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A Little Oral History
By: Chloe Jones

There is little documentation about Rillito's history. This is one of the reasons it is difficult for them to receive funding.

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According to an 1977 newspaper clipping from the Arizona Daily Star, the community first began in the 1880s as camp housing for Southern Pacific railroad workers. After World War I, the community had grown large enough to have its own school, which was later abandoned in the 1930s. Dust Bowl migrants then built a tent city they called “Hooverville,” named after the man they blamed for the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover.

 

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According to this newspaper clipping, a resident of Rillito named Peter Brady moved there in 1946. He said the town “really started to grow when the braceros (laborers from Mexico) came a couple years after I got here.”

 

Gertha Lee Brown-Hurd has lived in Rillito since 1963 and is a walking encyclopedia of everything about Rillito. This is the story she tells:

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"Technology came about at the same time desegregation came about," Gertha begins. Before, cotton was picked by hand, but the invention of cotton picking machines drove migrants from Texas into farms in Marana. Desegregation began and farmers who were on the school board were upset and did not want to integrate their schools, and essentially kicked African-American workers off their farms since workers to pick cotton were no longer a necessity.  These workers basically had nowhere to go, as they were not allowed to buy land in Tucson, nor buy land in Marana, the two neighboring cities.

 

They were able to buy land in between Marana and Tucson​ for $300 per acre. This land was formerly inhabited by a small Yaqui village. There was no infrastructure at all. No roads, electricity, water, sewage or gas.

 

The town was mostly owned by five families: the Bradys, the Robinsons, the Campbells, the Davis’s and the Browns. The streets in the town are named after these founding families.

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Residents were able to go across the then highway 84 (now known as the I-10) to the water tower owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad. They were able to get the water for free, but they had to haul it over themselves.

 

The Browns and the Robinsons worked together to get Pima County to provide electricity, gas lines and water lines. The residents of Rillito had to fight with local government to let them to have their own water well in their town. The farmers did not want to pipe water to Rillito. It took until 1978 for the town to have their own well.

 

The Robinsons owned the land that Rillito Vista Park is currently on. After the Robinson kids grew up and the wife passed, Mr. Robinson moved to Tucson and sold his land to Pima County.

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The Rillito Vista Park is now made up of a playground and swing set, but there once stood a recreational center, opened in 1982, and managed by Pima County. The community council was able to hold meetings, kids were able to play with each other and there was basically a town center for the community. Pima County tore it down after in the 2000s because it cost too much to manage and keep it up to code.

 

Gertha was studying early childhood and development classes at the University of Arizona when she was inspired to start a daycare center in Rillito after three drownings in the canal. A group called “Church Women United” helped build the daycare center along with cement donated from the CalPortland Cement. Gertha made this an early learning center for children, and since she was on the board for Head Start and Project Pep so she was able to get funding for the center.

 

They had the Rillito Community Council and the Rillito Water Users that also worked together to bring this daycare to life.

 

Head Start soon decided that all early learning centers should feed into the elementary schools, so they took away funding from the daycare and without any other steady funding, the daycare closed.

 

The donation to the daycare center was not the first time CalPortand Cement has helped out the Rillito community. The relationship between the cement company and the town began to protect Rillito’s water well from being exploited by Marana and Tucson, but it became stronger with the involvement the cement plant has with the community. The company also gives toys to the children of Rillito and gift cards to the adults each Christmas and helped renovate the home of a local woman who is mentally ill after her father died.

 

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“People need to preserve history and how these small towns got started. I mean we lose so much of that history by urbanizing… I feel obligated to keep that going, to keep the history alive,” says Gertha.

 

Rillito got its colonia designation about four years ago. Gertha is working on getting grants to help fund improvements in the town.

 

Although not many people have lived in Rillito, there have been a number of prominent figures that call Rillito their hometown:

Paul Robinson, son of a founding family, played for the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968

George Banks played for the Miami Heat in 1995

D. C. Warren was a well-known actor and stuntman in the 1980s and 90s

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A 1998 newspaper clipping from the Explorer, a weekly in Oro Valley.

A 1977 newspaper clipping from the Arizona Daily Star, a Tucson daily.

A tweet for CalPortland Cement in December, 2017.

Timeline of CDBG money in Rillito

Community development block grants (CDBG) are money delegated to states from federal funds. States then distribute to their counties and the counties distribute to communities.  Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990, states with colonies were mandate to give 10 percent of these CDBG funds to colonias.  Learn more.

Disclaimer: All photos from maranaheritage.org

Information for 1978-1998 from a 1998 newspaper clipping of the Explorer, information for 2012-2017 from Pima County Public Record. Missing 1998-2011.

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