main house.
When the hill where the McAdams house stands was prepared for construction in 1940, the
grading unexpectedly exposed a substantial Hohokam archaeological site, including pottery,
grinding stones, a human burial, and other features, including possible pit houses. The
Murphey-Joesler files at the University of Arizona indicate that, to Murphey's credit, he stopped
the grading immediately and contacted the Arizona State Museum. The museum director
visited the site and documented the site. McAdams, still in Ohio while the house was being
built, was fascinated by the discovery. Murphey assured him that no one else would be allowed
to disturb the site. In 1997, an archaeological survey of the area around the McAdams house
recorded the house as part of an archaeological site, AZ BB:9:320 (ASM), making reference to
the inadvertent 1940 discovery (Jeffery 1997; Lorentzen et al. 1997).
Today the McAdams house is part of a 120-acre parcel known as Kelly Ranch, which borders
Catalina State Park at the eastern limits of the town. In 2004, a county bond election approved
$2.5 million to be used by the Town of Oro Valley to buy the Kelly Ranch property, but just
recently the Town Council approved an alternative use of the bond money, to buy the land
needed to create a wildlife crossing of Oracle Road. The purpose of the proposed crossing,
which is part of the Arroyo Grande planning effort, is to preserve an ecological connection
between the Tortolita Mountains and the Coronado National Forest via Catalina State Park. The
Kelly Ranch property, which also includes many archaeological sites, remains in private
ownership, but many Oro Valley residents believe its acquisition by the town is still an
important goal in preserving the ecology and heritage of the area between Oracle Road and
Catalina State Park (Medrano 2009).
Other Individual Buildings of Note in the Study Area
In their guide to the notable architecture of Tucson and the surrounding area, Nequette and
Jeffery (2002:234-235) mention three other buildings that fall within the Oro Valley study area.
Two of the buildings are part of the 49-acre Tohono Chul Park, a botanical garden and
interpretive center located just northwest of the intersection of Ina and Oracle Roads. The
earliest of the two buildings at Tohono Chul is the Exhibit House, designed by Paul Holton and
built in 1937 using heavy adobe blocks made on site. Originally in the Sonoran style, the Exhibit
House was remodeled in 1984 but retains much of its historic character. The second building is
the Tea Room, designed by Lewis Hall and built in 1963 as the residence of the property owner.
The Tea Room is of burnt adobe block with exposed wooden rafters and distinctive ceramic tile
accents.
The third building noted by Nequette and Jeffery is St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, located
at 750 West Chapala Drive, just south of Magee Road and west of Oracle Road. Built in 1962,
the church was designed by Ned Nelson with a large A-frame roof supported by laminate
wooden beams. Nequette and Jeffery point especially to the "commendable" interrelationship
of the building and its site, which includes multiple-level seating, intimate courtyards, and a
stone base for the church itself.
Pre-1974 Subdivisions in the Town of Oro Valley
As part of the Cultural Resources Inventory, the historic architects on the WSA team made an
initial survey (sometimes called a "windshield survey") of selected residential architecture in
Oro Valley. The purpose of the survey was to identify buildings and neighborhoods with
potential historic or architectural significance and to provide preliminary descriptions of these
resources. The results of the survey will serve as the basis for later decisions about which
buildings or neighborhoods are most suitable for detailed study and documentation.
The selection of residential neighborhoods for the initial survey was based on our research into
the history of development in the Oro Valley area. Of particular use were the dates of
subdivision plats and house construction that we gathered from the records of the Pima County
Assessor. The tables below summarize this information, organized with reference to two years:
1965 and 1974. The usual age threshold for historic resources, following the guidelines of the
National Register of Historic Places, is 50 years. In other words, a historic property—whether a
building, a neighborhood, an archaeological site, or another resource—is generally not eligible
for listing on the National Register until it is at least 50 years old. However, the Arizona State
Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) usually places the age threshold at 45 years for architectural
properties, including residential neighborhoods, to help ensure that properties close to the age
threshold are not excluded from consideration. The SHPO also generally requires that at least
50 percent of the houses in a neighborhood be at least 45 years old for the neighborhood to
qualify as a historic district.
Our initial survey focused on neighborhoods that have at least some houses built 45 years ago,
or before 1965. We were less concerned about the percentage of pre-1965 houses, because
other factors, such as exceptional design, can outweigh the 50 percent rule. In addition to pre-
1965 houses, we also wanted a sense of how many neighborhoods had a significant number of
houses built before 1974, the year the Town of Oro Valley was incorporated. This would give us
an idea of the character of the town at the time of incorporation and also show us which of the
neighborhoods with only a limited number of pre-1965 houses would soon be increasing that
number. In other words, the number of pre-1974 houses in a neighborhood is a hint of the
historic preservation issues that the town may face over the next decade.
Nineteen subdivisions in the Town of Oro Valley were platted before 1974, with the earliest plat
filed in 1930 (see Table 8). All of these subdivisions are located in the southern portion of the
town, in or near the original limits of incorporation. Note that in a few cases a considerable gap
came between the platting of the subdivision and the actual construction of the first house. All
19 subdivisions have at least one house built before 1974, but only 11 subdivisions have houses
built before 1965. In terms of percentages of pre-1965 houses, only three subdivisions exceed
50 percent, but there are enough pre-1974 houses in the other eight to push them over the 50
percent mark in the next decade (Table 9).
Discounting the pre-1974 subdivisions without pre-1965 houses, and combining the multiple
phases of the Suffolk Hills and Fairhaven Village developments, we narrowed our list of
neighborhoods for the initial survey to just seven (Table 10). These seven neighborhoods have
been the focus of the initial survey by the project architects (see Figure 19). The following
paragraphs summarize the results of the initial survey in each of the seven neighborhoods. The
brief survey forms completed for the seven neighborhoods during the survey are provided in
Appendix D.
Campo Bello
Campo Bello was one of the earliest subdivisions to be platted and developed in Oro Valley. The
original plat was filed just after World War II by the owners, Toney and Mabel Hardy, for a 160-
acre tract that was formerly part of a homestead patented by Wylie Rudasill in 1935 (Figure 24).
Campo Bello is notable for its distinctive radial street plan, which is similar to Beaux Arts—
inspired street plans known elsewhere before the war, most notably at El Encanto Estates in
Tucson, platted in 1928. The radial plan derives ultimately from the Renaissance and Baroque
periods in Europe (Ames and McClelland 2002:41).
Campo Bello was platted early but developed only gradually. Of the 25 houses that currently
stand in the Campo Bello neighborhood, the earliest was built in 1948 and only 12 were built
before 1965. The large early lots of the original plat, ranging from 9.1 to 10.3 acres, were later
subdivided, but today all of the lots are still relatively large, the smallest around 3.3 acres. The
5-acre circular area at the center of the street plan was originally reserved for a community
center, but nothing was ever built on the parcel (Figure 25). The diagonal streets of the
symmetrical street plan have never been paved.
The spacious lots, low-density housing, unpaved streets, and large number of properties having
horse facilities give Campo Bello a notably open, rural feel (Figure 26). The view of the Santa
Catalina Mountains is uniformly spectacular (Figure 27). Native vegetation is the rule, primarily
prickly pear and cholla, with occasional trees. Most properties have some type of perimeter
fence or wall.
