Casa Grande Ruins History: The Story of the Great House Near Coolidge

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, at 1100 W. Ruins Drive in Coolidge, protects the "Great House," a multi-story earthen building raised by ancestral Sonoran Desert farmers and no longer in use by about 1450 CE. Father Eusebio Kino saw it in 1694 and gave it the name Casa Grande, and in 1892 it became the first prehistoric and cultural reserve in the United States.

I have driven a lot of buyers down Highway 87 toward Coolidge, Florence and Casa Grande, and when there is time, I like to pull in at the Great House. It surprises people: a tall, weathered earthen building under a big steel roof, sitting among Pinal County farm fields. Here is the story behind it, told the way I tell it in the car.

Who Built the Great House?

The Great House was built by the ancestral people of the Sonoran Desert, the farming culture archaeologists call the Hohokam. The National Park Service points out that "Hohokam" is an archaeologists' label for a type of site, with earthen buildings, red-on-buff pottery and long irrigation canals, not the name of a tribe. The ancestors of today's O'odham, Hopi and Zuni peoples are all connected to this history. The O'odham name for the big house is Siwañ Wa'a Ki:.

The structures at the site date to what archaeologists call the Classic Period, roughly 1150 to 1450 CE.

How the Great House Was Built

The building is made of caliche, the hard, lime-rich desert soil that anyone who has dug a hole in an Arizona backyard knows well. The builders laid damp earth in courses, let each layer dry, and then added the next. You can still see the horizontal lines where each course was set. The walls are thicker at the base, and the outer rooms rise three stories around a four-story core in the middle.

The people who used the Great House were gone from it by about 1450 CE. The Park Service does not give one simple reason why, and I won't guess at one either.

How Casa Grande Got Its Name

In November 1694, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuit missionary, became the first European known to see the building. In his journal he called it "casa grande," Spanish for "great house," and the name stuck.

Others followed. Juan Bautista de Anza's expedition passed through in 1775, and Stephen Watts Kearny's soldiers stopped by in 1846.

When the railroad came through about twenty miles to the west, a new town grew up along the tracks. It eventually took the name Casa Grande after the ruins, even though the ruins themselves sit outside that city, near Coolidge. My Casa Grande area guide has more on how that town got started.

Graffiti, a Petition and the First Reserve

With the railroad and a stagecoach route nearby in the 1860s to 1880s, visitors started showing up in bigger numbers. Many of them took souvenirs or scratched their names into the walls. Some of that 19th century graffiti is still visible today, and defacing the walls is now illegal.

People back East noticed. In 1889 Senator George F. Hoar presented a petition to the U.S. Senate, backed by supporters from Boston, asking Congress to protect the site. Repair work followed, and on June 22, 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set the land aside as the first prehistoric and cultural reserve in the country.

In 1901 Frank Pinkley was hired as the first on-site custodian. He later became superintendent of the Southwest national monuments and worked hard to bring visitors to Casa Grande, including hosting the Arizona Pageant there from 1926 to 1930. From 1906 to 1908, Jesse Fewkes led excavations that uncovered most of the lower walls you can see today.

The Roof Over the Ruins

The first shelter roof went over the Great House in 1903. On August 3, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Casa Grande Ruins a national monument, and the National Park Service took over. The steel shelter roof you see now was finished in 1932, along with a new visitor center. Between 1937 and 1940, Civilian Conservation Corps workers built the adobe buildings on the grounds, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places today.

One fun detail: in the early 2000s, a pair of great horned owls nested up in the rafters of that big roof. If you visit, look up.

Visiting the Great House Today

The monument is at 1100 W. Ruins Drive in Coolidge, off Highway 87/287, down a short paved entrance road. According to the National Park Service, it is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. most days, with a handful of holiday closures, and there is no entrance fee. Guided tours run twice a day from November 11 into mid-March, so this is a good time of year to go; call the monument the day of your visit for tour times. Plan on one to two hours.

If you are looking at homes in Pinal County, a stop here pairs well with a drive through Coolidge, Florence or San Tan Valley. You can browse homes for sale in Coolidge or read my guide to moving to San Tan Valley. And if you like this kind of local history, you might enjoy how Maricopa got its name from Maricopa Wells and the railroad.

Questions People Ask

Is Casa Grande Ruins in the city of Casa Grande?
No. The monument is in Coolidge, at 1100 W. Ruins Drive. The city of Casa Grande, to the southwest, took its name from the ruins.

How old is the Casa Grande Great House?
The structures at the site date to the Classic Period, roughly 1150 to 1450 CE, and the Great House was no longer in use by about 1450 CE.

Does it cost anything to visit Casa Grande Ruins?
No. The National Park Service lists no entrance fee for Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.

Terry Day, REALTOR®, DeLex Realty, 10115 E Bell Rd, Scottsdale, AZ 85260.