By Nancy Kirkpatrick Wright

(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. Over the next few months the Museum will celebrate this anniversary with a major exhibit and several kinds of programming. We will also run a series of articles sporadically over the next months that will explore the people and events who have shaped this museum's long journey. The first will document our founder, Sharlot Mabridth Hall)

The Sharlot Hall Museum, a reigning queen in the center of Prescott, is the size of a city block--and still growing. She houses Sharlot Hall's collections along with artifacts and documents gathered over a seventy-five year history. Sharlot's legacy also includes two books of poetry and hundreds of stories and articles. 

If you read Margaret F. Maxwell's, splendid biography, A Passion for Freedom: The Life of Sharlot Hall or the biographical introduction Maxwell wrote for the collection of Sharlot's prose works, Sharlot Herself, you will re-live Sharlot's remarkable life. Both books are available in local libraries and book stores. 

Let's look at Sharlot Hall's life anew. What pivotal influences contributed to this unusual woman's strong sense of mission? 

Sharlot's mother, Adeline Boblett, was teaching in Kansas Territory about the time James Hall, wanderer, adventurer, and sometime miner, decided to settle down. Their marriage united two diverse backgrounds. Sharlot described the Bobletts, her mother's family, as artistic freethinkers, interested in education and social betterment. They had a spiritual, mystical bent--New Agers of their day. We find these qualities surfacing again and again in Sharlot's life. 

On the other hand, the Halls were miners and farmers, moving west with the frontier, always toward greener pastures. They were uneducated, but strong-willed. The men were boss in the family, the women, considered inferior, worked hard in the home. Sharlot probably got her physical strength and straight-forward style from her father's side. 

Sharlot, the Hall's first child, was born in 1870 in a dugout cabin on a homestead in Kansas Territory. From her writings, we know that she adored her mother and that after her brother, Ted, was born, she became the protective older sister. Her writings about her childhood were replete with stories of snow storms, dust storms, prairie fires and of once sharing a trundle bed with Ted while neighbor children slept in other beds and the adults kept watch during a threatened Indian raid. 

In the fall of 1881, after a series of hot, dry summers, the Halls decided to join Adeline's brother in the Lynx Creek area, near Prescott, capitol of the Arizona Territory. 

Bright and inquisitive, eleven-year-old Sharlot, found new friends and adventures as the family herded twenty horses and two wagon loads of household goods along the Santa Fe Trail. However, along the way, Sharlot fell from her pony and suffered a spinal injury which was to cause her pain most of her life and surgery in later years. 

In February 1882, after almost three months, the weary travelers came into the Lynx Creek area and settled their tents and wagons near Boblett relatives. By this time the territorial capitol, less than twenty years old, was a thriving community with churches, schools, and even a concert hall. Of course there were also 18 saloons on Whiskey Row and a number of houses of ill repute to round out the offerings. 

Sharlot remembered her first view of Prescott a few weeks later: "As I followed down the trail that is now east Gurley street, I looked over across Granite creek to a sprawling log building in a cluster of tall pine trees--and I was told that it was the first governor's house--a governor's mansion of hewed pine logs with a 'shake' roof." That first impression was her talisman. 

It is not surprising that Sharlot had a deep love of nature and respect for the land. Her childhood along Lynx Creek, so close to nature, made her an outdoor woman whose personal landscape included an abundant natural world. Her articles and poems about flowers, trees, and the seasons of the desert are among her most beautiful. She spoke out for conservation of natural resources and was proud to share her birthday, October 27, with that great lover of nature and the West--Teddy Roosevelt. 

Sharlot had been making up poems from early childhood, and as soon as she could write, she copied them into little notebooks. When asked about her education, Sharlot said, "it nearly all came from study at home--and is faulty indeed. I had a great love for history and literature and especially for beautiful English in speech and writing and a very few good books fell into my hands quite early. There was a fit of oratory--at least of public speaking in my mother's family and much love of song and story telling."

In those days, no one pampered children in a mining camp. However, Sharlot and Ted attended school sporadically in Agua Fria (now Dewey) and their mother continued to teach them at home. When she was sixteen, Sharlot was allowed to work for her room and board and live with a family in town in order to attend Prescott High School. That year she formed cherished friendships. One friend, Ida Williams Davisson, wrote of Sharlot's first days at school, "Though quiet and shy, she had a sweet smile and a very friendly way." And speaking of their sarcastic teacher, Ida wrote, "When we made a mistake we expected to be held up to ridicule before the class, and I can still see poor Sharlot cringe as he criticized her." 

Ida tells of spending the night with Sharlot at the Hall's Lynx Creek camp: "She [Sharlot] said, 'If you will stay, you may have my cot, and I'll spread a blanket on the table.'--which we proceeded to do and had a good visit." 

During that school year, Sharlot visited the Governor's Mansion again. This time Henry Fleury, who had been secretary to the founding officers of the Territory, and was living in the Mansion, showed her around and told her stories about the first territorial officers and their wives. Sharlot wrote, "Even then I had a dream--that someday I might live in the big log house that seemed full of memory." 

Sharlot's mother became ill that summer so, except for an elocution class in Los Angeles years later, her formal schooling had ended. The next few years, Sharlot, in addition to helping at home, was a part of her father's mining operation. She served, she later wrote, "as chief cook, timekeeper, and guardian of the bullion . . . We were always on the lookout for a raid. . . I slept with a revolver under my pillow and one eye open." 

Sharlot was twenty when the Halls moved into their first real home, Orchard Ranch. Although the ranch kept Sharlot busy, she continued to write, and began selling poems, articles, and stories to a variety of periodicals--including the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. 

The Hall's house is no longer there, but you should stop and see the historic marker and informative exhibit at Orchard RV Ranch. It is easy to find on the north side of Highway 69 between Prescott Valley and Dewey. 

(The conclusion of this article, next week, will start with 1895, a pivotal year in Sharlot Hall's life.) 



Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (po0147p). Reuse only by permission.
Sharlot M. Hall and her brother Ted crossed from the middle of Kansas with their parents to Arizona. In February 1882, after almost three months, the weary travelers came into the Lynx Creek area and settled their tents and wagons near Sharlot's mother's relatives.