Although the architecture of Campo Bello is of limited historic interest in itself, with only 36
percent of its houses meeting the 45-year age threshold, the neighborhood does have potential
as a historic district because it preserves its distinctive subdivision design. The north half of
Campo Bello formed part of the original Town of Oro Valley when the town was incorporated in
1974; the south half became part of the town in 1984.
Oro Valley Estates
As discussed in Chapter 4, the development of Oro Valley Estates is linked closely with the
history of the Town of Oro Valley. Platted in 1959, Oro Valley Estates is located just west of
Oracle Road on the south bank of the Canada del Oro, an area that was formerly part of the
Canada del Oro Ranch. It is an early example of a residential community planned around a
professionally designed golf course, with the greens and fairways of the course flanked by
small, curvilinear residential clusters (Figures 28 and 29). The design reflects considerable
terrain modification of the kind landscape architects call naturalistic constructivism. The
neighborhood as a whole has spectacular views of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east,
and the golf course offers extensive, grass-turf vistas with occasional tree borders (Figure 30).
The residential clusters are of well-designed houses, most in the Modern style, carefully sited
on large, irregularly shaped lots with open front yards (Figure 31). Residential landscaping is
sparse, consisting mostly of desert species planted on gravel or scraped earth. The openness of
the subdivision, its superior design linking the residential areas with the golf course, and the
proximity of the mountains give this neighborhood a distinctively tranquil feel.
Today Oro Valley Estates has a total of 216 houses, just 32 of which (14.8 percent) were built
before 1965; another 60 were built before 1974. Despite the low number of early houses, Oro
Valley Estates has some potential as a historic neighborhood because of the relatively early
date of its design as a golf course community and the aesthetic layout of its streets and lots in
relation to the course. Oro Valley Estates was one of the principal parts of the Town of Oro
Valley at its incorporation in 1974.
Shadow Mountain Estates
Shadow Mountain Estates, located on the west side of Oracle Road between Hardy Road and
Calle Concordia, was platted in 1959 on part of a large homestead patented by Walter D. Ackley
in 1934. According to Marriott (2008:69-72), who has published several photographs of the
original homestead kept by the Ackley family, Ackley was an optician who playfully named his
homestead the Eye del Wild Ranch. The homestead also included a large acreage on the east
side of Oracle Road (see Table 6), which included the area later subdivided for Shadow
Mountain Estates–East and Suffolk Hills. The history of ownership of the Ackley homestead
after the family sold the property has not been researched, but all of this area was the property
of the Arizona Land, Title and Trust Company when the original plats for Shadow Mountain
Estates, Shadow Mountain Estates–East, and Suffolk Hills were filed.
Shadow Mountain Estates has a postwar curvilinear subdivision plan, which is also true of three
other early subdivisions in the survey—Shadow Mountain Estates–East, Suffolk Hills, and
Fairhaven Village. This type of plan became the approved standard of the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) for sound neighborhood design after World War II. The type includes
curvilinear interior roads, cul-de-sacs, and generously sized, irregularly shaped lots (Figure 32).
Curvilinear plans were promoted heavily by the building industry in response to the strict
standards required by FHA loans, and the many curvilinear subdivisions that sprang up across
the United States in the postwar period, most filled with Ranch and Modern style houses, were
the direct result of these standards. Curvilinear subdivision plans actually had their beginnings
in the concepts of landscape architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
who sought an alternative to the conventional rigidity of the urban grid (Ames and McClelland
2002:48-51; also see Akros, Inc., et al. 2007).
Shadow Mountain Estates has a builder-designed subdivision plan that is largely intact. About
51 percent of the houses were built before 1965, and 138 of the 151 of the houses were built
before 1974. The pre-1965 houses, many of which appear to be the work of a single builder,
tend to be Ranch-style houses with wide frontal gables and lateral shed carports. Other houses
are Modern or Eclectic in style (Figure 33). Many lots were scraped originally, but there has
been some natural regrowth. Drives are circular or straight; some are unpaved, some have rock
edging. The Santa Catalina Mountains are prominent in views to the east.
Shadow Mountain Estates has a subdivision plan that is average in quality and distinctiveness
and would probably not qualify as a historically significant neighborhood based solely on the
subdivision plan. However, the percentage of houses built before 1965 gives it some historic
potential.
Suffolk Hills
As noted above, the Suffolk Hills subdivision takes its name from the Countess of Suffolk, whose
distinctive Forest Lodge residence, built in 1937, now forms part of the Immaculate Heart
Academy property, in the northeastern portion of the neighborhood. Although the Suffolk Hills
subdivision was built in several phases based on plats from the years 1958-1960, it is a
coherent whole and is best considered as a single development (Figure 34). The subdivision is
located on the south side of Magee Road and the east side of Oracle Road, bounded on the east
by First Avenue and on the south by the Town of Oro Valley boundary. Suffolk Hills has the
most houses-190--of any of the seven early subdivisions in the survey.
Suffolk Hills is an excellent, visually pleasing example of a postwar curvilinear subdivision plan.
True to its name, the subdivision is quite hilly, and the interior road system is adapted to the
natural topography. Significant landscape features include an abundance of natural desert
vegetation, added plantings along streets, and the generous use of native stone in retaining
walls and edgings. About 60 percent of the houses in Suffolk Hills are of historic age; most are
Modern or Ranch in style (Figure 35). Suffolk Hills has historic potential both for its distinctive,
well-preserved design and its relatively high percentage of pre-1965 houses. The presence of
the historic, essentially intact Forest Lodge residence is an added virtue.
Shadow Mountain Estates–East
An extension of the original Shadow Mountain Estates subdivision, Shadow Mountain Estates–
East is located on the opposite side of Oracle Road, bounded on the north by Calle Concordia,
on the south by Hardy Road, and on the east by the Coronado National Forest. Its increased
proximity to the Santa Catalina Mountains gives it a distinctly different feel from its namesake
west of Oracle Road. This area is steeply hilly, with excellent views of the looming mountains to
the east (Figure 36).
Shadow Mountain Estates–East is postwar curvilinear in design, with a main north-south street
(North Riviera Drive) from which three cul-de-sacs extend uphill to the east. Most lots are
irregularly shaped and generously sized; many building sites are quite steep. The earliest
houses are in the Ranch style; later houses are Neoeclectic (Figure 37). There is less consistency
of style here than in other early subdivisions in the survey. Natural desert vegetation is the
most common landscaping throughout the subdivision, either intact natural vegetation or
enhanced with plantings; very little non-native vegetation is seen in the subdivision. Driveways
are asphalt or gravel, semicircular where the terrain allows.
Despite its striking views and attractive setting, Shadow Mountain Estates–East currently has
low potential as a historic district. Just 14 percent of the houses were built before 1965, house
styles are inconsistent, and the subdivision design is average. Because 35 of the 57 houses in
the subdivision were built before 1974, the historic potential of the subdivision should be
reconsidered in another 10 years.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 was platted in 1937 by the owners, Lue W. G. and Frieda A.
Skinner, the same couple who had platted Linda Vista Citrus Tracts in 1930. Lue Skinner had
patented the land covered by these plats as two separate GLO claims in 1926 and 1929 (see
Table 6). Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 is bounded on the east by Oracle Road, on the west by
Calle Loma Linda, on the south by Calle Concordia, and on the north by Linda Vista Boulevard.
