Mesa, AZ - St. Mary's Basillica and the Rosson Home

We’ve been in the Phoenix area for 2 years now and really have not toured the downtown of Phoenix yet. Phoenix seems like such a new city and, though it has been growing all along, it’s modern history really began during WWII when many soldiers and airmen were brought out here for training. Liking the climate, after the war they moved here with their families. But the town site itself traces its roots back to a group called the Ho Ho Kam, meaning the ‘people who have gone’. They established a civilization here between 700 AD and 1400 AD when they mysteriously disappeared leaving behind a fabulous canal system which they used to water their crops.

And then in 1867 along came Jack Swilling who looked at the flat, rockless dusty plains that this valley was and saw farm land - all it needed was water. Well, yeah, that’s what crops need. Being an entrepreneur, he formed the Swilling Irrigation Canal Company and began digging a canal to divert some of the water from the Salt River into the lands of the valley. Others moved to this area and formed a town first called Swilling’s Mill, then Helling Mill, then Mill City, and finally the city fathers settled on Phoenix, since the town would spring from the ruins of a previous civilization. And, use a lot of their old canals.

This city doesn’t have quite the history that many other towns have but there are some older buildings that can tell a lot about life in early Phoenix. One of these is the Rosson Home which has an interesting history itself. But all in good order. The first order of the day is where to go for breakfast and how to get there. Getting there is easy - by the light rail. We wouldn’t have to drive in traffic (oh, yes. Phoenix has traffic), use gas, find parking, pay for parking - a real deal for $2.00 for a whole day pass. And we could relax and see the sights as we rode along.

As for breakfast - that’s easy too. In Phoenix, I’ve been reading for years about Matt’s Big Breakfast, right north of downtown.

        4.5 stars on Urbanspoon.com

        4.5 stars on Foursquare.com

        4 stars on Yelp.com

        4.5 stars on Tripadvisor.com

Hey, how could we go wrong? Not only that, it’s convenient to where we’re going to be touring today. What an excellent breakfast we both had. 1” slabs of whole wheat bread, a large order of home fries with onions and spices and a serving of scrambled eggs. Very good breakfast - worthy of all the good reviews I’ve read about this place. And, then I had one of my ‘Welcome to the Big City’ moments - when I saw the bill: $25.00. Holy Cow, we have never even spent that much on dinner, much less breakfast. Maybe, I’ll have to send Gary out to get a job. But, in the end there had been a mistake in computing the totals and I had actually expected about this much for our bill.

Sated, we strolled out heading for St. Mary’s Basilica which gets 5 stars from Yelp. Who in the world reviews and rates Basilicas online? You can review and rate MacDonald's, Target or the local car company, How do you review a Basilica? Who’s going to give a Basilica a 1? OK - I live in America so I an imagine this happening. Actually it did get several 4’s and here’s one.

        St. Mary's is conveniently located in downtown Phoenix and warmly welcomes everyone who enters. My only complaint is the heavy smell of incense before we even entered the church (it wasn't a bad scent, just REALLY heavy).

        We stepped inside en route to the convention center one day and it was beautiful and inviting inside. Not sure what services they offer, but stop by and check 'em out!

I’m not making this up. It’s really online in Yelp as a review. I’d venture a guess and tell her that the services were probably Catholic. Must have been the Clueless Convention.

The church was founded in 1881 but the current building was completed on 1914 and dedicated in 1915. It sits over the site of the original adobe church. It is the oldest Roman Catholic parish in the greater Phoenix area and has the largest stained glass collection in Arizona. Here is the window in the choir loft in the back of the church.

Pope John Paul II elevated it to a Basilica and visited it in 1987. Here is the bench where the Pope knelt while he was worshipping in the Basilica.

Here’s a plaque on the front of the church erected to honor one of the priests. Note how everyone rubs his nose as they walk by as a blessing.

3 blocks further was the Rosson home built by Dr. Roland Lee Rosson and his wife Flora Murray, with her money in 1895 on one of the original lots in Phoenix. Their lot is circled in red in the map below.

Because he was a local doctor and later a mayor of Phoenix, he built quite a showcase of a home. It was 2800 square feet and filled with such modern accommodations as electric lights, hot and cold running water, small sinks in each bedroom, downstairs and upstairs toilets and a telephone. It had Gib doors on all entries to the porches both downstairs and upstairs. A Gib door is very like a double-hung window, meaning that it slid up in its track so that one could walk under it out to the porch. High ceilings are required. The ceilings were all tin and the downstairs floors were wood with inlaid parquet borders around each room. Interestingly, each room had its own border pattern except one room which had 4 different patterns, one on each side. (That must have been the ‘practice’ room.) There were deep red transoms in each downstairs room. Red is a sign of wealth since to make the red color, gold must be worked into the glass. There were plain glass transoms and plain wood floors upstairs since no visitors ever made it up there.

You’ll notice that the house is wood and brick rather than the popular adobe which is the usual material for homes in this area. Interestingly they lived in the house for only 2 years when they moved to California.

When the home was purchased by the city of Phoenix for restoration in preparation to be a museum, it had been owned by several families and it had then been a rental house, a boarding house and a ‘flop house’. Doors had been boarded over, rooms had been converted to single rooms, carpeting had been laid, lights had been removed, all the woodwork had been painted - many times and a room had been built on the rear to be the kitchen and store room. Someone had even painted over the beautiful bricks on the outside The docent we had for our tour told us that the house was a mess. Below is a picture of the house in the 1950’s. The restorers had to look into history to see how the house had looked when the Rossons had lived there.

They had quite a few surprises: they pulled up the carpeting and found the parquet bordered wood floors, they took off some paneling and found pocket doors hidden in the walls which told them the coloring of the woodwork. The removed many layers of wallpaper and found the original. Great surprises but it took a long time.

The best record of what the house had looked like came from the letters of Whitelaw Reid, a publisher of the New York Tribune and an Ambassador to France. He wanted to live in Arizona for the winter to help with his respiratory problems and Rosson saw this as a real opportunity. However, for the 2 years that the Rossons lived in the house, they rented it out to Reid for 6 months of each of these years. During this time, they picked up and moved to another home for the winter, all their kids, all their furniture, all their clothes, all their kitchen, everything. No wonder she wanted to move to CA - she wanted a home she could live in for more than 6 months a year. Actually, Reid really did not like the house much, especially because it did not have enough room for his servants. The second year he came, he rented a second home for his servants.

Here’s a cute story about the second owner of the home, a family named Goldberg which had a daughter named Hazel. She and her fiancé, Joe Melzer, had made elaborate plans to be the first couple to be married in the new state of Arizona. On February , they were in the church, dressed in their wedding finest, with their wedding party around them when Arizona was declared a state by President Howard Taft who signed the bill at 8:00 Arizona time. The word was telegraphed to Arizona but it took 55 minutes for the word to reach the main telegraph station at the railroad depot. Among the crowd awaiting the word was a young man who rushed through the crowd, probably jumped on a bike and rushed to the church to announce the signing. Thus the couple was the first to be married in the new state of Arizona with their 3-yr old ring-bearer, Barry Goldwater, in attendance.

Next it’s off to the Wells Fargo Museum.