This is a great card from Gilbert, Arizona! My first thought when I saw the name was that Gilbert must be a small, possibly declining town of a few hundred people. Since it’s in Arizona, I imagined it might have been a mining community that began to fade after the mine closed.
However, Gilbert is actually a suburb of Phoenix and has a population of nearly 300,000. The last time the town had only a few hundred residents was around the 1940 census. In the 1980s, Gilbert experienced a population boom. Between 1980 and 1990, the population grew from 5,717 to nearly 30,000. By 2000, it had reached almost 110,000—an increase of more than 400% in just a decade.
There was no mine. William Gilbert, the town’s namesake, provided land to the Arizona Eastern Railway in 1902 to build a line between Phoenix and Florence. Settlers, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved into the area, including some who had left Mexico during unrest associated with Pancho Villa. They organized the Gilbert Ward in 1918.
Gilbert was primarily a farming community, supported by the rail line and the construction of the Roosevelt Dam, along with irrigation projects such as the Eastern and Consolidated Canals. In fact, it was briefly known as the “Hay Capital of the World” in the 1910s.
Today, Gilbert is largely a bedroom community of Phoenix.
Not quite the quiet desert town I imagined—but a rapidly growing suburb with a surprisingly rich history.
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