The smaller Linda Vista Citrus Tracts, located on the north side of Linda Vista Boulevard, was
never fully developed and today holds just 14 houses, the earliest of which was built in 1971.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has 44 houses today, just five of which were built before 1965
and just seven before 1974.
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has a regular, rectilinear subdivision plan, originally consisting of
40 basically square lots, each measuring about 9.5 acres in area. Some lots have been further
subdivided since the original plat was filed, but the lots in general are still large and rectangular.
The overall design is simple in the extreme and may reflect a desire by the original owners to
sell the land quickly, with minimal investment, perhaps in response to the demand for
"gentleman's orchard estates" of the 1930s, as discussed in Chapter 4. The north-south streets
that were part of the original plat—Calle Loma Linda, Calle Milagro, Calle Buena Vista, Calle
Almendra, Calle Codorniz—are still in place today and divide the rectangular subdivision into
five rectangular parts (Figure 38).
Like the other early subdivisions in the survey, Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has excellent
views of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east. Most have limited natural desert vegetation
and instead include a mix of introduced plantings concentrated near the houses. In certain
areas, some desert vegetation has regrown, especially prickly pear and cholla cactus, and some
of the denser stands may reflect patterns of former orchard or other agriculturalg rowth.
Because of the large size of many lots, the subdivision has an open, rural feel; some of the more
substantial properties have distinctive gate features, perimeter fencing or walls, and horse-
related features. The southeast corner of the subdivision is occupied by Canyon del Oro High
g
School and James D. Kriegh Park (formerly Dennis Weaver Park).
Linda Vista Citrus Tracts No. 2 has only a small number of historic houses and many show
evidence of significant alterations. Although the neighborhood is of interest for its connection
to early efforts to develop the Oro Valley area in the 1930s, the architecture and landscape of
the neighborhood reflect this connection only in a limited way. The subdivision has low
potential as a historic district based on either its design or its houses.
Fairhaven Village
Platted in two parts in 1958 and 1960, Fairhaven Village is another, minor example of a postwar
curvilinear subdivision plan. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by Oracle Road, on the
north by Fairhaven Street, on the west by Northern Avenue, and on the south by Cortaro Farms
Road. This area has relatively flat terrain with a slight uphill slope to the northeast; good views
of the mountains to the east; and sparse natural desert plantings with no enhanced plantings
along the streets. The streetscape includes some shallow drainage ditches but no other special
features.
Only 3 of the 26 houses in Fairhaven Village were built before 1965, though 22 were built
before 1974 (Figure 39). The design of the subdivision is intact but simple and undistinguished.
Because of the small number of early houses and the average quality of the subdivision,
Fairhaven Village has low potential as a historic district.
CHAPTER 6
HISTORIC CONTEXTS FOR THE STUDY AREA
Based on the narrative of prehistory and history presented in Chapters 2 and 4, we have
defined a set of historic contexts for evaluating the significance of cultural resources in the Oro
Valley study area. As noted in Chapter 1, the National Register of Historic Places defines a
historic context as a statement about the "patterns or trends in history by which a specific
occurrence, property, or site is understood and its meaning (and ultimately its significance)
within history or prehistory is made clear" (NRHP 1997:7). In other words, a historic context is
the basic information one needs to understand how a historic property relates to its particular
time and place. "Historic property" as used by the National Register means any district, site
(including archaeological site), building, structure, or object. A historic property is considered
significant in a particular historic context if it is clearly associated with the context and still has
the physical characteristics that convey that association.
Historic contexts are used to evaluate the eligibility of a property for listing on the National
Register. The National Register provides four criteria for significance evaluation that amount to
general statements about how a property must relate to specific historic contexts. In other
words, to be eligible for listing on the National Register, a property must meet at least one of
the four criteria, but meeting these criteria requires the development of specific historic
contexts relevant to the particular property. The four National Register criteria for evaluation
are:
A.The property is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad
patterns of our history.
B. The property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.
C. The property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of
construction, or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or
represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual
distinction.
D. The property has yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in prehistory or
history.
Criteria A, B, and C are typically used to evaluate districts, buildings, structures, and objects, but
Criterion D is used almost exclusively to evaluate archaeological sites. Most archaeological sites
do not readily convey an association with particular events or individuals or methods of
construction and are instead valuable primarily for the information they might yield through
excavation. At the same time, certain properties may be eligible for the National Register under
two or more criteria, or even all four. As a pertinent example, the Steam Pump Ranch was
recently listed on the National Register under Criterion A for its association with the historic
context of "early cattle ranching during the Arizona Territorial period and the founding of
settlement along the Canada del Oro" (Barker 2009). Although the nomination considered only
the Criterion A eligibility of the ranch, a recent evaluation by Thiel (2007) recommended that
the ranch be considered eligible under all four criteria: A, for its association with ranching; B, for
its association with the Pusch and Procter families; C, for its distinctive ranching-associated
architecture; and D, for its archaeological potential relating to the historic period. The Arizona
State Historic Preservation Office probably decided to ease the process of National Register
nomination by pursuing only one criterion of eligibility, but the ranch may retain its eligibility
under the other three.
As this discussion implies, an important part of evaluating the National Register eligibility of a
property is its integrity. If a property has been altered or renovated or damaged in a way that
seriously compromises its ability to convey its association with a historic context, it no longer
has significance and is not eligible for listing on the National Register. Depending on the type of
property, integrity may apply to "location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and
association" (NRHP 1997:2). For archaeological sites, the essence of integrity is the likelihood
that a site preserves information relevant to one or more historic contexts developed for the
region, usually in a research design written by a professional archaeologist.
The National Register eligibility of a property is also evaluated in terms of the scope of its
significance, or whether the property is of local, state, or national significance. It is likely that
most historic properties in the Oro Valley study area, if eligible for the National Register, are
eligible at a local level of significance. The pertinent example is again the Steam Pump Ranch,
which was nominated under Criterion A in part for its association with cattle ranching. Although
cattle ranching is the subject of a statewide historic context (Collins n.d.), the level of
significance pursued in the Steam Pump Ranch nomination was local. In other words, the ranch
is significant for the way it represents a statewide phenomenon, but its significance does not
extend beyond the local context. Other statewide contexts that are potentially relevant for
historic properties in Oro Valley include contexts on homesteading (Stein 1990), historic trails
(Stein 1994), railroads (Garrison et al. 1989), the New Deal (Collins 1999), the Protohistoric
period (Gilpin and Phillips 1998), prehistoric water utilization (Foster et al. 2002), stone artifacts
(Slaughter 1992), and the Paleoindian and Archaic periods (Mabry et al. 1998).
Historic Contexts for Prehistoric Archaeological Sites
The development of historic contexts for prehistoric archaeological sites is typically based on
the kinds of questions that a group of sites is thought to be capable of answering through
excavation or other intensive study. In other words, the historic contexts developed for
prehistoric sites amount to a research design, with a set of general research themes tailored for
the expectations in a particular project. The following paragraphs describe four historic
contexts (research themes) appropriate for the evaluation of the information potential of
prehistoric sites in the Oro Valley study area. Because archaeological research in the study area
has focused primarily on three large sites (Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village, and
Romero Ruin) and very little work has been carried out at other sites, the four contexts are
based heavily on what is known to be relevant for understanding these three sites.
