In 1891,
Dr. Alexander John Chandler, a Canadian and the first veterinary surgeon in the
Arizona Territory, settled on a ranch south of
Mesa and studied
irrigation engineering. By 1900, he had acquired of land and began drawing up plans for a town-site on what was then known as the Chandler Ranch. The town-site office opened on May 16, 1912. The 1912 town-site was bounded by Galveston Street to the north, Frye Road to the south, Hartford Street to the west, and Hamilton Street to the east. By 1913, the town center featured the Hotel San Marcos, which also had the first grass golf course in the state.
Chandler High School was established in 1914. Chandler was
incorporated on February 16, 1920 by the
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, after 186 residents petitioned them Most of Chandler's economy was sustained during the
Great Depression (though the Depression was to blame for the cancellation of a second San Marcos hotel), but the cotton crash a few years later had a much deeper impact on the city's residents. A. J. Chandler lost his San Marcos hotel to creditors as a result. Later, the founding of
Williams Air Force Base in 1941 led to a small surge in population, but Chandler still only held 3,800 people by 1950. By 1980, the population had grown to 30,000, and it has since paced the Phoenix metropolitan area's high rate of growth, with suburban residential areas and commercial use areas swallowing former agricultural plots. The population has nearly doubled in the last twenty years. Some of this growth was fueled by the establishment of manufacturing plants for communications and computing firms such as
Microchip,
Motorola and
Intel. ==Geography==