Rio Verde Area Information

Rio Verde is a census-designated place (CDP) in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. It is a gated, master planned community. The population was 1,811 at the 2010 census. HISTORY

The area surrounding the Rio Verde community, northeast of Scottsdale, was settled by small farmers in the 1880s, who grew hay and alfalfa to provide for the nearby Fort McDowell US Army camp (1865-1890) (now the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation). In the late 1890s, William W. Moore acquired several of the small farm plots on the Verde River, combining them into what became the Box Bar Ranch. After his death in 1929, Moore’s sons, Glenn and Lin Moore, operated the Box Bar as a partnership, under the name “Moore Bros Cattle Co.”, with grazing leases both east and west of the Verde River. Lin Moore also ran the X2 Ranch, 12 miles (19 km) to the west, where he and his wife, Ada Lucille, had homesteaded in the 1920s. William Moore’s father, Ranse B. Moore, had emigrated to Arizona from California in 1883 and ranched for many years on the Reno Ranch, just west of the community of Punkin Center, Arizona.

The “Asher Hills” were named for Frank Asher, who had been Glenn Moore’s brother-in-law and William Moore’s partner for a time. The granddaughter of Asher’s wife Ella, Jacque Mercer, was selected as Miss Arizona and then Miss America in 1949.

In 1955, the Moore brothers retired from the active cattle business and sold the ranch and their holdings to the Page Land & Cattle Co. (Lin Moore retained the X2 Ranch; after his death in 1960, his widow continued to operate the X2 until she sold it in 1970). The Moores’ descendants, including historian Wyatt James, still reside in Maricopa County. A portion of Lin & Lucille Moore’s homestead property on the foothills to the south, known as “The Ochoa Place” has recently been incorporated into the expanding McDowell Mountains McDowell Sonoran Preserve.

In 1970, Page Land & Cattle sold ranch land at the to Rio Verde Development, Inc., which in 1973 began to develop the tract as the master-planned community of Rio Verde. An 18-hole golf course was completed in 1973, and a second in 1981. Both were extensively renovated in 2007.

DEMOGRAPHICS

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