Cultural Affiliation and Interaction
The study of affiliation and interaction among distinct cultures has long been an important part
of archaeological research, including in southern Arizona. At prehistoric sites in the region,
elements of the prevalent Hohokam tradition are sometimes found in close association with
elements of the Mogollon, Salado, and other cultures centered in regions well to the north and
east of the Tucson Basin. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Hohokam traditions of the Tucson Basin
are themselves, in many respects, distinct expressions of traditions originating or better known
in the Phoenix Basin. The significance of a prehistoric site in the Canada del Oro area can
depend on the degree to which the site provides evidence of affiliation and interaction
between the Tucson Basin and other cultural regions at different times in prehistory.
Cultural affiliation and interaction were also important aspects of Native American life during
the Protohistoric and historic periods. In the Canada del Oro area, Native American
archaeological sites from these two periods have yet to be recorded, but we know from
historical and ethnographic documentation that the area was frequented by different bands of
Apache early in the historic period. The Canada del Oro itself seems to have marked a frontier
between the Apache and the Tucson Basin, which in protohistoric times was the home of
sedentary Pima speakers and in historic times the Tohono O'odham. If Protohistoric or later
Native American sites are eventually found in the study area, their interpretation will
unavoidably include the context of affiliation and interaction among distinct Native American
cultures.
Chronology
Dating an archaeological site, or determining when it was occupied, is a fundamental task of
archaeological research. Site dates are used to construct a regional chronology, or a temporal
sequence that places sites in relation to each other according to their periods of occupation. In
the Southwest as a whole, the period of occupation of a site is usually established through
absolute or chronometric dating techniques such as radiocarbon dating, archaeomagnetic
dating, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and dendrochronology; or by relative dating,
which relies on the presence of artifacts or other material culture known to be diagnostic of a
particular time period. In southern Arizona, radiocarbon dating is the most commonly used
technique for obtaining absolute dates; relative dating relies mostly on ceramic (pottery) and
stone tool (especially projectile point) typologies with well-established temporal associations,
often tied to absolute dates.
Sites in the Oro Valley study area have the potential to contribute to questions of regional
chronology when they are likely to yield materials for either absolute or relative dating.
Chronological information gathered in recent excavations at two of the major prehistoric sites
in the study area—Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village—has provided substantial new
insights into the timing of settlement and population growth in the Canada del Oro area.
Diet and Subsistence
The foods people ate and how they obtained them is a focus of almost any archaeological
study. One of the first steps in studying prehistoric diet and subsistence is to reconstruct the
natural environment, or the setting where the inhabitants of a site necessarily pursued their
mode of subsistence, whether it was large-game hunting, a mix of hunting and gathering, or
agriculture. Geoarchaeological studies, the analysis of macrobotanical and pollen samples, and
the analysis of animal remains can provide information useful in the reconstruction of the
prehistoric environment. In addition to environmental reconstruction, an understanding of
prehistoric diet and subsistence depends on interpretations of site structure, land-use
practices, and settlement patterns, and on the analysis of artifacts, notably ceramics and stone
tools. Reconstructing diet and subsistence with these methods has been an important part of
the recent work at Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village.
Community Organization
Archaeology has long placed an emphasis on intrasite organization, or the distribution of
artifacts and features (such as the remains of houses) within an individual site, and on
settlement patterns, or the distribution of archaeological sites across a regional landscape.
Taken together, intrasite organization and settlement patterns can illuminate the nature of
community organization in a given time and place, or how the different parts of an individual
site and the different contemporaneous sites in a region functioned together as a community.
Y
For the Tucson Basin Hohokam, the nature of both intrasite organization and settlement
patterns changed through time, and archaeologists have correlated these changes with
developments in subsistence focus, sociopolitical complexity, religious and ideological systems,
and other aspects of Hohokam culture.
In the Oro Valley study area, the work at Sleeping Snake Village and Honey Bee Village has
examined the complexity of intrasite organization at these large sites and its relationship to the
distribution of smaller sites in the surrounding area, all of which seems to reflect a significant
degree of functional specialization both within and among sites. Evaluation of the information
potential of other prehistoric sites in the study area will necessarily take into account the issue
of community organization.
Historic Contexts for the Historic Period in the Study Area
The Oro Valley study area, always on the periphery of the historic core of southern Arizona at
Tucson, nevertheless experienced to one degree or another nearly every part of the larger
region's history. But the timing and details of southern Arizona history as experienced in the
study area are what make Oro Valley a distinctive place with its own historical identity. Three
contexts capture much of that distinctiveness and can serve as references for interpreting the
significance of individual cultural resources in the study area.
Early Transportation Routes and the Canada del Oro Crossing
Although we have not documented it fully in this report, a recurrent theme in the history of the
study area is the importance of the Canada del Oro crossing as a way station along the road
between Tucson and points north, particularly places along the lower San Pedro River. At least
as early as the Mexican period (1821-1854), both Euroamericans and Native Americans
considered the crossing not simply the best place to ford the Canada del Oro but apparently
also as a kind of marker of the northern limit of the Tucson Basin. It is not clear if the crossing
was fixed at a specific spot or if it varied somewhat over the years or with the seasons, but it
seems always to have been in the same general location. It was, not surprisingly, the focus of
the earliest successful settlements in the vicinity of the Canada del Oro, including George
Pusch's Steam Pump Ranch.
It is safe to say that virtually all transportation routes in the Oro Valley study area, from the
earliest trails to modern Oracle Road, were created with some reference to the Canada del Oro
crossing. The remains of other historic features associated with the crossing, such as camp
sites, stage stops, or early bridges, may also survive as archaeological sites in the area, and all
would be covered by this context. We have not specified a time period for the context, but it
potentially includes the entire historic period.
Cattle Ranching and Homesteading in the Canada del Oro Area, 1869-1962
Cattle ranching was the impetus for nearly all early settlement in the study area, from the
earliest attempts by Francisco Romero, George Pusch, and a few others to the many stock-
raising homesteads patented in the area before World War II. The dominant role of the stock-
raising homestead in the transfer of public lands to private ownership meant that cattle
ranching and homesteading were essentially the same activity for most early settlers. The
stock-raising homestead was also the starting point for much of the residential development
that took place in the area after the war.
This context is a slight modification of the historic context defined for the National Register
nomination of the Steam Pump Ranch, "early cattle ranching during the Arizona Territorial
period and the founding of settlement along the Canada del Oro" (Barker 2009). Here the
beginning date, 1869, is the probable earliest year of Francisco Romero's presence in the area.
The end date is the same as that of the Steam Pump Ranch context, which reflects the end of
John Procter's tenure at the ranch.
Early Residential Development in the Canada del Oro Area, 1945-1974
The platting of subdivisions in the Oro Valley study area began as early as 1930, but the actual
construction of houses in platted subdivisions did not begin until well after World War II—the
earliest subdivisions in what is now the Town of Oro Valley did not see their first houses until
the late 1950s. But despite the late date of initial construction, residential development in the
study area is part of the larger postwar boom that had an almost immediate effect on the
entire greater Tucson area, including the area immediately south of modern Oro Valley. Thus,
early residential development in the Oro Valley area is best understood with reference to all of
the postwar years preceding the incorporation of the Town of Oro Valley; hence the period of
significance here, 1945-1974.
