Louis Ellsworth

Louis Ellsworth

was born on September 18, 1865, in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the early years of the Latter-day Saint settlement. His father, Edmund Lovell Ellsworth, was a prominent pioneer leader who had captained the first handcart company across the plains in 1856. His mother, Mary Ann Jones, was an English convert who managed their rural households through successive frontier moves.

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Louis grew up in the rural settlements of Utah and northern Arizona, learning the skills of stock-raising and farming in a high-desert environment. In the late 1880s, he moved south to the Salt River Valley, an area that was beginning to attract settlers due to the reconstruction of ancient Hohokam canal systems.

Settling the Salt River Valley

Louis settled in the Lehi district, which is now northern Mesa, and later farmed in the Mesa district. He married Josephine Louvina Crismon, the daughter of pioneer Charles Crismon, who had led the initial party to Lehi in 1877. The marriage united two prominent pioneer families deeply committed to reclaiming the desert through agriculture.

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Farming in the Salt River Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a constant battle against drought and flood. Before the construction of major dams, the Salt River was unpredictable, either drying to a trickle or washing away the primitive brush-and-rock diversion dams built by the settlers. Louis and his fellow farmers spent winters hauling rock and brush to repair these canals, ensuring water would reach their alfalfa and grain fields during the scorching summer months.

The Ostrich Boom and Irrigation

Louis became one of the first cotton producers in the valley and eventually one of the region's largest ostrich farmers. At the peak of the feather fashion boom, his ranch maintained a flock of more than a thousand birds. He even exhibited ostriches at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, demonstrating the global reach of early Arizona agriculture.

His life spanned the critical transition of the East Valley from a dry territory into an irrigated agricultural empire, a shift accelerated by the completion of the Roosevelt Dam in 1911. The dam stabilized the water supply, allowing farming families to expand their operations.

Louis died on July 23, 1925, in Whiteriver, Navajo County, Arizona, at the age of fifty-nine. He was buried in the City of Mesa Cemetery. His legacy of agricultural entrepreneurship was carried on by his son, Earl Ellsworth, who later rode as Grand Marshal in the first Chandler Ostrich Festival in 1989.