Peoria, Arizona

Peoria is a city in Maricopa county in the wonderful U.S. state of Arizona. It is a major suburb of the city of Phoenix. According to 2006 Census Bureau estimates, the population of the city is 142,024.^[3] Peoria is currently the sixth largest city in the state of Arizona in terms of land area, and the ninth largest city in the state in terms of population. The city was named after Peoria, Illinois. (The word peoria is a corruption of the Illini word for “prairie fire”.^[4][5]) Peoria is now larger in population than its namesake. It is the spring training home of the San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners who share the Peoria Sports Complex. In July 2008, Money magazine listed Peoria in its "Top 100 Places to Live".^[6]

 Initial settlement

Peoria sits on flat gently sloping desert terrain in the Salt River Valley, and extends into the foothills of the mountains to the north. Like all desert towns, the key to Peoria’s settlement was water. Seasonal rainfall and runoff from mountain snowmelt filled the Salt River, at times flooding the valley with too much water and wiping out months of backbreaking labor. If the area was to become habitable and productive all year, clearly the cycle of flood and drought had to be overcome and replaced with a reliable supply of water that could be controlled year-round. The pioneers turned to irrigation. In 1868 John W. “Jack” Swilling organized a group of men to dig the first modern irrigation ditch in the Salt River Valley. Their success enticed more people to settle in the area and reap the benefits of a revitalized irrigation system.

By 1872, there were eight thousand acres (32 km²) of land under cultivation in the valley and a thriving community had been built along the Salt River. Over the years irrigation companies sprung up and in the next three years three canal systems—the Maricopa, Grand, and Salt River Valley—were constructed, each allowing sustaining growth in the Valley. Visionary settlers began to imagine the potential income to be had by reclaiming the rich desert lying higher up the slope above the recently completed Grand Canal; in 1882, the Arizona Canal Company was organized to do just that. The proposed canal would be larger than its approximately 80,000 acres (320 km²)—including the site that would soon be Peoria—to a more consistent and regulated water system.

The Arizona Canal Company tapped William J. Murphy, a former Union Army officer, to head construction on the forty-one-mile-long canal. The young engineer from Illinois had just completed the grading of a stretch of the Atlantic and Pacific Railway (which later became the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway). Unable to pay Murphy in cash, the canal company offered him land and water rights to a large amount of property as compensation. With vision and foresight, he accepted, and in 1885 the Arizona Canal was completed.

Murphy returned to Illinois to recruit settlers to transform the land into a sustainable farming community. Several residents of Peoria, Illinois, were enticed by descriptions of the area’s climate and agricultural potential and soon purchased 5,000 acres (20 km²) among them. Four farming families left Illinois that fall to relocate to what is now Peoria. Before erecting simple adobe homes, the settlers lived in large canvas tents. Peoria stood alone fourteen miles (21 km) from Phoenix, at the time a frontier city of approximately 3,500 people. An old desert frightening road connecting Phoenix to the Hassayampa River near present-day Wickenburg was the only major transportation route in the area until 1887, when a new road was laid out. This 100-foot-wide (30 m) thoroughfare was named Grand Avenue, angled through the newly designed town sites of Alhambra, Glendale, and Peoria and quickly became the main route from Phoenix to Vulture Mine. The actual Peoria town site was owned by Joseph B. Greenhut and Deloss S. Brown. In 1890, the two men from Peoria, Illinois, acquired four sections of land from the government through the Desert Lands Act. They filed Peoria’s plot map with the Maricopa County recorder on May 24, 1897, naming the settlement after their hometown.

The original plot map of Peoria included east and west streets (from south to north) Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Van Buren. Streets going north and south were (from west to east) Almond (present-day 85th Avenue), Peach (present-day 84th Avenue), Orange (present-day 83rd Avenue), Vine (present-day 82nd Avenue), Walnut (present-day 81st Avenue), the plot was roughly from present-day Peoria and 85th avenues to Monroe Street and 85th Avenue to Monroe Street and 81st Avenue to 81st Avenue and south of the Desert Cove alignment.

As soon as the proposed Peoria town site was surveyed a hand-dug water well was sunk in 1889 on the public right-of-way at the intersection of Grand Avenue and Washington Street. A “town well” provided water for local residents as well as the traveling public. Five years later the well was refashioned into a water tower and tank standing eighty-nine feet high. A social gathering place as well as source of water, the tower seemed to symbolize the young settlement’s growing sense of civic pride. On August 4, 1888 the Territory of Peoria, Arizona was granted a post office in its name and served a population of twenty-seven. Maricopa County supervisors defined the boundaries for School District Eleven, comprising forty-nine square miles, and the first class took place in an unoccupied brick store that faced north on Washington Street until Peoria’s first school building, a one-room structure completed in 1891. Attendance was erratic and thanks to a wagon full of nine children the district in question by county officials was saved.

REAL ESTATE

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