Just as the ranching and homesteading period was defined by the transfer of a single expanse
of public land in pieces to the private domain, the period of early residential development in
the study area was defined by the transformation of a relatively small number of large ranch
holdings into numerous, far smaller parcels for individual houses. It is this process of
subdivision and the variety of forms it took that characterize the postwar years, and it is this
process that is now represented in the plats, streets, lots, and houses of Oro Valley's early
neighborhoods.
CHAPTER 7
RECOMMENDATIONS
This report summarizes Phase One of the Oro Valley cultural resources inventory, a first step in
documenting the number and variety of archaeological sites, historic places, and early
residential architecture in the Town of Oro Valley and its planning area. The report will serve as
a basic planning tool for the town and is the starting point for Phase Two of the inventory,
which will center on the preparation of a preservation plan. This chapter presents a set of
general recommendations for cultural resources work in the town over the next five to ten
years and discusses the specific tasks to be carried out in Phase Two. The general
recommendations are organized by three categories of resources: archaeological sites, sources
on the history of Oro Valley, and residential subdivisions. A summary list of the general
recommendations is provided at the end of the chapter, followed by the specific
recommendations for Phase Two.
Archaeological Sites
Information about archaeological sites in the Town of Oro Valley and its planning area is
constantly changing and expanding as archaeological survey and excavation projects are carried
out in advance of development. This report provides a comprehensive list of previously
recorded prehistoric and historic archaeological sites in the study area, as well as a
comprehensive list of archaeological surveys carried out in the study area, but both lists, based
on the AZSITE archaeological database maintained by the Arizona State Museum, are useful
only as an indication of the state of archaeological research in the study area at this particular
moment. Evaluating the potential impacts of a proposed project on archaeological sites will
always require freshly updated information from AZSITE (as well as other sources). In addition,
because of the highly variable quality of the data recorded in AZSITE, the significance and
reliability of the data is always a matter of interpretation. Using AZSITE data to make decisions
about the potential impacts of a proposed project should always be left to a professional
archaeologist familiar with the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of data collected at many
different times and under many different circumstances.
A useful and inexpensive step that the town can take to ensure that it always has updated
archaeological information for the planning area is to subscribe to AZSITE as a land-managing
agency. This will allow the town to receive regular, updated installments of AZSITE
archaeological site and survey data. The full interpretation of this information will still require a
professional archaeologist (and AZSITE may require that the town have an established
relationship with a professional archaeologist who will receive and interpret the information),
but the data will provide the town with a preliminary sense of resources already recorded and
the extent of previous research in a given location. Information about AZSITE and how to
subscribe can be found at http://www.azsite.arizona.edu/.
The task of managing the archaeological resources of Oro Valley would also benefit greatly
from the creation of the town's own centralized archaeological archive. In addition to the basic
information on site locations and survey coverage available from AZSITE, keeping track of
previously recorded sites and the professional attention they have already received requires
direct reference to survey and excavation reports. In many cases, consulting the full range of
reports on a site or a particular area can involve trips to multiple locations, including the
Arizona State Museum, the University of Arizona Library, and various local, state, and federal
agencies. And obtaining copies of reports on short notice from any of these repositories can be
time-consuming and expensive. With a well-focused effort, the town could acquire copies of all
reports and other documentation for all previously recorded sites and previously conducted
archaeological surveys in its jurisdiction, which would help streamline future planning efforts
involving archaeological sites and survey coverage. These reports and other documentation,
like the site locational and survey information obtained from AZSITE, would need to be kept by
the town in a way that restricts public access yet allows ready access to the appropriate
professionals.
Evaluating the potential impact of development on archaeological resources always benefits
from a consideration of all available information on archaeological sensitivity in areas that have
not been surveyed or otherwise systematically investigated by archaeologists. The general
information on archaeological sensitivity in the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (see Chapter
6) is a useful start, but a valuable expansion of this effort would be to prepare a
geoarchaeological study of site sensitivity in selected areas. Geoarchaeological investigation
involves backhoe trenching in locations considered to be of high sensitivity but lacking
significant surface archaeological remains. A specialist in geoarchaeological analysis (someone
who combines geological and archaeological expertise) examines the trenches for evidence of
buried cultural deposits and assigns sensitivity ratings based on a variety of geomorphological
factors. An example of an area of particular interest in Oro Valley is the floodplain of the
Canada del Oro, where major prehistoric sites may be mostly or totally obscured by relatively
recent soil deposition.
Finally, because the information on previously recorded archaeological sites provided in this
report was collected at many different times over the last 40 years or more, much of the
information has been made obsolete by the many development projects that have taken place
in the town over the same period. It was beyond the scope of the present project to make a
systematic, reliable assessment of which previously recorded sites are still intact today and
which have been partially or wholly destroyed by development. This kind of assessment is
complicated by the fact that some sites, although obliterated from the modern ground surface,
may still survive to a significant degree below the surface. An important and valuable step the
town could take to increase its understanding of selected archaeological sites in its jurisdiction
would be to make a systematic evaluation of impacts to these sites, including field evaluations
by a professional archaeologist.
Sources on Oro Valley History
As Chapter 4 of this report makes clear, the history of Oro Valley is known today only because
people at different times have saved the documents that relate to that history or have written
down their own memories and experiences of places and events. Many useful sources on Oro
Valley history have been generated or preserved through the official activities of government
agencies—survey plats by the GLO, topographic maps by the USGS, subdivision plats and tax
assessment records by Pima County—but other important sources exist only because private
individuals, through their personal connections to the Oro Valley area, were interested in its
history and took the time to write things down. The official records of government agencies
will, we can reasonably assume, continue to be generated and preserved; for example, the Oro
Valley Town Clerk has provided us with an outline of the comprehensive town records actively
maintained by her office. But it is not safe to assume that the many people who have firsthand
experience of Oro Valley's history will have the opportunity or the inclination to record their
memories and experiences. The town can be grateful that so many descendants of early Oro
Valley residents have already contributed to the valuable collections of historical information
by Marriott (2005, 2008), but how many other residents and descendants of residents have yet
to share their important memories?
We recommend that the Town of Oro Valley sponsor a systematic effort to collect the historical
memories of Oro Valley residents and their descendants, and to seek out the documents,
photographs, and other items owned by residents that relate to the history of the town. One
part of this effort should be a well-publicized notice that the town is interested in hearing from
people with memories of the town in the years before incorporation, followed by as many
interviews (usually called oral history interviews) of interested people as possible. To preserve
this information and make it easily accessible to everyone, the interviews should be recorded
with good equipment in a suitable setting, then accurately transcribed. A second part of the
effort should be an annual history clinic, when residents and other interested people are invited
to bring documents, photographs, and other items to be examined by knowledgeable people
who can photograph or scan the items as appropriate and record any information that the
owners provide. The annual history clinic could coincide with other public events, such as an
open house at the Steam Pump Ranch or a reading at the Oro Valley Public Library. The Oro
Valley Historical Society is an active and thriving organization that could undoubtedly be
enlisted to assist in the effort.
