History of Sedona, Arizona
From the Sinagua cliff builders to the Schneblys’ post office, Hollywood’s westerns and the city that incorporated in 1988: a short, sourced history of Sedona, Arizona.
Sedona History in Brief
Sedona’s Best Quick Answer. Sedona was founded in 1902, when T.C. Schnebly opened a post office in his home on June 26 and named it, at his brother’s suggestion, for his wife, Sedona Schnebly; the settlement had 55 residents. It became an incorporated city in 1988, so the town is 124 years old and the city 38. Long before that the Sinagua farmed the Verde Valley and built the cliff dwellings at Palatki, Honanki and Montezuma Castle between about 1100 and 1400, and the Yavapai and Apache, whose descendants form the Yavapai-Apache Nation, lived here when the first homesteader, John James Thompson, arrived in 1876. Hollywood came in 1923 and stayed fifty years. The sections below take each era in turn; the dates come from the Sedona Heritage Museum, the National Park Service, the Yavapai-Apache Nation and the city.
The First Peoples of Sedona
People have lived in the Verde Valley for at least ten thousand years. The earliest were hunters who followed big game into the valley at the end of the last ice age, then the Archaic cultures who left stone tools and the first rock art. The civilization that built what you can still visit was the Sinagua, a name taken from the Spanish for the waterless San Francisco Peaks, who farmed corn, beans and squash across the Verde Valley from about 500 to 1425.
The eruptions of Sunset Crater north of Flagstaff in 1064 and 1066 spread ash over the region, and in the centuries that followed the Southern Sinagua built the pueblos and cliff dwellings that are now national monuments and Forest Service heritage sites: Montezuma Castle, begun around 1100, a five-story dwelling in a limestone alcove above Beaver Creek; Tuzigoot, a hundred-room pueblo on a hill above the Verde River; and Palatki and Honanki, the red rock cliff dwellings west of Sedona, occupied between 1150 and 1350. More than a thousand petroglyphs at the Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site, the V Bar V, were inscribed between 900 and 1300, including a solar calendar that still marks the seasons.
The Sinagua left the Verde Valley by the early 1400s. Why is not settled; drought, conflict and migration toward the Hopi mesas are the usual explanations, and the Hopi count the Sinagua among their ancestors. Their agave roasting pits, sandals and black-on-white pottery are what remain, along with the walls.
The Yavapai moved into the valley by the 1400s and the Western Apache after them; the two peoples shared the Red Rock Country for centuries and today form the Yavapai-Apache Nation at Camp Verde. Their names for the landscape, and their stories of it, predate every English name on the map.
The arrival of American miners and ranchers in the 1860s brought the Army. Camp Verde was built to control the valley, General George Crook’s campaign ended organized resistance in 1873, and the Rio Verde Reservation was created in 1871 for the Yavapai and Tonto Apache who had surrendered. In 1875 the reservation was abolished. On February 27 of that year the Army marched about 1,400 to 1,500 people 180 miles over the mountains to the San Carlos reservation in winter; more than a hundred died on the way. The Nation remembers it as Exodus Day. The people were allowed to return to the Verde Valley in 1900, and about 200 did.
Explorers, Soldiers and the First Settlers
The first European to see the red rocks was Antonio de Espejo, who came through the Verde Valley in 1583 looking for silver and for two missing Franciscan friars, guided by Hopi men along the Palatkwapi Trail. The Spanish found copper rather than silver and did not stay. Trappers and prospectors drifted through in the early 1800s, and permanent Anglo settlement waited until the Army had cleared the valley.
In 1876 John James Thompson, an Irish immigrant, filed the first homestead claim on lower Oak Creek at the spot the Yavapai had farmed, which he called Indian Gardens; the name survives in Oak Creek Canyon today. Other families followed along the creek, planting the apple and peach orchards that fed Sedona for the next seventy years: the Jordans, whose farmstead on Jordan Road is now the Sedona Heritage Museum; the Pendleys, whose 1907 homestead became Slide Rock State Park; and the Schneblys, whose story is below.
How Did Sedona Get Its Name
Theodore Carlton “T.C.” Schnebly and his wife Sedona arrived from Missouri in 1901 and bought 80 acres on Oak Creek where Los Abrigados stands today, building a large two-story house that doubled as the settlement’s first hotel and general store. To get mail delivered, T.C. applied for a post office. His proposed names, “Schnebly Station” and “Oak Creek Crossing,” were turned down by the Postmaster General as too long for a cancellation stamp, and his brother Ellsworth suggested the name of T.C.’s wife instead. The Sedona post office opened on June 26, 1902, with T.C. as the first postmaster, and the town took its name from it.
Sedona Arabella Miller Schnebly was born in Gorin, Missouri, in 1877. Her mother, Amanda Miller, said she made the name up because it sounded pretty. T.C. also built the wagon road up the Mogollon Rim to Flagstaff, finished in 1902, that is still called Schnebly Hill Road; the geologists later named the red rock layer the Schnebly Hill Formation. The couple left Sedona after their daughter’s death in 1905 and came back for good in 1930; both are buried in the Cook cemetery off State Route 179.
