By Al Bates

The building known as the Governor's Mansion started as and remains the centerpiece of the Sharlot Hall Museum campus. It also is the subject of a classic piece of Prescott lore.

It was long held that the request for proposals for the mansion's construction was published in the Arizona Miner in June 1864. So when scholar and historian Dr. Albert William Bork was researching the project, he went to the Miner files to get the precise wording. Guess what? Bork found that "no such call for bids appeared in the Miner."

Prescott-born Bork had a personal reason for getting the story correct, since one of the builders of the Governor's Mansion was his maternal grandfather, Daniel Hatz. Hatz was a confectioner and baker from Switzerland who arrived in Prescott in early 1864 with his friend John Raible, a German who had apprenticed as a carpenter.

From his grandfather, Dr. Bork heard stories about others involved in the building's construction, including Samuel E. Blair from Pennsylvania, a carpenter, and Phillip Sheerer, a miner from Germany. There also were floaters who worked briefly as carpenters at $10 a day, and then left to try their luck at the gold fields. Hatz and Sheerer were not carpenters, so their contribution was to cut the large pines growing on the site, and split and hew them with broad axes to prepare the building logs.

Governor Goodwin and Secretary McCormick, after almost a year living and working in tents, were so eager to move in that they took occupancy while construction was still going on, despite unfilled chinks in the log walls, glassless windows and missing hardware. McCormick occupied the north half, Goodwin the south.

Once construction was complete, Hatz and the other builders took up different pursuits. Raible and Sheerer established a brewery, probably Prescott's first. Hatz and Raible were associated in mining ventures and local politics. Each served as a city councilman, and Hatz was also city assessor and tax collector. Hatz, beginning in 1876, owned and operated one of the first hotels in Prescott, located a block south of Whiskey Row.

The original mansion was roughly hewn, but with the arrival of sawmills, improvements were made, and when Governor McCormick brought his new bride from the east, its layout changed to be suitable for a married couple, not as bachelor quarters. Once the seat of Territorial government moved to Tucson, it became the private residence of Henry Fleury, and subsequently suffered three decades of neglect.

After Fleury's death in 1895, Joseph Dougherty bought the building and converted into a duplex that he shared with tenants. Most of the changes Mr. Dougherty made were not structural (except for addition of the dormer) but cosmetic, including interior paneling and outside clapboard siding and addition of flooring to all rooms beyond the two front rooms. He also installed electricity and plumbing.

The mansion became property of the state in 1917, and the City of Prescott agreed to maintain it and to provide utilities. Ten years later, local historian Sharlot Mabridth Hall was permitted to live in the mansion and operate it as a museum. The artifacts she collected remained after her death, forming the core of the museum now named for her.

Almost immediately, Sharlot began to restore the old building to its earlier appearance, removing the siding and refilling the log wall chinks with cement. By the mid-1930s, a partial restoration was complete, but there was much left to do. In the 1960s, steel beams were placed in the attic to help support the roof, and in 1980, three years of extensive work started from the foundation up. A significant change was to replace the leaky and drafty cement chinking with adobe, using a fiber binder similar to the original.

Rather than just stabilizing the building from further deterioration, the decision was made to repair it where needed and to adapt it to better meet museum needs. Another critical decision was to use it to picture life in the 1860s while occupied by Governor McCormick and his wife Margaret, by display of both original artifacts and replicas.

The restored mansion was rededicated and reopened to the public in June 1983.

"Days Past" is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are available at www.sharlothallmuseum.org/library-archives/days-past. The public is encouraged to submit ideas for articles to dayspastprescott@gmail.com.