Bethany Home Road named after local TB sanitarium
From Jan. 2, 2000:
How did Bethany Home Road get its name? Is there a ”Bethany Home”? Do you know?
Do we know? Do we know? Do you think the state’s largest newspaper would blithely hand over the awesome responsibility of this column 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.
We did know this much: It had something to do with tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis used to be a big business in Arizona. Around the turn of the century, tuberculosis patients routinely were sent to Arizona to be cured by the clean, dry air. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.
The Sunnyslope area — which then was well north of the Phoenix city limits — was the site of many tuberculosis sanitariums, and Scottsdale was once known as ”White City” because of all the white tents where the tuberculosis patients lived.
The historian Marshall Trimble told us this when we called up to ask him the Bethany Home question. He knows everything. He knows Dick Lynch, who is a Valley historian who actually knew the answer to the Bethany Home question.
According to Lynch, the Bethany Home was a tuberculosis sanitarium operated in the early 1900s by a religious organization ”way out in the boondocks” near what is now 15th Avenue and Bethany Home Road. Hence, the name.
Bethany, as you know, is an ancient town near Jerusalem at the foot of the Mount of Olives. In Hebrew, it means roughly ”house of late-season green figs,” according to our dictionary.
And while we’re on the subject, for any really, really new newcomers, Indian School Road takes its name from a boarding school that the federal government operated at Central Avenue and Indian School Road until 1990.