The First Settlers and the Apple Orchards

The first non native settler to make a home in this canyon arrived in eighteen seventy-six, a man named John James Thompson. Riding up Oak Creek, he came upon a garden already planted with corn, beans, squash, and melons, watered by a spring, that Native people had tended before him. Thompson took over the abandoned plot, called it Indian Gardens, and built a cabin there.

Others followed. Abraham James arrived in the late eighteen seventies and is credited with naming many of the great rocks, Bell Rock, Steamboat, Courthouse, and the spires we now call Cathedral. Families named Owenby, Armijo, Purtymun, and Van Deren dug irrigation ditches from Oak Creek and coaxed farms out of the red soil.

What grew best was fruit. At an elevation near forty-four hundred feet, apples, peaches, and pears thrived, and for much of the twentieth century the apple was an engine of Sedona's economy, long before a single tourist came for the scenery. Part of the old farmland along Oak Creek is now Red Rock State Park, and the orchards that made this valley famous still bloom each spring in Oak Creek Canyon.