Ten things worth knowing about Mesa

Every longtime Mesa resident has a favorite piece of trivia, usually delivered while driving a visitor down Main Street. Here are ten worth keeping in your pocket, each one checked against the people who keep the record.

Where it all started

1. The name describes the ground. When early settlers camped along the Salt River, they called the high, flat land above the bluff "the mesa," the Spanish word for table, according to Visit Mesa. The settlement that grew there became Mesa City, and later simply Mesa.

2. The town began with 29 voters. The Mesa Company, Latter-day Saint settlers from Utah and Idaho, arrived in the Salt River Valley on February 14, 1878, and laid out a townsite exactly one square mile in size, with wide streets and lots of a little over an acre so families could keep gardens. Mesa City incorporated on July 15, 1883, and just 29 residents voted in the first election. Today the city counts more than 515,000 people.

3. Mesa's first canal was much older than Mesa. The Hohokam built canal networks across the valley for centuries before leaving in the 1400s, and the 1878 settlers dug out part of an abandoned Hohokam canal to create the Mesa Canal. The ancestral site that oversaw some of those fields still stands on North Date Street. Long called Mesa Grande, it was renamed Sce:dagĭ Mu:val Va'aki, O'odham for "Blue Fly's place of dwelling," in November 2024, with names approved by the Salt River and Gila River communities. Its platform mound is estimated to have controlled more than 27,000 acres of farmland. The Arizona Museum of Natural History opens it to visitors in the cooler months.

Desert living

4. The calendar runs on heat. The National Weather Service's normals for nearby Phoenix put the first 100-degree day around May 2 and the last around October 5. The heat can arrive early, too: at the end of the 2026 spring training season, the Cubs and Athletics moved some of their final games in Mesa to the evening to spare fans unexpected triple-digit afternoons.

5. Before the subdivisions, there was cotton and citrus. Citrus orchards appeared in the early 1890s and grew into a major industry, and the cotton boom of the 1910s was big enough that Mesa threw a King Kotton Karnival in 1919, before prices collapsed the next year. Grain, melons, alfalfa, grapes and nuts filled the fields around town, and a University of Arizona research station operated on Main Street until 1983.

6. Mesa trained British pilots in World War II. Falcon Field was built in 1941 to train British pilots, while Williams Field trained Americans. After the war Falcon Field became the city's airport, and Williams, which closed as a base in 1993, reopened as Williams Gateway Airport in 1994 and is now Mesa Gateway Airport.

Traditions only Mesa keeps

7. Dinner comes with the largest Wurlitzer theater organ in the world. Organ Stop Pizza opened in Mesa in 1975 with a Wurlitzer from the Denver Theater, rebuilt and enlarged for the restaurant. Its owners kept adding rare pipework, and the restaurant says the instrument is now the largest Wurlitzer pipe organ anywhere. Since 1995 it has played in a building on Southern Avenue designed around it, with pizza, pasta and a salad bar on the tables below. Bring someone who has never seen the console rise into the spotlight.

8. Arizona's only Martin Luther King Jr. parade marches downtown. Each January the Mesa-East Valley Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parade steps off at Center Street and MLK Way and is followed by a festival at the Plaza at Mesa City Center. Mesa voters made King's birthday a city holiday in 1996.

9. The temple lights have run for more than four decades. The Christmas lights on the Mesa Arizona Temple's grounds began in 1979 with about 5,000 clear and blue bulbs. By the early 1990s there were more than 300,000, and today the display draws more than 1.5 million visitors a season. This year the lights glow nightly from November 27 through December 30, and admission and parking are free.

Firsts and new chapters

10. Mesa keeps collecting firsts. On November 18, 2019, it became the first Autism Certified City in the United States, after businesses and city departments completed autism training through the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards. In February 2026, the Mesa Historical Museum opened the Arizona Baseball Museum in the historic Lehi Auditorium, the first museum in the state devoted only to Arizona baseball, fitting for a city where the Cubs first trained in 1952. And in August 2026, Gateway Library in Eastmark, Mesa's first new library in more than 30 years, was named the world's best new public library by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

That's ten, and there are plenty more. Test a few on a friend over coffee at Lost Dutchman Coffee House on North Center Street, a block off Main, where the beans are roasted in the company's own Mesa micro-roastery and the ice cream for the affogatos is made in-house.