By Paul Fees
Prescott is Prescott because of two extraordinary women, Sharlot Hall and Grace Sparkes. Without their work, Prescott might be just another big town bypassed by freeway and progress. Sharlot’s vision gave Prescott its historical identity; Grace’s energy endowed the city with forward motion.
Sharlot Hall (1870-1943) and Grace Sparkes (1893-1963) were born a generation apart but led remarkably parallel lives. Hall’s rancher father took his family from Kansas to Arizona in the early 1880s, landing at Prescott when Sharlot was thirteen. Sparkes’ miner father brought his family from South Dakota to Prescott when Grace was just fourteen. Sharlot learned Arizona history at Judge Henry Fleury’s table in his Prescott home, the log building that housed the first governors of the territory. Grace acquired her sense of local history and spirit from Prescott’s Catholic girls’ school, St. Joseph’s Academy. By the time Grace graduated in 1910, Sharlot was already serving as Arizona’s historian, the first woman appointed to public office in the territory.
Sharlot read widely and, as a girl, began to write, drawing on pioneer stories, folk tales and characters that peopled the central Arizona highlands. By the turn of the century, she had published in small magazines. Her poems appeared in one of the West Coast’s most noted periodicals, Land of Sunshine, whose editor, Charles Lummis, introduced her to the Southern California literary establishment. In 1903 one of her stories appeared in Boston’s prestigious Atlantic Monthly.
Lummis also encouraged Sharlot’s collecting. His Southwest Museum inspired Sharlot’s dream to create a museum of Arizona’s history. Back home, she set her sights on the old log building (Governor’s Mansion) where she had listened to Judge Fleury’s stories. Built in 1864 to be both home and office to John Goodwin, appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to the governorship of the new Arizona Territory, and Richard McCormick, Territorial Secretary, it was nearly derelict in 1917 when Sharlot helped persuade the state to purchase it. Her profile in Arizona historical and political circles was such that, in 1924, Sharlot was selected as one of the state’s presidential electors and carried Arizona’s electoral votes to Washington, D.C.
The preservation and interpretation of the Governor’s Mansion now became her mission. She made it the repository for her Arizona collections. By 1927, with a life lease from the city, the old log house also became her home.
Meanwhile Grace Sparkes had made the promotion of Prescott her particular mission. As secretary of the Yavapai Chamber of Commerce beginning in 1913, she took charge of Prescott’s annual Frontier Days Celebration and pushed the rodeo into prominence. Realizing the desirability of a first-class tourist hotel, she led the local fund-raising effort to establish downtown’s Hassayampa Inn. Hall’s biographer, Margaret Maxwell, noted she “adopted Sharlot, beginning about 1926, as one of her ‘causes.’”
In 1928 Sharlot opened the Governor’s Mansion to the public. It became the historic heart to Grace’s crusade to make Prescott the soul of Arizona. In the 1930s, as local chair of successive New Deal “alphabet agencies,” Grace was able to direct monies to the construction of a stone building adjacent to the mansion. It served (and still serves) as a secure exhibition space; part of it was set aside as an apartment for Sharlot, who lived there until her death in 1943.
Grace Sparkes, Sharlot’s partner in Prescott’s renaissance, later took her promotional drive to southern Arizona, where she owned a mine, and contributed to the National Park Service’s preservation efforts. Grace is buried not far from Sharlot in Prescott, the city whose identity the two did so much to shape.
See the Governor’s Mansion at Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 West Gurley Street, Prescott, Tuesday – Saturday: 10 AM – 4 PM, and Sunday: 12 PM – 4 PM.
“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 also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.