Tempe, Arizona: How Hayden's Ferry Got a Greek Name

Tempe, Arizona, started out as Hayden’s Ferry, a river crossing on the Salt. Its new name came from a valley in Greece, credited to Darrell Duppa.

Duppa is the same English settler who’s given credit for naming Phoenix. McClintock says Duppa “understood the classics well,” which goes a long way toward explaining a Greek name in the Arizona desert.

A store, a ferry and a lot of names

The town started in 1871. That year, according to James McClintock’s Arizona: Prehistoric, Aboriginal, Pioneer, Modern (1916), Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Tucson merchant, set up a store “in a house of willow wattles near the river, across which he placed a ferry. So the first settlement was known as Hayden’s Ferry.” A short way off was a Mexican community called San Pablo.

The name didn’t sit still. The federal place-names database lists Hayden’s Ferry in 1871, then Butte City or Hayden’s Butte, and by 1875 “Tempe” or “Hayden’s Mill.” It says the name was made official as Tempe about 1879. McClintock dates it the same way: when the Johnsons and other Mormons settled between the two villages, “about 1879, the name of Tempe was generally used.” Eventually it covered San Pablo too.

The Vale of Tempe

McClintock says Tempe “is assumed to have been named by that erratic genius Darrell Duppa, after the romantic vale of Tempe, in Greece, where poets rusticated and evolved songs of pastoral content.” In his 1921 book on Mormon settlement he was a little firmer: the name, “from a valley of ancient Greece,” is “credited to Darrell Duppa, a cultured Englishman, who is also understood to have named Phoenix.” GNIS adds why: the area looked like the Vale of Tempe.

There was a rival story, and McClintock didn’t think much of it. It held that the name “came from Jack Swilling’s discovery of a ‘tame pea’ vine on the river bank, but this is not so plausible.” Then he added a note on how you should say it: “the word is not Spanish and should be so pronounced.”

A local newspaper writer gave the Greek word his own spin. Thirty years after Hayden’s arrival, Frederick C. Wright, who ran the Tempe department of the Arizona Republican, opened a short town history with “Tempe, a Greek word meaning ‘beautiful valley.’” Farish reprinted it in 1918. You’ll notice that’s a looser reading than the other sources, which say the name came from one particular valley in Greece.

Hayden didn’t disappear

The ferryman’s name stuck around even after the town lost it. In 1921 McClintock wrote that the flour mill Hayden built “still is known by his name,” and that Arizona’s congressman, Carl Hayden, was his son. The 1913 map at the top of this page also shows a blue line labeled Hayden east of town, though the map itself doesn’t say what it is.

Sources & further reading

• James H. McClintock, Arizona: Prehistoric, Aboriginal, Pioneer, Modern, vol. 2 (1916). Hayden’s store and ferry in 1871, San Pablo, “about 1879,” Duppa and the vale of Tempe, and the “tame pea” theory (p. 572); Duppa “understood the classics well” (p. 612).
• James H. McClintock, Mormon Settlement in Arizona (1921), p. 219. “Hayden’s Ferry, Latterly Tempe,” the name “credited to Darrell Duppa,” the mill and Carl Hayden.
• Thomas Edwin Farish, History of Arizona, vol. 6 (1918), p. 108. Frederick C. Wright’s history of Tempe, with “a Greek word meaning ‘beautiful valley.’”
• GNIS feature 12233 (U.S. Geological Survey). Hayden’s Ferry (1871), Butte City or Hayden’s Butte, Tempe or Hayden’s Mill by 1875, and the official name about 1879 at Duppa’s suggestion.