Safford

Ranchers from Gila Bend

The two-story Graham County Courthouse, a Neo Classic building erected in 1916, stands on a landscaped public square at the end of Safford’s principal commercial avenue.^1,4 The 1982 National Register nomination described Safford as a city of 6,000 in southeastern Arizona and the county seat of Graham County.¹

The town began in 1874, when ranchers from the Gila Bend area, tired of seeing their ranches washed out, moved their settlement east and named it for Governor Anson Pacely Killen Safford, who was visiting the area.³ Byrd H. Granger’s Arizona’s Names credits C.M. Ritter with establishing the townsite, while Joshua E. Bailey opened the first store and post office.³ President Ulysses S. Grant had nominated Safford as territorial governor in 1869, and he is known as the “Father of the Arizona Public Schools.”^5,6 He later founded Tarpon Springs, Florida, where he died in 1891.⁵

A marker near town records the Gila Valley’s Apache hunting grounds as colonized by Mormon pioneers in 1879.⁷ On December 1, 1885, Lorenzo and Seth Wright were ambushed and killed while pursuing Indians who had stolen 45 horses from early settlers.⁸ The Mt. Graham and St. Joseph Stakes of the L. D. S. Church set up a marker to the brothers in 1938.⁸ In 1940 the Federal Writers’ Project guide traced US 70 here past irrigated farm lands developed by the Mormons, with a Southern Pacific branch alongside between Safford and Miami.⁹

The Fight for the County Seat

When Graham County was created in 1881, Safford, which the nomination calls the area’s only sizable village, served as the first county seat.¹ In 1883 the seat moved four miles east to Solomonville, named for Isador E. Solomon, who settled there in 1876 and established a store.^1,9 On September 2, 1896, editor Robert S. Patterson started the Safford Rattler for the sole purpose of bringing the seat back, charging that it had been taken “by the fraud and boodle of that one [land] owner.”² After five issues the Rattler admitted defeat, and the seat stayed in Solomonville until June 1915, when Safford defeated Pima in a close race.²

By then, according to the city’s marker, the courthouse had been relocated four times, from an adobe structure in Safford to two sites in Solomonville and the Rig’s Building on Main Street.⁴ Ludgerding and Eagan won the contract for $40,400 on March 10, 1916, and began by burning 300,000 red brick, enough for the interior with extras to sell to the public.⁴ The exterior brick came from El Paso, and the courthouse was finished in six months and dedicated on Labor Day, September 6, 1916.⁴ The two-story jail ell was demolished in 1978, and when the county offices left for a new facility in October 1996 the court system took over the entire building.⁴

School, Lodge Home, and Bank

Safford City Hall began as the North Ward School, built by R. A. Smith Jr. and John Morris for $5,400 and ready in September 1898 with single seats for 250 students.¹⁰ In February 1940 Safford passed a $40,000 bond issue to acquire block 42 from Safford Schools and bought the grounds and building for $24,000, but World War II put off the renovation that Tucson architect H. O. Jaasted planned in December 1941, and the vacant building housed the Red Cross and the Rationing Board.¹⁰

In June 1920 the State Lodge of Odd Fellows and Rebekahs announced a home for orphans and the elderly on the 13-acre Beebe Homestead, and the Tudor Revival home of locally burned brick opened April 25, 1922.¹¹ Its two planned wings were never completed, and for 25 years it sheltered elderly convalescents and 33 orphans and half orphans, with garden crops, an orchard and farm animals raised on the grounds.¹¹ The city used it as the Safford Public Library from 1963 until 1991 and moved its own offices in when interior restoration began in 2000.¹¹ The Womans Club of Safford, dedicated in 1937, is also on the National Register of Historic Places.¹²

Tucson architect H. O. Jaastad designed the neo-classical Arizona Bank and Trust Company building in 1920, and the marker says the Depression closed the bank’s offices in Safford, Pima and Thatcher late in 1923.¹³ The rod and light still on its upper northwest corner once told the local police officer, before radios, that he was needed at the station.¹³