The accumulation of historical documents, photographs, and other items implied by history
clinics and similar efforts raises the question of how and where all of these materials will be
organized and stored. The Oro Valley Historical Society itself already has a substantial collection
of materials, many of which still need to be inventoried and organized, and all of which lack a
permanent storage facility. The town will do a great service to its residents and its history if it
makes a systematic effort to consolidate, inventory, organize, and house the various sources on
Oro Valley history that are currently held by individual residents, the Oro Valley Historical
Society, and the town itself. The ideal situation would be a central repository in Oro Valley,
perhaps at the public library or the town government offices, where these sources are
organized and maintained, and where town residents and other interested people can have
easy access. Because of the sensitive and irreplaceable nature of some of the materials, access
would have to be carefully monitored and limited to onsite use. The repository would probably
need to operate in the manner of a special collections department at a library. A good starting
point for an effort leading to a centralized repository would be a curation-needs assessment to
determine the volume and kinds of materials to be managed and the type of facility required to
manage them effectively.
Getting the town's historical sources in one place, organizing and inventorying them, and
making them readily accessible will help promote a fuller use of these sources by interested
professionals, the town's residents, and the town itself. One important use of visual and
documentary sources that the town should consider is to develop exhibits on the history of the
Oro Valley area. Exhibits could be designed for a single location, such as the public library or
the town government offices, or they could be designed to travel among different locations,
including the public library, area schools, special events, and other public settings. The same
could be done for the major prehistoric sites in the town: displays incorporating the artifact
collections from Honey Bee Village, Sleeping Snake Village, or Romero Ruin—much of which
languish in boxes at the Arizona State Museum—could be developed for the same kinds of
venues.
Residential Subdivisions
Our initial survey of residential architecture in Oro Valley has shown that four of the earliest
subdivisions in the town are potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of
Historic Places as residential historic districts. The four subdivisions are Oro Valley Estates,
Suffolk Hills, Campo Bello, and Shadow Mountain Estates. We recommend that the town
consider nominating each of the four subdivisions to the National Register, with the consent
and cooperation of the residents.
Because of the preliminary nature of our survey, we are not certain that the Arizona State
Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) will agree that any of the four subdivisions is appropriate for
a National Register nomination. Before deciding to pursue a nomination, which can be a
significant expense, a determination of eligibility should be made for the selected subdivision
by the SHPO. A determination of eligibility involves contacting the SHPO, providing a minimal
level of documentation about the selected subdivision, and arranging for the SHPO to visit and
tour the subdivision. If the SHPO determines that the subdivision is eligible for listing on the
National Register, a nomination is warranted.
Following a determination of eligibility, the town would approach the neighborhood association
for the subdivision, or the residents themselves, and recommend that a nomination be
prepared. The nomination process, which includes writing a detailed historic context for the
subdivision and preparing SHPO historic building inventory forms for all of the houses, could be
funded directly by the town, by contributions from the neighborhood residents, or by a
combination of these sources. When each resident contributes a portion of the nomination
cost, individual contributions are usually smaller when the neighborhood is large, because
much of the expense of a nomination is in the historic context, which is generally the same for
any size of neighborhood. In other words, the per-house cost of a nomination declines as the
number of houses increases.
If the town decides to pursue only one National Register nomination of a subdivision, we
recommend that either Oro Valley Estates or Suffolk Hills be nominated. Oro Valley Estates has
a relatively low percentage of houses built before 1965, but it is notable for its excellent
subdivision design in association with a golf course. It is also closely connected with the history
of the Town of Oro Valley as one of the original subdivisions at incorporation. Suffolk Hills has
both a high percentage of houses built before 1965 and an excellent subdivision design. It is
also associated with the Countess of Suffolk's Forest Lodge, an important example of Modern
architecture in the town and in the Tucson area as a whole. The listing of either subdivision on
the National Register would be a boon to the residents, who would receive a tax benefit for
having a contributing house in the district, and to the Town of Oro Valley, which would draw
new attention to its commitment to the effective management of cultural resources in its
jurisdiction.
However many residential district nominations the town decides to pursue in the short term,
the long-term planning for the town should include regular consideration of additional district
nominations. As we indicated in Chapter 5, other subdivisions in the town not considered here
will soon approach the 45-year threshold. Not all will be suitable for nomination, but early
subdivisions constitute the most substantial undocumented cultural resources in the town,
even if an appreciation of their historic significance is still mostly uncultivated in Oro Valley.
Summary of Recommendations
Our general recommendations to the Town of Oro Valley for the next five to ten years can be
summarized in a list:
1. Archaeological Sites
a. subscribe to AZSITE as a land-managing agency
b. create a centralized archaeological archive
c. conduct geoarchaeological evaluation of selected high-sensitivity areas
d. conduct field assessment of recent impacts to selected archaeological sites
2. Sources on Oro Valley History
a. sponsor a systematic effort to collect sources on Oro Valley history, including:
oral history interviews and transcriptions
annual history clinics
b. conduct a curation-needs assessment for collected historical sources
c. develop a centralized repository for historical sources
d. develop exhibits on local history and archaeology
3. Residential Subdivisions
a. nominate four early subdivisions as National Register districts:
Oro Valley Estates
Suffolk Hills
Campo Bello
Shadow Mountain Estates
b. regularly consider additional nominations in long-term planning
Our specific recommendations for Phase Two of the inventory relate to two tasks: preparing a
preservation plan, and expanding public outreach.
1. Preservation Plan
The Phase One inventory has brought together much valuable information about the cultural
resources of Oro Valley and how these resources embody the history and cultural heritage of
the town. Using the results of the inventory and our general recommendations for additional
cultural resources work, an effective preservation plan can now be assembled that will help the
town set priorities and make decisions about the documentation, evaluation, and preservation
of resources as development projects in the town are proposed and carried out. The
preservation plan should be concise (5 to 10 pages) and include a distillation of the inventory
findings. The general recommendations presented here should be the focus of the plan. It is
also important that the plan be easily understood by a wide audience and consistent with the
standards of the Arizona SHPO, the Arizona State Museum, the National Register, and the
cultural resource goals and standards already established by the Town of Oro Valley.
2. Public Outreach
The Phase One inventory included the preparation of a four-page brochure summarizing the
goals and results of the inventory and geared to a general audience. The inventory also
included an Open House held in the town council chambers, with a slide show and large-format
posters (text and photographs) focused on the various aspects of the inventory. All of these
materials were intended to inform Oro Valley residents of the results of the inventory and to
encourage their participation, but only a small number of the town's residents have been able
to take advantage of these opportunities. We recommend that an additional effort be made in
Phase Two to involve the public in the results of the inventory and to encourage public
participation in the preservation of the town's cultural resources.This effort could include three
items in particular:
a. publication of the Phase One brochure in a high-quality color format, slightly revised
to reflect completion of the inventory, with 2,000-3,000 copies printed; the brochure
could be distributed both by the town at public locations and by the Oro Valley Historic
Preservation Commission in its ongoing outreach efforts
b. making the Phase One inventory report easily available on CD (50-100 copies), and
for download on the town website; the town should also consider having 100 perfect-
bound hard copies of the inventory report printed for targeted distribution
c. hosting a public lecture series on the cultural resources of Oro Valley, sponsored by
the Oro Valley Historic Preservation Commission in cooperation with the Oro Valley
Historical Society
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[add this information to the title page, format as necessary]
Town of Oro Valley
Mayor Paul H. Loomis
Vice Mayor K. C. Carter
Council Member William Gamer
Council Member Barry Gillaspie
Council Member Al Kunisch
Council Member Salette Latas
Oro Valley Historic Preservation Commission
Daniel Zwiener, Chairman
Robert Baughman
Ed Hannon
Sam McClung
Lois Nagy
Valerie Pullara
Patricia Spoerl
19Qo—
U Ethnohistoric and
Ethnographic hic Period
H 0 1800 no gra p
v
0 = 1700
0 z
< 1600-- Protohistoric Period
1500—
1400— Tucson
LU
1300— Classic
Tanaue Verde
1200—
1100-
LU Sedentary
—' 1000
w �
> - 900—
Colonial
800--
0 700— /It)
SID$
500— Pioneer
500—
cc
w 400—
Rea
Early
300—
Ceramic
200—
100--
A.D.
