SDC Institute
PIONEERS OF YOUNG ARIZONA
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| Theodore and Asailee Sellers of 1910s Phoenix, Arizona - (cks.ai) |
By Kenneth Howard Smith for SDC Institute
The year was 1910, in the raw and sprawling infancy of Maricopa County, Arizona. There was nothing out here—nothing but endless oceans of green cotton fields drowning in the blinding glare of the Sonoran Desert. The long train, chugging relentlessly from New Orleans and making its agonizingly slow crawl toward the golden coast of Los Angeles, shuddered to a halt in the middle of a vast plantation. A chorus of shouted warnings cut through the dry desert air. Railroad police, heavy boots crunching on the gravel, swarmed from car to car, their voices cracking with threats. Everyone off the train, or straight to jail.
Thirteen-year-old Theodore Sellers scrambled from the metal belly of a railcar, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had departed Marlin, Texas, with a singular, desperate mission: get off railroad property as fast as humanly possible, especially if you were Black. Arizona was officially a territory, but the heavy, suffocating shadow of the Jim Crow South stretched clear across the desert.
With a burst of adrenaline, Theodore cleared the rusty barbed-wire boundary fence, tumbling into the relative safety of the open plain. These days, the rails were choked with young riders traveling in protective packs. The hobos divided themselves along strict unwritten lines—the seasoned old-timers who had known the iron road for decades; the irregulars who only hopped between neighboring towns; and the fresh-faced newbies, boys like Theodore from every small town imaginable, all fleeing the heavy boots of poverty and physical abuse.
As the scattered refugees of the train drifted across the expanse, Theodore found himself walking further from the tracks, drawn toward a small, orderly community of canvas tents clustered around a creaking windmill and a deep water trough.
It was late in the evening. Just a few weeks prior, back in Marlin, the last train of the day had been hissing steam at the depot. His mother, Emma Sellers, had pressed a crumpled roll of bills into his palm. She had tried valiantly not to cry, knowing her eldest child had to vanish from the state of Texas with absolute haste. The town whispers hadn't needed to spell it out; trouble had arrived in the terrifying shape of a potential shotgun wedding and the wrath of a local family. In those days, thirteen was an age of forced, terrifying manhood.
Now, clutching his canvas knapsack tight against his shoulder—carrying every earthly possession he owned—Theodore approached the camp. A murmur of low voices drew him in. In the center of the clearing, a traveling preacher stood beside a roaring fire, raising his hands in a quiet blessing for the evening meal, thanking the Almighty for safe passage through the unforgiving desert.
Twenty large family-sized tents and a handful of smaller ones ringed the fires. Children and weary parents laughed softly as they prepared to share a communal feast of pinto beans, smoked turkey tails, crusty cornbread, and old raisin jack wine bottled in clear Mason jars.
As the "Amen" echoed across the desert sand, the preacher's eyes locked onto Theodore. He stepped forward, asking the boy his name and welcoming him to the sanctuary of the fields. Before Theodore could answer, a young girl roughly his own age stepped up, wordlessly handing him a heavy tin bowl brimming with hot beans. Theodore mumbled a quiet thank-you, his cheeks burning, before she retreated to a modest, neatly pitched pup tent at the very edge of the encampment.
Her name was Asailee Brown. By day, she picked cotton under the blistering sun for fifty cents a day. By night, she hauled water and washed clothes for five cents a garment, adding another nickel if the customer wanted their shirts pressed flat with a heavy iron heated over open coals.
Intruded upon by hunger and curiosity, Theodore watched the lantern light flicker against Asailee’s tent walls, where she was frying Louisiana hot links over a small camp stove. He walked over to return her empty bowl.
What started as a shy exchange over a tin dish quickly dissolved into the shared, heavy confidences of the displaced. They traded stories of where they came from and why they had crossed the burning expanse of the Southwest. Asailee spoke with a quiet, hardened resolve about fleeing Louisiana on a fast-moving freight. Her family’s sharecropper patriarch had viewed her as property, offering no protection from his predatory advances. So, while he was occupied at the outhouse, she had fished his moonshine drinking-change jar out from under the bed, ran for the depot, and never looked back.
The stolen coins had bought her passage to Phoenix and a few basic supplies. She had been surviving out here on her own for four months.
Theodore initially harbored thoughts of hopping the next eastbound or westbound iron horse to California. But looking at Asailee, a strange anchor caught in his chest. He asked if he might pitch his small pup tent right alongside hers. She agreed with a shrewd nod, noting that they could easily continue their hushed conversations through the thin canvas walls at night. Besides, the older field hands respected Asailee; she could cook and wash better than anyone, and they knew better than to cross her. They paid her well to keep them fed and presentable, leaving her entirely unmolested.
