Surprise

Surprise is a city in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States, in the West Valley of the Phoenix area. Flora Mae Statler, who founded it in 1938, chose the name, by her own account, because she doubted the little town would ever grow into much.

Statler was the daughter of Charles Gillett, a pioneer who helped found Glendale, and property records found in the 2000s showed that she owned the land before she married Homer C. Ludden, the developer once credited with the founding. Another story links the name to Surprise, Nebraska, the hometown of Ludden. The land along Grand Avenue and the Santa Fe railroad was divided into small lots for inexpensive houses of farm workers, and at first the site had little more than a filling station and a handful of homes. Surprise was incorporated in 1960 and stayed a small farm town for decades.

Sun City Grand, a retirement community built by Del Webb from the 1990s, brought many new residents to the north of the city. The Southwest Railplex, a business park on the BNSF railway in the southeast of the city, holds warehouses and light industry.

Surprise Stadium hosts spring training of the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers each February and March, when fans come from the Midwest and Texas to watch. The Surprise Recreation Campus around the stadium has a library, a tennis complex and Surprise Community Park with its fishing lake. The White Tank Mountains rise west of the city, and the White Tank Mountain Regional Park protects desert trails, a seasonal waterfall and rock carvings left by the Hohokam.