Pima County’s latest land acquisition features sweeping views of the Catalina Mountains, a sprawling ranch house designed by a famous Tucson architect and a colorful backstory peppered with cowboys, bootleggers and mobsters.But arguably the most exciting thing about this property along North Oracle Road is what was never built there.Since the early 1970s, voters, grassroots groups and local government officials have fought off repeated attempts to turn the historic Kelly Ranch into a residential and commercial development.Now, after decades of trying, the county has finally purchased the 109-acre patch of desert so it can be permanently set aside as open space.
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Nicole Fyffe, senior advisor to the county administrator, calls it the “missing piece” of Catalina State Park.“It’s fantastic. I’m pleasantly surprised after all this time to finally get it preserved,” she said. “I think it’s been on somebody’s radar for a long, long time.”
Marina Yoakum, of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, unpacks ceramic bowls while staging the house at Kelly Ranch, a historic property purchased by Pima County for preservation.
Grace Trejo, Arizona Daily Star
Fyffe ought to know. She has been involved in efforts to secure the property since she joined the Administrator’s Office in 2001. She was beginning to think it was never going to happen.Fyffe said Kelly Ranch was “one of the first properties we started discussing” more than 20 years ago, when county officials began assembling a priority list of parcels to buy and preserve as part of the newly adopted Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan.The county made several offers for the ranch over the years, including one triggered by the approval of a 2004 bond issue that generated $164.3 million for open space and habitat protection. “The same thing happened over and over: The seller was not willing to entertain the appraised price the county came up with,” Fyffe said.The county will end up paying about $6 million for Kelly Ranch — one-third of it up front and the rest in annual installments, with interest, over the next two years.The money for the initial $2 million down payment came out of this year’s county budget allocation for open-space land acquisitions. The remaining money will come from future open-space allocations and from the Pima County Regional Flood Control District, which is kicking in $600,000 from the Flood-prone Land Acquisition Program it created after the devastating floods of 1983 to keep homes and businesses out of at-risk areas.Part of the Kelly Ranch property is in an erosion hazard area, Fyffe said.
An undated aerial photo shows the 109-acre Kelly Ranch with the Santa Catatlina Mountains in the background.
Courtesy of Pima County
To help with the purchase, the county is also seeking $1.5 million in federal grant money administered by Arizona State Parks and Trails and private donations from a dedicated fund set up by the nonprofit Pima County Parklands Foundation.The Board of Supervisors approved the purchase on April 1, with Supervisor Steve Christy casting the only vote against the proposal. The county officially closed on the ranch on April 28.The goal is to eventually add the property to Catalina State Park, but Fyffe said that could take years and require action by the Arizona Legislature.In the meantime, the county and the state parks department plan to develop a cooperative management agreement for the land. Fyffe expects that process to get underway in the coming months and include some opportunity for public input.For the time being, the county’s new acquisition is closed to the public, though roughly 700 people did get to wander around inside the empty ranch house on May 10, when the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation included it on its annual spring home tour.House of historyThe U-shaped, adobe-brick house with a red-tile roof was designed in 1940 by Josias Joesler, “a renowned architect with multiple listings on the National Register” of Historic Places, said Ian Milliken, cultural resources and heritage preservation manager for Pima County.Ohio businessman J.E. McAdams had the home built as a winter retreat for him and his family. It is perched on a bluff above the Cañada del Oro wash, with an enclosed sun porch, a broad patio and lots of picture windows looking out at the western wall of the Catalinas.
Designs show the estate home at Kelly Ranch, as drawn in 1940 by renowned Tucson architect Josias Joesler.
Courtesy Pima County
The estate also features a detached garage, a guesthouse and stable and a swimming pool — now fenced and empty — down the hill from the ranch house.The McAdams family used to refer to their several-thousand-acre slice of Southern Arizona as Rancho Romero, but the property has also been known as Desert Springs Ranch, Rancho del Oro and now Kelly Ranch.“It’s got a little bit of a complicated history,” Milliken said.Evidence of Indigenous habitation has been found in the area dating back more than 1,000 years. There are at least three known Hohokam sites on the property, including the remains of a possible settlement that was unearthed during construction of the ranch house.
After decades of trying, Pima County has finally purchased Kelly Ranch, a 109-acre patch of desert that will be set aside as open space.
