By Richard Montague

Basket weaving across central Arizona’s high deserts and valleys remains a foundational art form and living cultural archive. Among the Yavapai, baskets have long served as essential vessels for daily use and profound markers of meaning. Each intricately coiled piece—crafted from willow, devil’s claw, cottonwood, sumac, or cattail—tells a story of place, ancestry, and communal ingenuity. Within the Arizona Highlands, especially Prescott and the Verde Valley, the Yavape' (Northwestern Yavapai) established an outstanding tradition, providing the primary source of historic baskets in regional collections and at the Sharlot Hall Museum.

More than a utilitarian skill, basketmaking is a living expression of worldview, spirituality, and family heritage. Patterns such as the celebrated six-pointed star and dynamic figurative motifs are not mere decoration, but symbolic links to cosmology and memory. Baskets have functioned as tools for gathering, gifts for ceremony, and valued trade items exchanged within and beyond tribal boundaries. Historic images and museum holdings—including the “Baskets Keep Talking” exhibit at Sharlot Hall—offer lasting proof of the artistry and complexity that define these woven forms.

By Worcester P. Bong

On December 23, 1863, when Fort Whipple was temporarily established at Del Rio Springs, north of Chino Valley, a monthly newspaper called the Arizona Miner began publication at this U.S. Army post. The first issue, published on March 9, 1864, informed people about the new Territory of Arizona. Topics included proclamations, government activities and the establishment of a territorial capital. Later in May 1864, Fort Whipple was moved south to a location along Granite Creek and east of the soon-to-be-named town and territorial capital of Prescott. The last issue published at the fort was on May 25, 1864. Thereafter, the Arizona Miner was published in Prescott. But newspaper publishing at the post would return.

By Robin LaCorte

Eighty years ago, the world was at a crossroads. For Americans—many from small towns like Prescott—the global conflict felt distant yet deeply personal. Young men and women stepped forward to serve, becoming what journalist Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation any society ever produced.”

North Africa marked the first real shift in Allied fortunes. In his book, The End of the Beginning, Winston Churchill observed, “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.” From Prescott, men like Albert Crawford and Arch McCabe were among those serving in the Allied effort that opened the way for the invasions of Sicily and then Italy. Their service paved the path to European victory.

By Lily Blackwell

Since 1997 Chino Valley FFA has sponsored the Chino Valley Corn Dinner. However, the roots of this event date back to 1950 when the women's fellowship of Chino Valley Community Church hosted the first gathering. Called “Corn Roast,” funds raised were used to support the church's mission trips and projects. The dinner typically consisted of beef, a vegetable, dessert and all the corn you could eat. During the first “Corn Roast” the corn was cooked in the church basement or outside over an open fire. Over time, volunteers and attendees increased, and moving to an elementary school cafeteria allowed for steady growth.

By Kristen Kauffman

Bob Parsons was a twenty-seven-year-old English teamster with three fingers that didn’t close and a reputation for disorderly conduct. In June of 1894, he was fined fifty dollars and given fifty days in jail for bludgeoning someone with a beer bottle. He had no address and rotated living in hotels between Jerome and Prescott.

His girlfriend was Bohemia–or at least that’s what she told everyone her name was. Her real name was Birjina Valasquez, and not much is known about her except that she was twenty-three and a well-known prostitute working in Jerome. She and Parsons had been dating for two years.

By Norm Tessman. Updated by Bailey Cacciatore

Mastodons were on the brink of extinction when one died in a shallow watering hole 15 miles southwest of today's Prescott. The last major ice age had ended, and the climate was similar to today’s. There have been many questions about this creature’s passing,, including the cause of death and the possibility it was killed by human hunters.

A research project in spring of 1999 by Sharlot Hall Museum hoped to answer some of these questions. A team of professional paleontologists, anthropologists and volunteers reopened and extended a site near a prehistoric water hole where a mastodon died. They searched for more of its bones and those of other animals, for evidence of who or what killed them and for clues about prehistoric Arizona’s environment.
 

By Parker Anderson

In 1957, a former ASU English professor named Richard Kenneth Snodgrass formed a new business called Counterpoint Productions, with which he hoped to foster arts and humanities in Arizona and Yavapai County in particular. Among his partners were area photographers Art Clark and John Ludwig. After publishing two historical booklets, “The Prescott, Arizona Story” and “Ballad of a Laughing Mountain”, Snodgrass and Counterpoint set their sights on independent filmmaking.

Snodgrass was influenced by European “New Wave” cinema, which was starting to make its way into American art house theatres in the 1960s. He envisioned a multi-part film he would name LEGACY, to be filmed entirely in Prescott. It is no longer known who his investors were, but it is presumed they were local residents excited about a home-grown movie being filmed in Prescott. The actors were all locals who volunteered their services, and it is believed the Prescott city government volunteered to shut off city streets without charge so scenes could be filmed. Everyone was excited about the new movie!

By Stuart Rosebrook
[Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D., Executive Director of Sharlot Hall Museum, discovered he is related to Sharlot M. Hall through a shared relative on his father's and Sharlot's mother's Boblett-Deardorff side. He adapted this article from Margaret E. Maxwell’s “A Passion for Freedom: The Life of Sharlot Hall” republished by the Sharlot Hall Museum and for sale at the Museum’s gift shop.]

From her childhood days in Kansas to her home at Orchard Ranch, Sharlot Hall grew up with a Western work ethic and love and appreciation for all the family’s animals.

Sharlot Hall Museum’s founder, Sharlot M. Hall, was born in James “Jim” and Adeline Hall’s homestead cabin in northeastern Lincoln County, Kansas, on October 27, 1870. Sharlot recalled her birthplace was adjacent “a small stream thickly lined with oak, elm, walnut and hackberry trees, and with thickets of tall wild alum bushes all along in which the poles forming the framework of the Indian tepees [sic] were still standing when I was old enough to play in the abandoned teepee shelters.”

By Bradley G. Courtney

If any early Prescott saloon was cursed, it was Cortez Street’s Keystone Saloon, located north of the Plaza on the west side of that street. Its first proprietor, Gotlieb Urfer, came to America from Switzerland before the Civil War. He arrived in Prescott in 1874, opened a lodging house on Cortez in 1877, and eventually added a saloon, naming it the Keystone Saloon and Lodging House. He married Ellen Dunn of Ireland in 1878.

On Wednesday, December 16, 1885—one day before his fiftieth birthday—Urfer was found lying senseless on the floor behind the Keystone’s bar, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his head. According to a December 18, 1885, Courier report, a lodger sprinted into the saloon after hearing a gunshot and saw Urfer with “a great ghastly hole in the right side of his head, from which his brains and blood were oozing.” Several others  nearby also ran in. They saw the bleeding Urfer and “near his right hand, lay a pistol of the bull-dog pattern.” All concluded this was suicide.