Sloan family in Maricopa: 1938

By Brent Murphree

In February 1938 Ava Sloan moved to Maricopa with her husband Oliver and their three children, Dustin, Toby and Peggy.

“I drove the pickup with Toby and Dustin by my side,” she said in her 1989 memoir.  “Oliver and Peggy rode horseback.”

The roads were so bad in 1938 that it took just as long to get there by car as it did by horseback.

At the time Charles Mickle owned the land north of the railroad tracks at Porter Road east of where Walmart is now located. The Sloans moved into a small, two bedroom house on a sand hill. They got their water from a hand dug well.

Sloan says her small son, Dustin, said, “Mom, let’s take our table and chairs and go back home.” It was a long way from anything at that time.

They cleared the desert with Fresno scrapers and teams of horses. They also used a lot of manpower, including Native Americans from the nearby Ak-Chin Community.

“We had no electricity, no water or plumbing in the house,” Ava said. The family used a wood cook stove for both warmth and cooking. 

“I made tall, square shelves on legs, screened it, put burlap around it and a pan of water on top.” Sloan said that this is where she kept the butter and milk cool. “You would be surprised how good it kept.”

While clearing the land, the men found the body of a man under some mesquite trees.  Someone ran to get the sheriff in town. Before heading into town with the body, the sheriff went by the house and opened the trunk of the car for Ava to see.

“He was a sandy-haired man; must have been from a cold place,” she said.  “He had heavy underwear on. Flesh was in his shoes.”

There were no visible signs of what had caused the man’s death.

Within a year the Sloans had running water and electricity. When they started irrigating the land around the house, all the snakes went to higher ground.

“I killed over a hundred rattlesnakes that first year,” Ava said.  “I went out every morning, see where they crawled in a hole, got water and poured in the hole until they came out.” Well into the 1960s Sloan kept a pickle jar full of the rattlesnake rattles she started collecting in those days.

Her son Dustin was very calm and had nerves of steel, according to Sloan. One day Sloan’s husband, Oliver, was working underneath a tractor.

“Dustin was standing by,” she said.  “He said, just as calm as you please, ‘Dad, there’s a rattlesnake crawling under there.’” Oliver sat up quickly and hit his head on a bolt which almost knocked him out. The three-year-old calmly helped his dad up and away from danger.

“Sure made a knot that stayed with him the rest of his life,” Ava said.

Editor’s note: Ava Sloan was the great aunt of former Maricopa Vice Mayor Brent Murphree. Her brother, A.P. Murphree, was Brent's paternal grandfather. In 1988 Sloan wrote an unpublished memoir of her life, titled “Life of a Pioneer Mother.” She was born in 1905 and died in Casa Grande in 1999.