The 67th annual Fort Verde Days Parade will be held this Saturday, Oct. 14. The event serves as Camp Verde’s annual homecoming celebration, commemorating the history of the military post that played a pivotal role in the town’s growth.
For the last 30 years, third-generation Arizona native and this year’s parade grand marshal Steve Ayers has been helping to tell that story.
In spite of Ayers’ contributions to the community, which have included service on the board of the Verde Valley Archaeological Center and Camp Verde Historical Society and as Camp Verde’s economic development director, he said he feels “honored, if not a little bit embarrassed” over his selection.
“I [had] no idea,” Ayers said. “This came as a surprise. I found out about it at the Corn Fest this year. To say I was shocked is probably an understatement … My first thoughts were, gosh there’s a lot of people in this town that are a lot more deserving of this than I am. But it’s nice to be recognized for some of the [work] you’ve done.”
Ayers’ involvement with Camp Verde started when he met his eventual wife Susan in 1993 while working as a sales representative for a company that sold parts for heavy trucks and equipment. He eventually relocated to Camp Verde and the couple married in 1994.
“I met my wife up here, she worked for a fastener company, and my boss told me it didn’t matter where whether I lived in Phoenix or if I lived up in the north half of the state [because they] had customers all over, [so they] didn’t care where I lived,” Ayers said. “So I decided to pack up and come here. I’ve never regretted that decision. I still think this is probably the prettiest place in the state.”
The couple still spends most weekends walking their dogs, and Ayers has continued his outdoor recreational pursuits in the Verde Valley — which is in keeping with this year’s parade theme: “Verde Gras: Fun in the Verde Valley.”
“As a kid, I was in scouting programs,” Ayers said. “We used to do a lot of camping and I loved coming up here. Then when I turned 16, and got a driver’s license, my friends and I went backpacking and camping all the time, and there are nine federal wilderness areas that surround the Verde Valley, and we camped in most of them as kids. Most of my recreation is related to outdoor stuff. I’m [also] a brewer. I’ve been doing that for 45 years.”
Ayers favors Belgian styles of beer and found a way to combine that passion with one of his other interests, the sustainability of the Verde River, with the 2018 opening of Sinagua Malt, a Camp Verde-based startup that is working to have area farmers grow malting barley, which requires less water than crops such as alfalfa, in order to keep more water in the river.
“It’s a malting facility, so we don’t brew beer, we just malt barley, which is what you need to make beer,” Ayers said. “We partner with Sedona Beer Company. All of their beers use Sinagua Malt … We’ll be looking to work with more of the local brewers here in Yavapai County as well as Northern Arizona to have them buy that barley so we can continue to convert those fields.”
The history of the Verde River has long been one of Ayers’ fascinations, an interest that he attributes to his father. Ayers has written a book in the “Images of America” series in partnership with the Camp Verde Historical Society; he also donated the royalties to the society. While Ayers was working as a reporter for the Verde Independent, he started uncovering a number of long-forgotten stories about the Verde River, which he is now compiling into a second book.
“There were Spanish explorers in the Verde Valley and Camp Verde, Cottonwood and crossing these places that we all live today in 1583, which is two decades before the founding of Jamestown on the East Coast. So European visits to this area preceded a large portion of the United States,” Ayers said. “That’s something underappreciated.”
“[Another] story that I found that had been long forgotten was that in the 1930s, the town of Camp Verde came within a matter of weeks of a dam being built that would have flooded the [town] and put it under water permanently,” Ayers said. “That never happened because [the] Salt River Project and others opposed this other organization called the Paradise Valley Water and Irrigation District, which wanted water rights on the Verde River [and] was going to build a series of dams to flood the upper side of the Phoenix Valley and Camp Verde was going to be under probably what would have been a reservoir as big as Roosevelt Lake.”
Two of the accomplishments of which Ayers was most proud during his tenure as the town’s economic development director were the urban upland trail plan he developed for Camp Verde and the construction of the $40 million FrameTec manufacturing facility, which is anticipated to open in 2024.
“Something that I had focused on from the very beginning [was] that you needed to make a community livable before anybody was going to want to invest in it,” Ayers said. “I had probably the finest person I ever worked for, Russ Martin, our town manager, to credit for giving me 10 years and a very long leash to do what I felt was necessary.”
