How Tempe Got Its Name: Hayden's Ferry and the Vale of Tempe

Tempe got its name in 1879 from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, an Englishman who also helped found Phoenix. Looking at the butte by the Salt River, he felt the river, the green fields and the hill reminded him of the Vale of Tempe in ancient Greece. Before that, the settlement was known as Hayden's Ferry.

I drive through Tempe all the time, and every time I come over the Mill Avenue bridge and see the butte with the big "A" on it, I think about how much history is packed into that one corner of the Valley. Most people know Tempe for ASU and Tempe Town Lake. Fewer know it started as a river crossing run by a freighter from Connecticut, with a little help from a well-read Englishman. Here is the story as I have pieced it together from the City of Tempe's own history pages.

Long Before Tempe: The Hohokam Canals

The first people to farm this stretch of the Salt River were the Hohokam. According to the City of Tempe, between about 500 and 1450 AD they built a large network of desert canals, and that system became the foundation for the canals the Valley still relies on.

After the Hohokam left, the canals sat quiet for centuries. Then, starting around 1865, settlers began digging out those old channels and building new ones. The city credits Hispanic families from southern Arizona as the first settlers here. They helped build the first two canals, the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch and the San Francisco Canal, and started small farms on both sides of the butte. In 1872 some of those families founded a town called San Pablo, east of the butte.

Charles Trumbull Hayden and His Ferry

West of the butte, a man named Charles Trumbull Hayden was building something of his own. Born in Connecticut in 1825, Hayden had taught school, run freight wagons on the Santa Fe Trail starting in 1848, and set up a freighting business in Tucson in 1858 that supplied army posts and mining camps.

The Tempe History Museum tells a great detail: on a trip in the 1860s, Hayden camped by the Salt River and looked out over the land from the top of the butte. He came back around 1870 and 1871, filed a water claim and a homestead, and in 1871 started a ferry crossing at a narrow spot in the river. That spot is now the entrance to downtown Tempe.

The ferry was cable-operated, and it became the key river crossing in the area. Around it, Hayden built a store, a blacksmith shop, warehouses and, most important, a flour mill. The mill was powered by canal water and began operating in 1874. By 1883, the museum says, it was turning out 300,000 pounds of flour a month. The settlement around all of this took the name Hayden's Ferry.

How the Vale of Tempe Came Into the Picture

Here is where Darrell Duppa comes in. Duppa was an English adventurer who had already played a part in getting Phoenix started. As the City of Tempe tells it, he looked at the butte rising over the wide river and the green fields around it and was reminded of the Vale of Tempe, a valley in Greece near Mount Olympus that shows up in Greek mythology.

By then Hayden's Ferry and San Pablo had grown into one community, and in 1879 the town was officially named Tempe. Stand on the butte at sunset today and it is not hard to see what he meant.

The Butte, the School and the Town Grows Up

The hill at the center of all this has two names: Tempe Butte and Hayden Butte. Locals mostly call it "A" Mountain because of the ASU letter on its south face. It rises about 300 feet, and Sun Devil Stadium was built at its base in 1958.

Hayden stayed busy as the town grew. He led the push to bring the territory's first Normal School, a college for training teachers, to Tempe. The Arizona territorial legislature picked Tempe in 1885. That school went through several names over the years and became Arizona State University in 1958. Hayden's son, Carl Hayden, went on to become a United States senator for Arizona.

From a Dry Riverbed to Tempe Town Lake

The idea of bringing water back to the Salt River bed started at ASU in 1966, when a dean challenged students to design a project for the riverbed. Tempe kept the dream alive, broke ground in 1997, and filled the lake with water starting in June 1999. Tempe Town Lake opened to the public on November 7, 1999, the day after a dedication festival that drew more than 35,000 people.

Today, if you walk along the lake path near Mill Avenue, you are close to where Hayden ran his ferry, where the flour mill stood, and where Duppa looked up at the butte and thought of Greece. If you are curious what living in Tempe is like now, my moving to Tempe guide covers neighborhoods and everyday life, and you can browse homes for sale in Tempe. Next door, my moving to Phoenix guide covers the city Duppa helped start. And if you like these name stories, read how Litchfield Park got its name.

Questions people ask

Who named Tempe, Arizona?
Darrell Duppa, an Englishman who also helped found Phoenix, is credited with suggesting the name. The town was officially named Tempe in 1879.

What was Tempe called before it was Tempe?
The settlement west of the butte was called Hayden's Ferry, after Charles Trumbull Hayden's ferry across the Salt River. A separate settlement east of the butte was called San Pablo.

What is the mountain in Tempe called?
It is Tempe Butte, also called Hayden Butte, and most people call it "A" Mountain because of the large ASU letter on its south side.

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

Sources: City of Tempe, "A Brief History of Tempe" and Tempe Town Lake historic timeline; Tempe History Museum, Charles Trumbull Hayden; Wikipedia, Tempe, Arizona.