Arizona’s capital city might have been called “Salina,” “Stonewall,” or even “Pumpkinville,” had it not been for a spurious English “Lord” named Darrell Duppa. Duppa was a well-educated world traveler who, it was rumored, was given a substantial allowance by his wealthy English relatives to remain permanently at large.
His raucous lifestyle, highlighted by epic bouts with dipsomania was, no doubt, a source of embarrassment to his relatives and contributed to his banishment to Arizona. It was said “Lord” Duppa was fluent in seven languages. Unfortunately for his listeners, the erudite eccentric spoke all seven in the same paragraph.
Duppa was a member of a committee chosen to select a name for the new settlement on the banks of the Salt River one sunny October day in 1870.
Q: I admit that I’m not new to the Valley, but I have a burning question which in all my 36 years, I cannot answer. How did Bethany Home Road get its name? Is there such a place as “Bethany Home’’? I can understand how Camelback, Washington, Central, Indian School and just about all the other major thoroughfares got named, but not Bethany Home. Do you know?
A: Do we know? Do we know? Do you think the state’s largest newspaper, a powerful media colossus such as Phoenix Newspapers Inc., a newspaper for the new millennium, would blithely hand over the awesome responsibility of teaching the Valley 101 course to someone who didn’t know something as simple as that? It is to laugh. Ha, ha.
Actually, no, we don’t know. Or at least we didn’t know until we asked around a bit.
Q: There are so many places around the Valley with “ranch” in the name. How many were ever really ranches?
A: Lots of them. Lots and lots. Despite all the sprawl, you have to bear in mind that the Valley metro area started as a farming community, and until fairly recently, Maricopa County was primarily an agricultural area. So there were a lot of ranches.
Not all of these spreads were exactly hardscrabble kinds of places. McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale, before it turned into a residential development, was the home of Fowler and Anne McCormick. Fowler McCormick’s two grandfathers were Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the grain reaper, and John D. Rockefeller, so he wasn’t exactly hurting for cash. He later became president and chairman of the board of International Harvester.
Patriotism was the motivating factor in the naming of one of northern Arizona’s most prominent cities. A party of immigrants bound for California camped at the foot of the San Francisco Mountains on July 4, 1876. To honor the nation’s centennial, they raised the colors. To celebrate the occasion they called the site Flagstaff.
A group of miners in Santa Cruz County wanted to call their new town “American Flag,” but the idea was nixed
