By Tom Brodersen

(It was in 1928, seventy-five years ago this coming June 11, that the first guest signed the Governor's Mansion register and the Sharlot Hall Museum began. We are running a series of articles over the coming months that will explore the people and events that have shaped the museum's long journey. This Sunday we will look at the museum's beginnings up until 1928.)

Today the Old Governor's Mansion, which Sharlot Mabridth Hall called the "Arizona's Mount Vernon," is the heart of the Sharlot Hall Museum. For Sharlot, this big log cabin was always "the most romantic house in Arizona -- rich in stories of the state's first official and social life, tales of Indian wars mingled with convivial jokes and merriment -- with haunting love stories and tragedy of death and misfortune." 

Samuel Blair, W. P. Blair, Daniel Hatz, Philip Sheerer, and John Raible built it in the summer of 1864, soon after the territorial governor's party arrived. Sharlot wrote, "With axe and adze the logs were hastily shaped, dragged in by oxen and mules, and laid into the walls" of the rough 'mansion' which we can still enter today, after over 138 years. 

The log house served as both home and office for Territorial Governor John Goodwin and Secretary Richard McCormick. In September 1865, when Goodwin was elected Territorial Delegate to Congress and returned to the east, McCormick brought his new wife Margaret out from New Jersey, and he soon became our second territorial governor. Sadly, Margaret McCormick died in childbirth and was, as Sharlot wrote, "laid with her babe in her arms under the pines." In 1867, the Territorial Capital was transferred to Tucson, and Governor McCormick went with it. His wife's remains were sent back east. 

Governor and Mrs. McCormick had shared the house with Henry Fleury, who served as personal secretary for both governors. Judge Fleury later acquired the building from the federal government and lived there until his death in 1895. 

Sharlot Hall was born in Kansas on October 27, 1870, just six years after Prescott was founded. In 1881, her family set out by covered wagon and headed for Arizona. Sharlot described how, along the way, she "counted the graves lost in the grass and more than once climbed off my pony to set some rotting head board straight." As her family "threaded the rugged canyons and crossed the mountains" of central Arizona, Sharlot saw prehistoric ruins, which awakened her lifelong interest in Native American cultures and artifacts. 

"In mid-February of 1882," Sharlot wrote, "I rode into Prescott on a long-legged dapple gray mare who had just left her footprints the full length of the Santa Fe Trail." On that day she saw the Old Governor's Mansion for the first time. Rustic as it was, Sharlot said it seemed "grand enough to me who remembered the sod houses and dug outs." 

Soon she was "a schoolgirl in Prescott and there was a gray-bearded man," Judge Fleury, still living in the old log house. Sharlot listened to the tales he told of earlier days, which "lighted a fire that was never to die in my heart." Sharlot wrote that, "after the gray old man was carried out the door never to return," she began to collect relics of the disappearing frontier and as her collection grew so did her "desire to own the old log house and put all these things of story and romance into it." 

The death of Charles Poston on June 24, 1902, was another spur to Sharlot's desire to create a museum. The Territorial Legislature had called Poston the "Father of Arizona" and voted him a tiny pension. In the museum's archives, one of Sharlot's letters contain her penciled entry lamenting how "Charles D. Poston, pioneer, traveler, poet, author, diplomat, breathed his last upon the earthen floor of an adobe hovel in squalor and alone." 

The passing of Arizona's pioneers -- their stories unrecorded, their possessions scattered and lost, their graves unmarked and forgotten -- moved Sharlot to seek out the living "old-timers" all over the state, documenting their lives and collecting artifacts "that root people deeply into the life of their own locality." 

In 1907, with the help of the women of Prescott's Monday Club, Sharlot organized an event to raise money to build a clubhouse with a museum. A "Hassayamper's Evening" was held at the Prescott Opera House on Gurley Street. Sharlot opened the program, which included dances and musical entertainment, with tales of Arizona history and a plea to preserve the old Governor's home. She read poetry from her soon to be published book, 'Cactus and Pine', which would later be reviewed by the New York Times as "a significant volume of Western verse." Sharlot declared from the stage that the "Hassayamper's Evening begins a fund which ought to grow and blossom." 

However, apparently private funding was not adequate. It would be another twenty years before her efforts of create a museum in Prescott would bear fruit. 

Sharlot continued to write poetry and historical articles, which were published in periodicals from coast to coast. From 1901 to 1908, she was associated with Charles Lummis's magazines, 'Land of Sunshine' and 'Out West.' The Southwestern Museum in Los Angeles, which Lummis founded, was yet another inspiration for her dream. When the last territorial governor, Richard E. Sloan, of Prescott, appointed her territorial historian in 1909, Sharlot became the first woman to hold public office in Arizona. 

In 1917, the State of Arizona bought the old Governor's mansion from Joseph Dougherty, who had modernized the historic log building by covering it with wood siding. The City of Prescott agreed to maintain the historic structure, but no money was allocated, so for another decade not much was done. 

Calvin Coolidge was running for a second term in 1924, and Sharlot's name was placed on the ballot as a presidential elector. She had the honor of delivering Arizona's electoral vote to Washington. On the trip east she visited the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and toured museums and art galleries in New York and Boston, which strengthened her desire to create a museum in Prescott. 

In May of 1927, Sharlot wrote a formal letter to the City of Prescott, asking for a lifetime lease on the Governor's Mansion and freedom to develop it as a museum in exchange for donating her historical collection. The City of Prescott accepted her plan on June 20, 1927. The dream she had carried since she was a girl was finally becoming reality. 

Before she actually moved into the old Governor's Mansion, Sharlot made another trip back east to see a doctor. She visited small museums, historic homes, "the woods Thoreau walked among," and the old Wayside Inn that Longfellow had written about. The Inn had been restored with money from Henry Ford. Sharlot said it was "exactly what I have dreamed for thirty years of doing with the old house in Prescott without the Ford capital without any capital but my own hands and brain and my historical collection." 

Sharlot soon moved her collections into the Governor's Mansion and began the work of turning the old log building into a "House of Memories." She opened the Museum's guest register for her first official guest, Arizona State Historian George Kelly, on June 11, 1928, 75 years ago this coming June. 

(Tom Brodersen edits the 'New Directions', the Sharlot Hall Museum newsletter.) 

 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (bug534pi)
Reuse only by permission.
In 1907, Sharlot M. Hall organized an event to raise money to build a clubhouse with a museum. A "Hassayamper's Evening" was held at the Prescott Opera House. She opened the program with tales of Arizona history and a plea to preserve the old Governor's Mansion, shown here in about 1900.