Days bled into weeks, and weeks melted into months. The dirt track buckboard ride into the tiny, sprawling outpost of Phoenix—centered around the dusty crossroads of 32nd and Van Buren Road—was a ten-mile ordeal. It was on one of these supply runs that Theodore spotted a handwritten note tacked to the general store’s bulletin board. A local rancher was shedding parcels of land far west of town, down a quiet dirt trail near Broadway Road and 7th Street. The price was fifty cents an acre, but there was a catch: buyers had to purchase twenty acres at a minimum.
In 1910, if a teenager had ten dollars in his pocket, he was considered wealthy.
Yet, through relentless labor, Theodore had managed to stash away over twenty-two dollars earned from dragging forty-pound bags of cotton down endless rows. He hadn't touched a single nickel of the emergency cash his mother, Emma, had pressed into his hand back in Marlin. Meanwhile, Asailee's culinary prowess had expanded far beyond the communal bean pot. Field hands lined up outside her tent nightly, paying hard cash for real, home-cooked meals. Between her cooking and her laundry trade, Asailee had quietly amassed over thirty-five dollars of her own.
As the autumn air cooled, the cotton picking season drew to a close. Day by day, the once-bustling encampment of tents vanished like morning mist as workers drifted toward the coast or north toward the mines. Just days before the violent fury of the Arizona monsoon season broke over the desert, Theodore and Asailee found themselves entirely alone.
Every single tent was gone save for their two small shelters, marooned in the middle of a harvested field stripped bare to the gray stalks, the fluffy white gold already packed tight on trains bound for eastern mills.
They stood side-by-side, wondering if it was finally time to break camp and chase the California dream. Then, a plume of dust rose on the distant horizon. A horse and buggy crawled slowly toward them across the flat earth. It was Mr. Goldwater, accompanied by his five-year-old son, Barry, peering out from beneath the buggy’s canopy with wide, curious eyes.
Mr. Goldwater reined in his horse, stepping down to offer his thanks. He praised Asailee for keeping his massive crop on schedule and ensuring the transient workers remained fed and orderly through the grueling harvest. Looking at the two hardened teenagers, Goldwater announced a shifting of the tides: he was selling off the last remnants of his sprawling five-thousand-acre dust bowl. He was stepping away from ranching to enter the political arena. With talk of Arizona pushing aggressively toward statehood in the coming years, he intended to serve on the committees heading to Washington, D.C.
Sweeping his hand across the barren land, Goldwater explained that this final parcel of his ranch was destined for an unusual buyer. The United States military had placed a special requisition; this specific grade of Sonoran cotton was destined for a plant in New Jersey, where it would be chemically treated and turned into gunpowder.
Goldwater turned his gaze to Theodore and Asailee. "What are your plans?" he asked. He strongly suggested they plant their roots right here before statehood blew land prices through the roof.
Theodore swallowed hard. "Land goes for a dollar an acre, minimum twenty acres," he noted.
Goldwater smiled, a knowing glint in his eye. "True enough, son. But you're standing on the very last plot of the old ranch."
He revealed a sprawling deed of trust for a three-hundred-acre tract. The cost was negligible compared to what the land would inevitably command once the territory transformed. Goldwater reached into his coat pocket and pulled out twenty-five dollars in back wages for each of them. Instead of handing over the cash, he proposed a deal: he would use their combined fifty dollars as the down payment on the deed.
Furthermore, Goldwater pointed out an invisible line cutting through the upper north portion of the property. "They're planning a major thoroughfare right through here," he told them, gesturing to the dust. "They're going to call it Broadway Road, all the way out here in the middle of nowhere."
As Mr. Goldwater and young Barry climbed back into their rig and turned the horse around, a legendary transaction was sealed in the desert dust. Fifty dollars down, eight dollars a month for twenty-five years at a meager half-percent interest, complete with two functioning water wells on the property. In a stroke of brilliant business symmetry, Goldwater immediately turned around and leased the very land he had just sold to the Sellers, paying them fifty dollars for the upcoming year's crop rental—making Theodore and Asailee sharecroppers who proudly owned the dirt they tilled.
In the decades to come, that three-hundred-acre expanse would transform beyond recognition. The southern edge of the property would become the site of the first radio station antenna in Phoenix, with Asailee holding a firm partnership in the broadcast. Her financial acumen would stretch further, securing partial ownership in the burgeoning Midwest Coca-Cola Bottling operations, the Prudential Insurance Company, and an influential recording studio that birthed the rhythm and blues pioneers Dyke and the Blazers, forever immortalizing the phrase with their hit record, "Funky Broadway."
Asailee Sellers would eventually build a community church on the northern half of the land, divided neatly by the roar of Broadway Road. The Sellers family's monumental contributions to the architecture of Arizona history would run deep—even as time, quietly and systematically, attempted to wash them out of the official record.
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