B.C.
100—
200—
L.d Lc.
300—
(Early Agricultural)
400—
500—
1,000—
U
2,000
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5,000—
5,000—
Early Archaic
7,000—
8,000
z
O 9,000—
z Paleoindian
LU 0
10,000—
Q
a.
Revised List of Tables
Table 1. Archaeological surveys in the Oro Valley study ares enD
AE 1-I ST-
Table 2. Summary of archaeological site types in the Oro Va
Table 3. Archaeological sites in the Oro Valley study area O 7-elast.E_s
Table 4. Early GLO survey plats of townships in the Oro VE
Table 5. Historic features shown on early GLO survey plats
Table 6. Homesteads and other land claims patented in the(
Table 7. Summary of patented land claims in the Oro Valle_
Table 8. Oro Valley subdivisions platted before 1974,by plat year
Table 9. Oro Valley subdivisions platted before 1974,by pre-1965 percentage
Table 10. Oro Valley subdivisions in the initial survey
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Work Plan for Archaeological
Data Recovery at the Steam Pump
Ranch, AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), Oro
Valley, Pima County, Arizona
J. Homer Thiel
Reviewed by
Patricia Castalia
Desert Archaeology, Inc.
3975 N. Tucson Boulevard
Tucson, Arizona 85716
Drew Gorski
Poster Frost Associates
317 N. Court Avenue
Tucson, Arizona 85701
"I'Vrff
%,,,,,"40 Desert Archaeology, Inc.
3975 N.Tucson Blvd.,Tucson,AZ 85716•23 December 2009
�N�11�
, .
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES 3
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA RECOVERY AT THE STEAM PUMP 4
PROJECT AREA LOCATION AND DESCRIPTION 4
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING OF THE PROJECT AREA 4
THE STEAM PUMP/ BLACKSMITH SHOP 6
RESEARCH QUESTIONS 6
WORK PLAN 7
REFERENCES CITED 10
. .
LIST OF FIGURES
1. Reproduction of USGS 7.5-minute topographic quad Oro Valley,Ariz.
(AZ BB:9 [NW]),showing location of project area 5
2. Work plan for the Steam Pump/Blacksmith Shop building 8
WORK PLAN FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL
DATA RECOVERY AT THE STEAM PUMP
RANCH, AZ BB:9:75 (ASM), ORO VALLEY,
PIMA COUNTY, ARIZONA
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA RECOVERY AT THE STEAM PUMP
The Town of Oro Valley is preparing to reconstruct the historic Steam Pump/Blacksmith
Shop at the Steam Pump Ranch, located along the north side of Oracle Road. The adobe
brick building was apparently constructed in the 1870s and initially housed a large steam-
powered water pump. A later wood frame addition was the location of a blacksmith shop.
Portions of the building are preserved,primarily three of the adobe walls of the steam pump
building. Other portions survive as archaeological features. Prior to the reconstruction
activities, Desert Archaeology, Inc., will perform archaeological data recovery to collect
information about the building, locate adjacent features, and recover a sample of artifacts
associated with the building's use. As part of this work, a backhoe will be used to grade the
area around the building to improve drainage, directing water away from the foundations.
This work plan presents a detailed description of the planned work. Desert Archaeology has
previously surveyed the property and prepared a detailed history of the ranch (Thiel 2007).
PROJECT AREA LOCATION AND DESCRIPTION
The project areas are located in Pima County in the northeast quarter of Section 7,Township
12 South, Range 14 East on the USGS 7.5-minute topographic quad Oro Valley, Ariz. (AZ
BB:9 [NW]) (Figure 1). Specifically, the project area is located along the northern side of
North Oracle Road,east of Lambert Lane,in Oro Valley.
Area of Potential Effects (APE) refers to the "geographic area or areas within which an
undertaking may directly or indirectly cause alterations in the character or use of historic
properties,if any such properties exist" (36 CFR 800.16[d]).The APE for this project includes the
footprint of the project area.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING OF THE PROJECT AREA
The project area is located immediately adjacent, to the south, of the channeled Canada del
Oro wash. This major tributary of the Santa Cruz River receives runoff from the nearby
Santa Catalina Mountains. Natural vegetation along the floodplain adjacent to the Canada
del Oro within the vicinity of the project area, includes mesquite groves and isolated
cactuses. The actual Steam Pump Ranch property has been extensively modified by its
historic and modern use. The modern vegetation includes cottonwood, palm, pecan, and
eucalyptus trees;along with large areas of irrigated lawn with scattered bushes and plantings.
Work Plan for Archaeological Data Recovery at the Steam Pitinp Ranch, Page 5
Oro Valley,Pima County,Arizona
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location of project area.
Work Plan for Archaeological Data Recovery at the Steam Pump Ranch, Page 6
Oro Valley,Pima County,Arizona
The elevation of the project area averages approximately 2,580 to 2,950 ft above sea level,
sloping slightly from the northeast to the southwest.
THE STEAM PUMP/BLACKSMITH SHOP
In 1874, George Pusch came to Arizona, driving a 14-mule team. He lived in Phoenix and
Prescott for awhile before moving to Tucson. Pusch formed a partnership with John
Zellweger, who had also moved to Tucson, and they opened a butcher shop together in the
mid 1870s, realizing they could make more money by selling the meat from their cattle than
by merely selling their cattle to others. Pusch purchased the Canada del Oro Ranch with
Zellweger and they marked their cattle with the PZ brand. The purchase of a steam pump
led to the renaming of the Steam Pump Ranch.
It is likely that the adobe portion of the Steam Pump building was constructed in the 1870s
to provide protection to the steam pump the two men brought overland to the ranch.
Unfortunately, records do not provide an exact date of construction. The existing building
had a rock foundation with tall adobe walls. The building had a corrugated metal roof
supported by metal trusses. The roof collapsed during a storm in 2003 and has been
dismantled. At some time the original floor inside the pump room was covered with a
poured concrete floor.
A blacksmith shop was built along the south side of the building. Its date of construction is
not known, although it is visible as a wood frame addition in photographs from the 1920s.
The southern wall was partially made from adobe bricks. This portion of the building also
had a corrugated metal roof supported by wood trusses.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Archaeological excavation of the Steam Pump/Blacksmith Shop is expected to provide
answers to a number of questions relating to the construction and use of the building. Each
is detailed below.
