Ten things worth knowing about Buckeye

Every city has a few facts its residents like to trot out when visitors come to town. Buckeye has more than most, partly because it is old by Valley standards and partly because it is growing at a pace few American cities have matched. Here are ten worth keeping in your back pocket.

1. It is named for a canal, and the canal for Ohio

The name Buckeye did not start with the town. In 1885 Malie M. Jackson and two partners laid out an irrigation canal and called it the Buckeye Canal, after Jackson's native Ohio, the Buckeye State. When a post office opened in March 1888, it took the canal's name.

2. On paper, it was first called Sidney

In September 1888 Thomas Newt Clanton and O.L. Mahoney filed a plat for a town they named Sidney. Residents ignored it and kept saying Buckeye, after the post office. In 1910 the town was replatted, and the name everyone already used became official.

3. The founding family came from Iowa

Clanton led a party of six men, three women and ten children west from Creston, Iowa, in 1877, hoping the desert would be good for his health. The family lived in Big Bug and Phoenix before settling near the canal in 1887. It worked out: he lived in Arizona for 49 years, dying at 82.

4. The canal is still working

The Buckeye Canal is older than Arizona's statehood, and it is not a museum piece. The local water district says it delivers close to 130,000 acre-feet of irrigation water a year to more than 17,000 acres. The farm fields you pass south of downtown are watered the way they were in Clanton's day.

5. The whole town once fit in less than a square mile

When Buckeye incorporated in 1929, it covered 440 acres, and its first mayor was Hugh M. Watson, founder of the Buckeye Valley Bank. Today the city claims more than 639 square miles, making it the largest city in Arizona by land area.

6. Main street was a coast-to-coast highway

Monroe Avenue was once U.S. Highway 80, which ran from Tybee Island, Georgia, to San Diego. Before 1926 the route went by names like the Dixie Overland Highway. According to the Buckeye Chamber of Commerce, a piece of the original roadbed is still in use where Monroe dead-ends at Apache. On Monroe today, Barbon Asadero grills Mexican-style steaks over mesquite inside the historic Ware Building, a restaurant its owner, Isai Martinez, built up from a single food cart he started in Buckeye in 2020.

7. Buckeye has been throwing the same party since 1935

The Buckeye Chamber of Commerce started Helzapoppin Days in 1935, with street dances, a parade, a carnival and a rodeo, and the cowboy singer Gene Autry came to town for it. The tradition lives on as Buckeye Days. Each January it brings a Cattle Drive Parade down Monroe Avenue and the Helzapoppin' PRCA Rodeo at the Buckeye Equestrian and Events Center. The center's own restaurant, The Tack Room, reopened after a renovation by the Duncan family, who bought the property in June 2023, and serves home-cooked meals in a western setting.

8. The Halloween Carnival has run 86 years

This October, Buckeye held its 86th annual Halloween Carnival on Monroe Avenue. Every booth is run by a local nonprofit, school, church or charity group, and the city says all of the proceeds go back to those groups, which is a good reason to buy a few more tickets than you need.

9. It may be the fastest-growing city you have heard of

The city's economic development office reports that Buckeye grew from 6,537 people in 2000 to an estimated 132,000 in July 2026, and that it ranked as the fastest-growing city in the U.S. over a recent five-year span. It also estimates the city is only about 17 percent built out, with room for more than a million people someday.

10. September is dove season

September has its own tradition. Dove season opens September 1, and the Buckeye Chamber of Commerce promotes Robbins Butte Wildlife Area, off SR 85 south of downtown, as a dove hunting spot minutes from downtown. In 2026 the season's first weekend brought a dove cook-off at The Tack Room and a youth dove hunt at Robbins Butte, and downtown restaurants such as Casa de Leyva offered hunters specials. Casa de Leyva, run by Rogelio and Stephanie Leyva, serves birria tacos, molcajetes and weekend brunch from a red-roofed building off Monroe Avenue, with its entrance on Butler Avenue.

Where to go deeper

The Buckeye Valley Museum, run by the Buckeye Public Library on MC 85, keeps pre-Columbian pottery, historic photographs, oral histories and artifacts from the town's earliest days. It is free, and it closes each summer from June through August, so the cooler months are the time to go and collect a few more facts of your own.