By Bradley G. Courtney

Dating back to 1874, the oldest saloon in Arizona began with the man who probably had more influence upon early Whiskey Row history than any other: Dan Conner (D.C.) Thorne. It takes some explaining, but D.C. Thorne must be considered the original founder of the Palace Saloon.
   

A New Yorker, he moved to Prescott in 1867 and quickly invested in several nearby mines. In the summer of 1874, Thorne began making his mark on Whiskey Row. He was seeing profits from his mining ventures in the early 1870s, which enabled him to explore other entrepreneurial endeavors. He, along with William Hutchinson, opened the Cabinet Saloon on lot 19, 118 Montezuma Street, where the northern portion of today’s Palace Restaurant and Saloon operates.

By 1877 Governor John Fremont’s daughter, Lily, was able to write in her diary: “[Thorne] keeps the chief faro & gambling place in the village, but is nevertheless a good citizen.” Indeed, the Cabinet would’ve been the saloon the Earps and Doc Holliday visited when in Prescott, although it cannot be proven what places they patronized while in town.

Then calamity struck. It was Friday morning, July 6, 1883, when the courthouse bell sounded. Fire! Smoke poured from the windows and doors of the Cabinet’s restaurant section, located in the rear of the saloon. Flames quickly burst through the restaurant’s rooftop and soon engulfed the saloon. A defective flue in the Cabinet kitchen was later cited as the source of the fire. When it was all over, most of what was then identified as Whiskey Row was gone. This area became known as the “burnt-out district” for the rest of 1883 and early 1884.

The Palace Saloon on Goodwin Street, described in last week’s “Days Past,” absorbed much of the Cabinet’s business. But early in the morning of Valentine’s Day, 1884, fiendish fire was at it again. The origin of this conflagration was in the first-class hotel of which Prescottonians were so proud, the Sherman House. Like the Whiskey Row fire of 1883, a defective flue was the cause.  
   

The Arizona Weekly-Miner poetically reported, “Along the wooden and papered walls the forked tongues of fire leaped and chased each other with demonized and resistless fury.” Soon the Sherman House was overwhelmed with flames. Nathan Ellis and Al Whitney’s popular Palace Saloon had no chance. It was still open when the fire started. Inside were Whitney and bartender Julian Percy. With assistance, they pulled out the bar, one billiard table and a piano before the Palace was consumed by the blaze. 

With much of Montezuma Street’s Whiskey Row section still vacant, it was ripe for a second, if not better, life. Ellis and Whitney rebuilt their Palace with stone, brick and iron on lot 19, 118 Montezuma Street where the Cabinet Saloon had operated 1874-83, opening on Independence Day, 1884. The Cabinet Saloon was rebuilt two doors south on lot 21, 122 Montezuma.

There the two saloons served as the heartbeat of Whiskey Row until that fateful day of the Great Fire, July 14, 1900. The Cabinet was dynamited, and the Palace consumed by indescribably intense flames.

On July 3, 1901, the new Palace—a merging of the pre-fire Palace and Cabinet saloons—opened on lots 19, 20 and 21. The Arizona Weekly-Miner reported, “Only a very brief and incomplete description of such a magnificent building can be given.”

The beautifully revamped business could’ve just as easily been called the Cabinet, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Despite its name, the Palace’s story began with D.C. Thorne’s Cabinet Saloon in 1874. This irrefutable fact makes today’s Palace, serving its “rough customers,” the oldest saloon in Arizona, by far. 

“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.