Our Lady of Perpetual Help

Known as the Old Adobe Mission, this small church is the first Catholic parish and the oldest standing church in Scottsdale, raised by hand in the 1930s by the Mexican families who farmed and built the young town. They shaped its walls from adobe, the material of the desert, in the tradition their families had carried north. Long after Scottsdale reinvented itself as a resort city, the mission remains, a reminder that the town's early labor and faith were substantially Mexican, and that its founding congregation prayed in a building they made themselves.

What the plaque says

Old Adobe Mission. The first Catholic parish and oldest standing church building in Scottsdale, built by hand by the Mexican families who settled here in the late 1910s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Museum — 8.6 mi
  The Native Southwest, told in the first person
• Phoenix — 9.1 mi
  The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one
• Taliesin West — 9.1 mi
  Frank Lloyd Wright's desert masterwork, grown from the ground it stands on

More markers nearby

• The Little Red Schoolhouse — steps away
• Sterling Drug Store — steps away
• Winfield Scott Memorial — steps away
• Herb Drinkwater — steps away