By Stan Brown

 This is Part 2 of a three part article.  Part 1 was published on June 21, 2008 and Part 3 was published July 12, 2008 and all are in the SHM L&A Days Past Archives.

We left off last time with Tom Sanders returning from a trip to California to help settle his sister there. Soon after returning to Prescott, Tom married Cynthia Miller, thus further uniting two of the original settler families of Miller Valley.

On Oct. 1, 1873, Tom Sanders purchased the part of his father's farm that encompasses the Las Fuentes campus today and he built a rough-hewn log cabin for his new family on the hillside where the Las Fuentes Care Center is today.

Tom and Cynthia were married in that month; he was 28 and she was 16. However, the family's sense of wanderlust gripped Tom, and he writes, "After our marriage, I thought we would go over to Orange, where I had located sister, and that we might like to live there rather than in Prescott." He and Cynthia bought a house and lot there, and rented 10 acres on which they planted beans. In order to make a living he worked building irrigation ditches and helping with harvesting, but in the process he failed to give his bean crop enough water and it failed. They sold the house and lot, and returned "to a country I was more familiar with." He admitted California was getting "too thickly settled to suit me," and "the same span of sorrel mares that took Cynthia and me over there brought us back again to the old home in Miller Valley."

Here Tom continued to farm his own and his father's farms but, in 1876, a drought caused the crops to fail. He decided to give up farming and devote himself to raising cattle, so he leased 300 head of cattle from the Miller brothers. By this time, the Miller's freighting business had grown, and they had over 40 wagons and 12 mule teams.

In the spring of 1877, Tom and Cynthia moved their cattle operation east to "a watering place known as Coyote Spring," and settled at Yaeger Canyon (today bounded by Highway 69, State Route 169 and Highway 89A near Mingus Mountain).

In that same year, the Miller brothers went bankrupt, having over-extended their investments in mines. They had a claim on Tom's cattle herd that he had leased from them, and settled by allowing Tom to keep 125 head. Soon that would grow to a herd of 400.

After Tom and Cynthia moved to Coyote Springs, their house on the hill remained unoccupied. Tom attempted to keep that farm going and returned to freighting, but when Roland Mosher offered to buy the Miller Valley farm, Tom was ready to sell. Mosher had been in Yavapai County for eight years.

Mosher was born in Canada and his odyssey led him to Camp Verde in 1870. From there he came to Prescott, where he established a dairy business on South Marina Street. In February 1878, Mosher purchased Tom Sanders' Miller Valley ranch to maintain his dairy herd.

Shortly before that, Tom had agreed to have his unoccupied house used as a school for the growing number of Miller Valley children. At this time Miller Valley was called "West Prescott," so the school would be called the West Prescott School, the forerunner of the Miller Valley School. The trustees "have supplied the school house with desks and benches of a modern pattern, blackboards and other school furniture," reported the Arizona Miner Newspaper. "Most of the pupils now attending this school did not receive the benefit of any school, on account of the distance to the one in town."

A young local teacher named Angie Mitchell was engaged to begin classes. The Arizona Miner reported on Feb. 25, 1878, "Miss Angie Mitchell, one of Prescott's most accomplished young ladies, began this morning, Monday, a three month's school, in the building formerly occupied by Thomas Saunders (sic) as a residence, in Miller Valley, adjoining the town of Prescott. Miss Mitchell is an experienced teacher, and will, we have no doubt, maintain that popularity in the school room, for which she is so distinguished in Prescott society."

Among Angie Mitchell's accomplishments, to earn such notoriety, was that she had a beautiful solo voice and could play the piano. It was said that when she was performing on Sunday evening at the Methodist Church service, all the saloons would close on Whiskey Row and the patrons would go to hear her.

Shortly after the school opened on the hill, where Las Fuentes would ultimately stand, the Arizona Miner continued their appraisal in March, writing, "The new school in West Prescott, of which Miss Angie Mitchell is teacher, has now thirty-two pupils on attendance. The large number attending, showed that a school in that neighborhood is fully appreciated by the inhabitants living west of town."

The school term was slated to run from the end of February until the end of May. On April 10, a wagon train transporting a man with smallpox to "the pest-house," (an isolated facility that had been established in Prescott in 1877 for smallpox patients) was stopped in Miller Valley. A citizen blocked the road with his buggy a few hundred feet from the schoolhouse, so the smallpox carrier could not enter the town. The road was too narrow for the ambulance to turn around, and subsequently it became stuck in the mud. Miss Mitchell dismissed her pupils at noon so they would not stand a chance of being infected. Later in the day, another wagon master was paid $25 to come and transport the patient to the pest-house.

The following fall, Miss Mitchell opened another new school in Chino Valley, and the old Sanders house, converted to a school and now owned by Roland Mosher, stood empty for over a year. Apparently the community did not have the money to hire another teacher, or none was available.

In August of 1879, a Baptist missionary named Rev. Romulus Adolphus Windes came to Prescott and was invited to preach several sermons in the Methodist churches. He preached in the morning at the Marina Street Methodist Episcopal Church, and in the evening at the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, on Summit Street. He and his wife, Maggie, with their three children had come to Arizona for her health. Since he could not locate any Baptists to begin his congregation, he was an obvious answer for the Miller Valley families seeking a teacher for their children. In the fall of 1879, he began classes in the building at the Las Fuentes location (Mosher's cabin), while the local families were motivated to raise money for a more centrally located school. Land was donated by Mr. Edwin G. Weil, and The Arizona Miner reported on Oct. 24, "Give notice to people of Prescott that we will build a good school house near Mr. (Sam) Miller's premises on Skull Valley stage road ½ mile from town. Please assist us by your words and means every opportunity you have."

Rev. Windes not only used the Mosher (Sanders) cabin as a school in which to teach, but began to conduct worship services with several people in attendance.

By Nov. 14, 1879, The Arizona Miner still reported "the people of Miller Valley are trying to procure money wherewith to build a school house..." Apparently within the following month the community was successful, for on Dec. 16 Rev. Windes announced in the Arizona Miner, "I will deliver a lecture at the new school house just erected out of town on the Skull Valley stage road, the subject being 'The Benefits of a Good Education.'"

He continued to use this new school as a house of worship on Sundays and, in January 1880, Rev. Windes officially organized Prescott's first Baptist Church. He named it the Lone Star Baptist Church, after a famous Pentecostal revival that had taken place in India. The only Bible and hymnbook belonged to the pastor, but he wrote, "Nobody could sing, and I never led a song service in my life, but I sailed right into it with main strength and awkwardness, and we made a noise and an appearance of singing, the audience joining in from memory. We didn't lack anything but the tune."

Part III will follow next week.

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Courtesy

Though this cabin was actually built by Tom Sanders circa 1873 on the location of present day Las Fuentes Care Center, it is known as the Mosher cabin. Roland Mosher had purchased the cabin and farm from Tom in 1878. He used the land for his dairy herd and the cabin became Miller Valley’s first schoolhouse.