Question 1). How was the building constructed? How did it change through time? An
examination of the standing portions of the building and sections of the foundation indicate
that a variety of materials (stone, mortar, adobe brick, wood, corrugated metal, concrete,
and tamped earth) were used to construct the building. Excavation of units along the
foundations of the building will allow for a better understanding of how the building was
constructed and how it was modified through time. Of special interest is an examination of
how the walls of the Steam Pump room and Blacksmith Shop abut each other.
Question 2). What was the layout of the Blacksmith Shop? The Blacksmith Shop has a
partially visible tamped earth floor. A rectangular wooden post protrudes from the floor
and is likely a mount for a piece of equipment. Clearing the interior of the room through
careful hand-scraping with shovel and trowels will expose other internal features and allow
Y, Y
Work Plan for Archaeological Data Recovery at the Steam Pump Ranch, Page 7
Oro Valley,Pima County,Arizona
for a better understanding of the placement of equipment such as the anvil, the hearth,
equipment stands, and cooling barrels. Only one other Territorial era blacksmith shop has
been explored in Arizona,the Moss Shop in downtown Phoenix(Thiel 1998.
Question 3). What was the internal layout of the Steam Pump room? The Steam Pump
room is currently covered with a poured-in-place concrete slab. This slab will be removed as
part of the reconstruction work. Archaeologists will clear the interior of the room beneath
the slab to locate earlier floor surfaces and to determine whether internal features, such as
equipment mounts,were present within the room.
Question 4). What activities took place around the Steam Pump/Blacksmith Shop?
Reconstruction plans call for the grading of the area around the building to direct water
away from the structure. It is uncertain whether there were features associated with the
building. A number of large rocks are visible on the eastern side of the building, perhaps
representing the location of a building or equipment. Units excavated by hand will recover a
sample of artifacts associated with the building. Careful stripping and contouring of the
existing ground surface will expose other artifacts and may locate adjacent features, which
will then be documented by archaeologists.
WORK PLAN
Archaeological fieldwork will be undertaken to answer each of the research questions
(Figure 2). A permit for archaeological fieldwork and a collections accession number will be
obtained from the Arizona State Museum. All project forms, photographs, and artifacts will
be submitted to the Arizona State Museum for curation.
All hand excavated units would be dug in either stratigraphic levels, if possible, or in 20 cm
arbitrary levels. Standardized forms will be completed for each level. Profile drawings will
be made of at least one wall for each excavation unit. All hand-excavated soil will be
screened through 1/4-inch mesh and the artifacts collected for processing in Desert
Archaeology's laboratory.
Task 1). Ten 2-m by 1-m excavation units will be hand excavated around the exterior
foundation of the building. Two units will be placed along each wall and a single unit will
be placed along the eastern side at the juncture of the Steam Pump room and the Blacksmith
Shop. A tenth unit will be arbitrarily placed to further document any area of particular
interest. The exterior of the building foundation is about 50 m and, as planned, a total of 20
m would be hand excavated down to the base of the foundation. The exposed foundations
will be documented through detailed profile drawings, photographs, and descriptive forms.
A total of 20 person days will be expended on this task.
Task 2). The floor of the Blacksmith Shop area,which measures roughly 11.8 m by 5.8 m(39
ft by 19 ft), will be hand scraped using a flat-nosed shovel and trowels, down to the hard-
packed floor surface. All floor features will be documented through forms, photographs,
and maps. A total of four person days will be expended on this task.
Work Plan for Archaeological Data Recovery at the Steam Pump Ranch, Page 8
Oro Valley,Pima County,Arizona 1, ---,,,,,,, fis4
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Figure 2. Work plan for the Steam Pump/Blacksmith Shop building.
Task 3). The floor of the Steam Pump room measures about 7.4 m by 7.3 m (24 ft by 24 ft).
After the removal of the concrete slab, the area will be stripped using a flat-nosed shovel
and trowels. All soil will be screened through 1/4-inch mesh. Archaeologists will be searching
for any original dirt floors and internal features. Four person days are expected to be
sufficient for this task.
Work Plan for Archaeological Data Recovery at the Steam Pump Ranch, Page 9
Oro Valley,Pima County,Arizona
Task 4). One 2-m by 2-m unit will be placed over the rock area adjacent to the Blacksmith
Shop to determine whether this is a floor or equipment mount area. Five additional 2-m by
1-m areas will be hand excavated in the area around the building to recover a sample of
artifacts and examine the external area for features. Ten person days will be expended for
this task.
Following completion of the hand units, a backhoe equipped with a seven-ft-wide scraping
blade will strip the area around the structure to the planned construction grade. This work
will be supervised by archaeologists who will collect artifacts and document any exposed
features. It is expected that two backhoe days and four person days will be expended in this
effort.
Following completion of fieldwork all artifacts will be processed in Desert Archaeology's
laboratory. Items will be analyzed and prepared for curation at the Arizona State Museum.
A report describing the results of fieldwork and artifact analyses will be prepared and
submitted to Poster/Frost for review within four months following completion of
fieldwork.
, .
REFERENCES CITED
Thiel,J. Homer
1998 Phoenix's Hidden History:Archaeological Investigations at Blocks 72 and 73. Anthropological
Papers No. 26. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Anthropological Papers No. 7.
Pueblo Grande Museum,Phoenix.
2007 Cultural Resources Survey of The Steam Pump Ranch, Oro Valley, Pima County, Arizona.
Project Report No. 07-121. Desert Archaeology,Inc.,Tucson.
P5LJD 13(1 SmFF
Proposed Steam Pump Ranch Recovery and Preservation Task Force (1)G tND *4
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Title
Steam Pump Ranch Master Plan Project Team
Steam Pump Ranch Recovery and Preservation Task Force
Steam Pump Ranch Recovery and Preservation Advisory Committee
Potential Membership
1. Oro Valley Historic Preservation Commission Chairman
2. Oro Valley Historic Preservation Commission Staff Liaison
3. Oro Valley Special Projects Coordinator
4. Representative from the Oro Valley Planning and Zoning Commission
5. Representative from the Oro Valley Parks and Recreation Department
6. Oro Valley Communications Administrator
7. Pima County Cultural Resources Manager
8. Project Consultant
9. Archaeological Consultant
10. Citizen At Large
Potential Duties
1. Recommend and monitor budget priorities.
2. Recommend and monitor recovery and preservation plan in accordance with National Register
and State Historic Preservation Office standards as well as the Pima County Easement and
Intergovernmental Agreement.
3. Recommend and monitor compliance with(proposed) Environmentally Sensitive Lands
Ordinance and all other requirements under town code.
4. Make recommendations on and monitor treatment proposals for buildings,grounds,documents
and photographs.
5. Monitor activities for Areas of Potential Effect(APE).
6. Recommend proposals for community outreach including the development of partnerships with
outside parties.
7. Monitor activities on the site in accordance with the Steam Pump Ranch Visitors and Access
Protocol.
8. Liaison with town groups planning events for Steam Pump Ranch.
9. Monitor and re-evaluate contracts and change orders.
A statement of the powers and duties should also be made including who recommendations should be
forwarded to.