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
Ever since man first set foot in this land called Arizona, he has felt compelled to name every river, waterhole, mountain pass and trail. Inspiration was usually drawn from great natural spectacles and awesome beauty, but not always. Among Arizona’s fabulous mineral laden mountains lie the skeletal remains of storied ghost camps of yesteryear, born in boom and died in dust, the fragile wooden walls, concrete ruins, monuments to hopes and aspirations that didn’t always pan out.
These ghostly reminders of the past were generally populated by a variety of boisterous, rough and tumble miners generally characterized as unmarried, unchurched, and unwashed. They named their temporary abodes after former hometowns or countries, girlfriends, local geography, dappled with a liberal touch of tongue-in-cheek humor.
