Before the town, there was water
The Hohokam worked this reach of the Gila River valley centuries before any town existed, moving water across the desert in canals. When Thomas Newt Clanton led settlers from Creston, Iowa, to the valley in 1877, they were following the same logic: find the water, then build.
A canal named for Ohio
In 1884 and 1885, Malin Monroe Jackson and partners J.L. Spain and Henry Mitchell built the Buckeye Canal, and they named it for Jackson's home state, Ohio, the Buckeye State. The post office that opened in the town's early years took the canal's name, and the name stuck well before Buckeye incorporated as a town.
What the water built
The canal turned desert into cotton and alfalfa country and made Buckeye one of Arizona's reliable farming towns for a century. The concrete-lined ditches you still see running alongside the fields west of town are the descendants of those first earthen cuts, and the farms are still the town's original industry.
The farming memory, still on the calendar
Buckeye's agricultural past is not just archival. Cotton Fest, the street fair held downtown after Thanksgiving, is an explicit tribute to the crop that built the place, and several of the old farm families remain part of the community's civic life. The canal is a good story to know because it explains everything else about Buckeye: the layout, the farming, and the name.