I made several work trips to Chandler where Intel was building the fabrication plant for the Pentium 4 CPU, and that was about more than ten years ago. Used to stay there for weeks at a time writing computer programs (field site inventory management mostly) on demand right at the job site to manage their almost billion dollar worth of materials during the construction of the chip making plant. Was always wondering about some of the remnants of the navel and valencia orchards that they had in the midde of the hot desert and the fabulous hacienda type layout of the city until I come across this article from http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/1221cr-history1222.html

Chandler founder's citrus orchard never profitable
The Chandler Museum

In 1928, Dr. A.J. Chandler decided to expand his ranching operations into the citrus industry. He set up the largest citrus orchard in the county a few miles south and east of downtown Chandler at the foot of the San Tan Mountains and named it Chandler Heights. Navel and Valencia oranges and grapefruit were grown there.

A small town was constructed for the workers and farmers working the orchard. It was designed along the same lines as downtown, with a central park surrounded by Mission Revival-style buildings.

Around the same time, Chandler was forging a friendship with noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright designed tents for laborers on the orchard to live in (shown here). These tents ended up being the only structures Wright ever built in Chandler.

Although the orchard started to produce fruit in 1931, it never became profitable for Chandler. The onset of the Great Depression, and the consequent drop in the price of citrus, forced the farmers in Chandler Heights to produce fruit in order to satisfy the banks and keep their land.

Specialty crops out West took a beating during the
Depression years. I know my grandfather and others
like him were forced to trade edible crops for other
edible crops just to feed the families. It was common
to trade sacks of potatoes for sacks of grain or even
trade food commodities for live Hogs for slaughter.
Few people had money at their disposal in the more
primitive, Agricultural regions of the San Joaquin
Valley during the Depression years.

During the Depression it was hard to market Citrus
in Arizona. They had to rely on local consumption
and the people that were there back then had little
or no cash money during and after the great Cotton
crash. Competition from the great and expansive
Los Angeles and Riverside counties that already
had markets into Mexico and multi-means to move
their crops around, other than reliance on the railroad,
made life even tougher for Citrus to get a foothold
and become profitable in Arizona for a number of
years.

Sometimes we look at things in the wrong light in
that we expect a secondary crop to be a money
maker when it has to become an established crop
first. People from Los Angeles did not branch
out and move to the Central Valley to grow Citrus
until they knew people here were already doing it.
In this respect Dr. Chandler helped pioneer Citrus
to be grown in Arizona. Does not matter if the
crops were profitable or not, like other pioneers
in the Central Valley that relied on other crops
to be their cash crops also, he found a way to
grow Citrus and get his trees established where
they had not been grown in masse before.

Jim

Dr. A. J. Chandler DVM was a native of Coaticock, Quebec, Canada born in 1859.
Graduated from Montreal Veterinary College with honors.

After graduation he soon moved to the United States where he opened his private practice of veterinary medicine in the city of Detroit and quickly became very successful and prosperous. By 1887 his fame had spread to the point where Gov. Zulick of the Arizona Territory offered Dr .Chandler the position of Veterinary Surgeon for the Territory of Arizona which he accepted. Five years later in 1892, in addition to his public veterinary duties, he succeeded in building the Consolidated Canal which was the largest and finest canal system in the entire southwestern United States. Dr. Chandler believed irrigation would make Arizona one of the greatest states in the Union. Dr. Chandler was a life long Republican, but never ran for any office. As time past he became one of the single largest land owners in the Arizona Territory. One of his crowing accomplishments came on May 17, 1912 when he founded the city of Chandler, Arizona and became its first mayor. In 1928 Dr. Chandler decided to enter the Citrus industry with his own orchard. The rest is as published in Joe Real's excellent post above.

I cant say for certain that the groves at Chandler heights are the ones planted by Dr. Chandler in the 20's, but there are some old, large trees laid out in a completely rectangular fashion, still in this area. It is a unique area, and the groves were laid out in a block many miles in length by a half mile or so in depth. From my observation, most of it is grapefruit production today.

I never heard that Frank Lloyd Wright had built farmworker housing, but I have seen the ruins of Wrights own first winter camp. He came to Arizona and built the winter camp on Dr. Chandler's property, and named it Ocotillo. He designed a nice resort for Dr. Chandler, but the depression kept that from ever being built. Im told this is how Wright discovered Arizona and decided to build his more permanent winter camp, Taliesen West, in Scottsdale.