Grace Trejo, Arizona Daily Star
As J.E. McAdams would later tell the Tucson Daily Citizen, when the newspaper featured the house in 1958: “Then we knew why this particular site was so nice and flat. With a complete view in every direction, it was an ideal location for an Indian village. They flattened it, centuries ago.”During Arizona’s territorial era, the land mostly attracted prospectors, ranchers and Apache raiders. U.S. Army troops would follow the Cañada del Oro as they marched between Tucson and Camp Grant, north of Mammoth.One of the earliest cattle operations in the area was run by Francisco Romero, who was born in Tucson in 1822 when it was still a part of Mexico. He and his descendants ran livestock across a wide swath of land on the west side of the Catalinas, including what is now Catalina State Park.
The exterior of the historic Kelly Ranch house from the backyard overlooking Catalina State Park.
Grace Trejo, Arizona Daily Star
The once-lush backyard of the Kelly Ranch house, as it looked in a 1958 photo spread by photographer Bill Sears in the Tucson Citizen.
Bill Sears, Tucson Citizen, courtesy of Pima County
Rancher Charles Kelly bought the Romero family’s spread and another nearby property in 1929 and announced plans to open a guest ranch there, stocked with cattle from his operation near Hereford.When Kelly died a few years later, local legend has it that his son, John, came out to the ranch to lay low with some of his fellow machine-gun-toting gangsters from Chicago.“They literally drove into the canyon in a chauffeur-driven limousine,” Milliken said.Area residents from that time also recalled stories about organized hunts with trained dogs to collect state bounties on mountain lions in the Catalinas and bootleggers hiding stills in some of the canyons to make cheap whiskey during Prohibition.Left undevelopedThe McAdams family hung onto Rancho Romero until 1971, when the bulk of the land was sold to investors with plans to convert it into a new golf course community for as many as 17,000 residents.The proposal drew fierce public opposition, prompting the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission to block it and the state to eventually acquire the property. Catalina State Park opened there on May 25, 1983, but the 109-acre parcel surrounding the McAdams ranch house remained in private hands.Since then, nearby residents and conservationists have turned away a pair of development projects at Kelly Ranch: one for a commercial center that was killed by a county-wide referendum in 1990, and the other for a neighborhood of up to 250 homes that died in 2012, after protestors convinced the Oro Valley Town Council not to annex the land.“It would have been like Rancho Vistoso: rows and rows of houses,” said Catalina State Park manager Steve Haas. “That really put a scare into people.”
The Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation’s Marina Yoakum, left, and Demion Clinco prepare the house at Kelly Ranch for a home tour.
Grace Trejo, Arizona Daily Star
The state park wraps around Kelly Ranch on three sides. From the backyard of the ranch house, “you’re looking down at both campgrounds and the equestrian center,” Haas said.The fence marking the southeast corner of the ranch comes within 50 yards of the park’s main road, just past the entrance station.Now there is preliminary talk of taking down that fence to let animals move more easily through Kelly Ranch, as they roam between the Catalinas and the Tortolita Mountains by way of a nearby bridge and underpass specially built for wildlife to safely cross Oracle Road.No decisions have been made about how the ranch property might be integrated into the park someday.
The view of the Santa Catalina Mountains from the back patio of the Kelly Ranch house, as photographed in 1958 by Bill Sears of the Tucson Citizen.
Bill Sears, Tucson Citizen, courtesy of Pima County
Haas said the land could be left as it is — maybe with a passive-use trail running through it — or used for more camping sites, picnic tables or equestrian amenities.The ranch house could be turned into a nature center, a visitor center, the park’s headquarters or all of the above, he said. “The opportunities, in my mind, are endless.”One other option under consideration is to sell off the house and some of the land immediately surrounding it as a private residence, with deed restrictions attached to preserve the historic building and prevent further development of the site. Fyffe guessed that such a sale could fetch about $1 million to help pay down what the county still owes for the entire ranch.Whatever happens, Haas said, county officials and conservation advocates deserve credit for their persistence. “They kept after it for decades,” and it finally paid off, he said.“It’s so exciting, even if they don’t do anything with it,” Haas said of Kelly Ranch. “The fact that it’s protected and will never, ever be developed is just huge for Catalina State Park.”
Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@tucson.com. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean
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