Cotton Country The Agricultural Roots of the West Valley
grew beautifully. The company bought roughly 16,000 acres west of Phoenix, and workers, many recruited from Mexico, cleared the land, dug canals and planted the fields. The settlement that rose around the farm was first called Egypt, then Goodyear, while Litchfield Park took the executive’s own name. Cotton was one of Arizona’s famous Five C’s, alongside copper, cattle, citrus and climate. Citrus left its own mark on the Valley. Orange groves once stretched across much of the region, including Glendale and Surprise. By the early 1990s the state’s citrus industry was worth more than $100 million a year, but home building steadily pushed most of the large orchards out of Maricopa County. Goodyear Farms eventually became an experimental operation whose work influenced farming methods well beyond Arizona. By the 1960s, though, the company was turning its attention to real estate, and when Goodyear Farms closed in 1986, its fields made way for the homes and businesses that fill the area today. Farming has not vanished, only moved. A 2024 University of Arizona study put agriculture’s contribution to the state economy at $30.9 billion, with much of the activity now sitting farther from the suburbs, in places like Yuma and Pinal County. So the next time you pass a stretch of flat, open ground on the west side and wonder what it used to be, there is a good chance the answer is a field that fed somebody and helped build everything you see around you.
The land under your neighborhood once fed the state. Knowing that history changes how you see the place you live. Drive the older roads through Goodyear, Avondale or Litchfield Park and you can feel it. They run straight and flat in a way modern suburbs rarely do, because the grid was never meant for houses. It was meant for farms, and the story of how those farms arrived begins, improbably, with a tire company. In 1916, Goodyear Tire and Rubber sent an executive named Paul Litchfield west with a problem to solve. Tires of the day relied on cotton cord, and World War I had choked off the supply of Egyptian cotton. Litchfield found his answer in Arizona, where Pima cotton, a long-staple variety bred from Egyptian stock,
10 Estrella Publishing - The Park magazine
November 2026
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