Sedona Art History
Sedona’s art story starts with the surrealists. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning married in 1946 and built a small concrete house by hand on Brewer Road, Capricorn Hill, where they lived until 1953. In 1947 and 1948 Ernst built “Capricorn,” the cement and scrap-iron figure group that stood guard outside the house; its bronze casts now sit in museums, and the Sedona Arts Center’s first exhibition in the Art Barn, in 1958, showed Ernst and Tanning.
That Arts Center began in 1958 as Canyon Kiva, organized by the Egyptian-born sculptor Nassan Gobran and a dozen civic leaders. It took over the Jordan family’s apple packing barn at the north end of Uptown, reopened as the Sedona Arts Center in 1961, and still runs galleries and a school of the arts there. On June 23, 1965, four painters, Joe Beeler, Charlie Dye, John Hampton and George Phippen, met at the Oak Creek Tavern in Uptown, now the Cowboy Club, and founded the Cowboy Artists of America. Abe Miller opened Tlaquepaque in 1973 around a grove of sycamores he refused to cut, and the courtyard village modeled on a town near Guadalajara remains the center of Sedona’s gallery scene, which now numbers more than two dozen galleries and a free First Friday gallery walk every month. See our shopping and gallery guide and our Tlaquepaque guide.
Hollywood, the Chapel and the City
In 1923 Zane Grey persuaded producer Jesse Lasky to film “The Call of the Canyon” where the novel was set, in Oak Creek Canyon, and Hollywood kept coming for half a century. Republic Pictures built a frontier town set in 1945 for John Wayne’s “Angel and the Badman”; “Broken Arrow” with James Stewart was shot here in 1950; “Johnny Guitar” filmed below Coffee Pot Rock from October to December 1953; and “3:10 to Yuma” followed in 1957. More than sixty productions were made in the red rocks between 1923 and 1973, enough for one historian to call Sedona “Arizona’s Little Hollywood.” The Sedona Heritage Museum keeps a room of posters and props.
The modern town took shape in the same decades. The Chapel of the Holy Cross, commissioned by rancher and sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude, was finished in 1956 on its spur of red rock south of the Y; our Chapel guide covers a visit. Don Pratt started Pink Jeep Tours in 1960. In 1980 the psychic Page Bryant published the first map of Sedona’s vortex sites, and the Harmonic Convergence of August 16 and 17, 1987, drew several thousand people to Bell Rock and made Sedona’s New Age reputation national; our vortex guide tells that story. Sedona incorporated as a city in 1988, straddling the Coconino and Yavapai county line; Slide Rock State Park had opened the year before and Red Rock State Park followed in 1991. In 2014 Sedona became the world’s eighth International Dark Sky Community. The 2020 census counted 9,684 residents, and millions of visitors a year now come to see what the Sinagua, the Schneblys and the film crews saw first.
Sedona History Timeline
- 500 to 1425: The Sinagua farm the Verde Valley; cliff dwellings at Palatki, Honanki and Montezuma Castle built from about 1100.
- 1400s: The Yavapai, then the Western Apache, settle the Red Rock Country.
- 1583: Antonio de Espejo’s expedition is the first European visit.
- 1875: Exodus Day: the Yavapai and Apache are marched to San Carlos; they return in 1900.
- 1876: John James Thompson homesteads Indian Gardens, the first Anglo settler.
- 1902: The Sedona post office opens on June 26; Schnebly Hill Road is finished.
- 1923: “The Call of the Canyon,” the first of more than sixty films shot in Sedona by 1973.
- 1946 to 1953: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning live on Brewer Road.
- 1956: Chapel of the Holy Cross completed.
- 1961: Sedona Arts Center opens in the Jordan apple barn. 1965: Cowboy Artists of America founded at the Oak Creek Tavern.
- 1973: Tlaquepaque opens.
- 1980: Page Bryant’s vortex map. 1987: Harmonic Convergence.
- 1988: Sedona incorporates as a city.
- 2014: International Dark Sky Community.
Sedona History FAQ
When was Sedona founded? In 1902, when the post office opened on June 26 in the Schnebly home with 55 residents nearby. Sedona did not incorporate as a city until 1988.
How did Sedona get its name? From Sedona Schnebly, wife of the first postmaster, T.C. Schnebly, after the Postmaster General rejected “Schnebly Station” as too long. Her mother invented the name because it sounded pretty.
How old is Sedona? The town dates from 1902, which makes it 124 years old in 2026; the city government dates from 1988. The Sinagua dwellings around it are 700 to 900 years old.
Who lived in Sedona first? Archaic hunter-gatherers, then the Sinagua from about 500 to 1425, then the Yavapai and Apache, whose descendants are the Yavapai-Apache Nation at Camp Verde.
Where can I see Sedona’s history? The Sedona Heritage Museum at 735 Jordan Road in Uptown, the Palatki and Honanki cliff dwellings (reservations through the Forest Service), Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot national monuments, and the Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site. For the rest of the town, start with our complete guide to Sedona.
