RE-COLONIZING ARIZONA: "Pioneer Crossing" - Marking The Mormon Trail with Streets of Luxury Housing

Intro: Another one of those "Vision Things" by followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter-Day Saints in an attempt to re-formulate the history of The Salt River Valley!

It was the front-page cover headline featured Story Spotlight written by Scott Shumaker that appeared in the Mesa Tribune on March 13th. Turn over the hardcopy version and you find that the developer - Blandford Homes - always pays for full-page advertising on the back.

top story spotlight

Ranching family’s project aims to preserve Mesa history

By Scott Shumaker, Tribune Staff Writer Mar 13, 2022

"Streets of luxury housing are planned to replace century-old orange groves and pastures at the end of Val Vista Drive on the south banks of the Salt River in northeast Mesa over the next two to three years.

While most of the orange groves will be lost, the four families that own the parcels hope years of planning and vetting potential developers will lead to a project that does justice to a historic slice of Mesa and opens it up to residents with public trails and trailheads.

JUSTICE??? 300 Latter-Day Saints arrived in indigenous lands and territories inhabited by more than 5,000 "Indians", staked out homesteads, claiming water-rights along The Salt River. 

=======================================================================

The landowners in this part of Lehi have partnered with Blandford Homes to create an 85-acre planned area development called Pioneer Crossing, a reference to a historic crossing point on the Salt River close by. 

SEE THIS RELATED CONTENT

Here in Mesa - and in Tempe and Phoenix and Scottsdale - there's documentation as well for what Frank Midvale called "The Pre-Historic Irrigation of the Salt River Valley" of earlier indigenous cultures that were established for centuries before anyone recorded their versions of that history when evidence of those who were here before was "discovered" and their settlements patterns were mapped.

< Here's a closer look from a Digital Geo Map 2003 uploaded by Richard A. Neely.
Major Hohokam Irrigation Systems in the Lower Salt River Valley
The link is below if you're interested in more details.
But let's note at this point, that it was the usual practice to bury the dead on higher ground above the irrigation canals close to settlements and housing patterns.
Finding artifacts or human remains is often the result of chance - or new construction.
Research Gate

 

INSERT: Post of this blog from July 2019

Digging-Deeper: Know Your Water + Water-Rights

Don't really intend to be silly or light-hearted about water rights and water, but it is the most precious commodity here in the Desert Southwest.
Here in Arizona in what we now call The Salt River Valley, ancient indigenous cultures created a vast system of canal networks over the centuries before the arrival of new 'Pioneers'. They expanded the open canals to supply natural water resources, converted to private-ownership or municipal control to build vast fortunes for agricultural lands and ranches. After World War II those same lands were needed to create large tracts of housing for Suburban Sprawl and shopping centers and for new industries. Irrigation districts had to be created. Water usage increased. Groundwater had to be tapped into. Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants had to get built. Planning for the future, the city of Mesa once owned 11,400 acres in Pinal County called the Mesa Water Farm. That acreage - and the water-rights - were sold off to Saints Holding Company. . ."

========================================================================

Mesa City Council last week approved an assortment of zoning changes and plan amendments that have cleared the way for the development to proceed.

Councilmember Mark Freeman, who represents the district and worked with stakeholders and the landowners as they contemplated the development, said after the council meeting that the families involved had turned away a lot of offers from developers over the years before arriving at this plan.

He praised the project for blending in with the surrounding area, providing the public with trail access and preserving a piece of the area’s agricultural heritage.

In a January Planning & Zoning Board hearing, neighbors were generally supportive of the development as long as the city put in a new fire station to serve the additional houses. Freeman agreed that a station is needed and said he is working to put a fire station at 32nd and McDowell on the ballot for the next bond election.

One of the properties involved in the development is Tyler Farms, a 40-acre horse boarding ranch. Attorney Brian Campbell, a member of the Tyler family and their representative, said the land surrounding Pioneer Crossing is loaded with history. The plans for the PAD, he said, were built around a vision to protect and highlight its history.

The day after the Council vote March 8, Campbell showed the Mesa Tribune some of that history. 

Standing on a hill overlooking the Salt River near Tyler Farms, Campbell pointed down the dry river toward a small white obelisk marking the Lehi Crossing. This spot was an important crossing on the Salt River used by traffic from Fort McDowell and pioneer families in the earliest days of Mesa. . .

Using historical documentation, the family believes the ranch is the site of the 1878 Mesa Company’s “river camp,” where the company camped while laying out the townsite of Mesa.

If true, that would place the first births and deaths of Mormon settlers on the ranch site, he said. Campbell said there have been surveys of the property for remains of the camp, but none have been identified yet.  . .

Pioneer Crossing carves out an “agritainment” district – a portmanteau of agriculture and entertainment – which will be anchored by the BB Farms citrus stand and Jalapeno Bucks, a popular barbecue spot featured on the Arizona Fresh Foodie Trail. The agritainment district will preserve a block of the orange groves and create event and dining spaces among the trees.

 

Reference: https://www.eastvalleytribune.com/news/ranching-family-s-project-aims-to-preserve-mesa-history/article_0796a914-a25a-11ec-91f7-0f3132031df8.html 

 

MORE RELATED CONTENT

This Saturday is the Seasonal Re-Opening for "A Hidden Gem " in Central Mesa - most people don't realize this cultural park even exists, even though its long history goes back centuries before the mid-1850's when Mormon Pioneers from Utah were sent on a mission in oxen-carts to colonize Arizona for The Church.

There were two waves, the first in an area now named "Lehi" after a Prophet in The Book of Mormon.

300 Latter-Day Saints arrived in indigenous lands and territories inhabited by more than 5,000 "Indians", staked out homesteads, claiming water-rights along The Salt River. 

"The Hohokam, the ancestors of the Akimel O'odham (Pima), constructed the Mesa Grande temple mound and established many settlements in the Gila and Salt River valleys of southern Arizona. Mesa Grande is one of the last places to show how the Hohokam created an irrigation network that pioneers began to reuse in the late 1800s. Mesa’s first inhabitants realized the partially filled canals for what they were and began excavating them to start the Valley’s modern agricultural industry.

They built rectangular pit houses from earth, rather than stone, and lived in small villages.  They were a peaceful people who cooperated to build large canal networks. Some of their canals were over ten miles long and used gravity to control water flow and to flush out the silt! The Hohokam were the only cultural group in prehistoric North America to rely on massive canal systems, irrigating up to 110,000 acres of corn, beans and squash. Archaeologists from the Arizona Museum of Natural History excavated one prehistoric canal that measured 15 feet deep and 45 feet wide. These irrigation systems represented monumental efforts of labor and engineering.

> In the late 1800s farmers rebuilt and opened the brilliantly engineered Hohokam irrigation systems – some remain in use today.

> Between the 7th and 14th centuries they built and maintained these extensive irrigation networks along the lower Salt and middle Gila rivers that rivaled the complexity of those used in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and China. These were constructed using relatively simple excavation tools, without the benefit of advanced engineering technologies.