A lesson in local history
and William Standage, members of the Mormon Batallion. The community, which had a school, is now part of Mesa.
Some streets and sites such as Northern Avenue in Phoenix and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, were assigned names that reflect a direction or location.
Following that rule in places like Gila Bend, however, could lead travelers down a path of confusion, Murray said.
In Phoenix’s formative years, Northern was reportedly the northernmost avenue in the city, but Main Street in Gila Bend has never been the town’s main street.
Main is several blocks south of the community’s main thoroughfare, Pima Street, that runs through the town’s business district.
And while hundreds of thoroughfares throughout the nation have Broadway streets that are named after the Great White Way in New York, Broadway Road in the Valley is named after a former Maricopa County sheriff, farmer and canal builder, Noah Broadway, who served as a lawman in the 1890s.
In Phoenix, 18 east-west streets were named after former U.S. presidents. Names of some Native-american tribes and communities identified north-south streets.
The presidential name practice was abandoned after the last name of President Theodore Roosevelt was painted on street signs. Between George Washington and Roosevelt, eight of the nation’s chief executives were either overlooked or rejected as street names.
One of them was John Quincy Adams, whose father, John Adams, America’s second president, already had a street named after him.
One of the most aptly named roads that has more to do with the state’s history and early pivotal development than most thoroughfares wasn’t named after a president or anyone else associated with power and influence.
Baseline Road, the Phoenix metro area’s longest uninterrupted road, stretches from Apache Junction in Pinal County to the Gila River Indian Community near the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers.
To spur development of territorial land that eventually became the Valley, surveyors in the 1860s established the initial point for the survey and subsequent development of almost all of the territory.
That initial point, or the baseline, was first used to divide the state longitudinally, and later became the imaginary line to start dividing land into parcels that were laid out like a grid during the U.S. Public Land Survey.
The link between street names and Arizona history subsided during the state’s high-growth years of the 1980s and 1990s when scores of new streets took on names that reflected the latest designs and styles.
“It’s hard to trace some of the street names because developers had no historical criterion for them,” state historian Marshall Trimble said.