Duppa Homestead

An English wanderer and classical scholar named Darrell Duppa gave Phoenix its name, reaching for the myth of the bird reborn from ashes: a new town rising on the canals and ruins left by the Huhugam, the ancestral people of this desert. Duppa came west with Jack Swilling's party, whose 1868 canal reopened the Salt River Valley to farming along lines the Huhugam had dug centuries before. He homesteaded here in 1871. This restored adobe, with its cottonwood-branch and mud roof, shows how the earliest Phoenix actually lived.

What the plaque says

Darrell Duppa explored Arizona four years before coming here with Jack Swilling's party, pioneers whose irrigation canal first opened the Salt River Valley to farming in 1868. A well-traveled Englishman and a scholar of the classics, "Lord" Duppa is credited with naming Phoenix and Tempe. In 1871, he homesteaded 160 acres of this land, qualifying for one of the first ten land grants in the Territory. This adobe, built after Duppa sold the land, is restored with cottonwood-branch, mud-roofed construction typical of the earliest houses in Phoenix.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Phoenix — 0.6 mi
  The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one
• Heard Museum — 2.2 mi
  The Native Southwest, told in the first person
• Taliesin West — 18 mi
  Frank Lloyd Wright's desert masterwork, grown from the ground it stands on

More markers nearby

• Chambers Transfer & Storage Company Building — 0.4 mi
• Santa Fe Freight Depot — 0.4 mi
• Maricopa County Courthouse — 0.5 mi
• J. W. Walker/Central Arizona Light & Power Building — 0.6 mi