By Jim Pool

This past week the City of Prescott proclaimed that the date of June 11 would henceforth be celebrated as “Sharlot Hall Museum Day.”  The city’s action was in recognition of the 85th anniversary of the opening of the Sharlot Hall Museum—the day the first visitor signed the Museum’s register and the day a schoolgirl’s dream was fulfilled.   As Miss Hall wrote:

“I was a school girl in Prescott and there was a gray-bearded man in the old log house…  To a few who would listen he told stories …  The sweetest and saddest story he told was of a lovely young bride who had lived in the old house only a brief year or two … in our school books we pressed little red roses from a bush under the window—a bush which the young bride had carried all the way from her eastern home and planted beside the pine logs. Even then I had a dream—that someday I might live in the big log house that seemed full of the memory of the lovely Lady of the Red Rose Bush.

A few months at school—then I was back on the cattle ranch—but the old man’s stories had lighted a fire that was never to die in my heart—he had made the beginning of Arizona unroll like a film of magic picture before my eyes and almost unconsciously I began to try to hold those pictures in words—and I began to save every smallest thing that belonged with the pictures and made them more clear.  So keen was the dream that the owners—after the gray old man was carried out of the door never to return—were often asked the price—and it was always beyond the wildest dreams of a girl on a little cattle ranch.”

On June 11, 1928, Sharlot Hall welcomed the first official guest to her museum in the Governor’s Mansion.  A year earlier she had written to the City of Prescott seeking lease of the “old Governor’s House”:

“For more than forty years I have been gathering in Yavapai County a collection of pre-historic relics from Indian ruins and of things relating to the early history of the county and state.…I hope to make this building and the grounds around it a center of historical and literary interest and a sort of civic center for the pioneers of Yavapai County and for such organizations of young people as might be benefitted or inspired by its ideals and purpose.”

The City of Prescott granted her a life lease to the Governor’s Mansion on June 6, 1927.  Sharlot immediately outlined plans; however, a trip to New England in the winter significantly influenced her plans:

“While I was in the East the past three months I visited many old houses of historic interest ….I found that all of them offered valuable suggestions for my own work, and at Sudbury, Massachusetts, I found Henry Ford doing with the Wayside Inn exactly what I have dreamed for thirty years of doing with the old house in Prescott….Now without the Ford capital — without any capital but my own hands and brain, and my own historical collection … I am going to try to make a sort of cross between the Wayside Inn at Sudbury and Mount Vernon, which is the nation’s shrine.  I find that few people, even those living in Prescott, have been inside this historic old house….Even in its utter dilapidation it has haunting charm.”

George W. Kelly of Phoenix was the first visitor to the Sharlot Hall Museum when it officially opened on June 11, 1928 (Photo Courtesy Sharlot Hall Museum – Ledger Book 245. Reuse only with permission).

It required a year of intense, difficult work to transform the Governor’s Mansion from its deteriorated state into a small, simple museum.  With support from the people of Prescott and Yavapai County, Sharlot continued to develop the museum and before the museum’s tenth anniversary, she wrote:

“….after I had spent everything out of the old home ranch and the cattle left when father died, the Federal work projects came along like Aladdin’s lamp.  They gave us the big stone building [the Sharlot M. Hall Building] and set in place Fort Misery and have allotted us workmen for the log ranch house…”

Today, we, the citizens of Prescott, Yavapai County, and the State of Arizona, must be the “Aladdin’s lamp” to sustain the continued development of Sharlot’s vision.

(Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners, International (www.prescottcorral.org). The public is encouraged to submit articles for Days Past consideration. Please contact Assistant Archivist, Scott Anderson, at SHM Archives 928-445-3122 or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.orgfor information.)