By Richard Gorby

In 1865, with Prescott only a year old, the first post office, a wood frame building on Montezuma Street, just a few feet north of Goodwin, was occupied by the Reverend Hiram Walker Read, the town's first postmaster.  After a year, with a total postal return of $23.16, the Reverend Read left in disgust, and Prescott's first post office became G.M. Holaday's Pine Tree Saloon, in 1866.

There was a government rule that a post office should not be in the same room with a saloon, so the Prescott Post Office was moved across the Plaza to Cortez Street, inside Calvin White's store, and White was made postmaster. 

By Richard Gorby

The word "post" comes from the Latin "positus", meaning "placed", because horses were put, or placed, at certain distances to transport letters (or travelers).  In the time of Julius Caesar the system was already well organized and, for the most part, worked reasonably well. 

By Elisabeth F. Ruffner

Among the first in the Goldwater family to set foot on the plaza would have been Barry Morris Goldwater's Uncle Morris, although his grandfather Michael (Big Mike, according to Barry) and his father Baron would also have traversed this heart of the town.  The family members built their first store building on Cortez Street on the east side of the plaza in 1879, after leasing Howey's Hall on the next corner south in 1877.  The store on the northeast corner of Union and Cortez was called "M. Goldwater & Son" and the family operated the business there until the death of Morris, when it became the Studio Theatre and was later demolished.

By Richard Gorby

Prescott's Bullwhacker (Hill) has come of interest lately, and its name should be, and is, of interest as well.  The hill was named over 120 years ago, when the Bullwhacker mine was on its top. The mine changed hands many times, was discarded many times, and although called Salvador for a while, still retained the Bullwhacker name.

By William Bork

Prescott prior to WW II, and even into the fifties, was a town set in a landscape which provided a natural playground for growing children.  If we headed in any direction, a distance of three or four blocks or so, we were in the midst of mostly untouched countryside.  The area was especially attractive on the west side of town because of the piney woods and rocks from under which there seeped small amounts of water which often flowed all year round.

By Jean Cross

"The scenery was wild and grand; in fact, all that I had ever dreamed of; more than that, it seemed so untrod, so fresh somehow, and I do not suppose that even now, in the day of railroads and tourists, many people have had the view of the Tonto Basin which we had one day from the top of the Mogollon Range.  I remember thinking, as we alighted from our ambulances and stood looking over the Basin, 'surely I have never seen anything to compare with this' - but, Oh! would any sane human being voluntarily go through what I have endured on this journey to look upon this wonderful scene?"

By Mona Lange McCroskey and Curtis Ritter

W. Curtis Miller was born March 30, 1866 in Barrackville, West Virginia. He graduated from the University of Nashville, Tennessee and taught in rural schools in West Virginia for thirteen years. A shy, retiring man, Miller's life can only be traced through the memories of relatives and an occasional newspaper clipping.  He himself wrote, "I have always been as modest about appearing in print as I have been about appearing before an assembly to give a talk."  About 1900, Miller contracted tuberculosis and ventured to Arizona as a health seeker.  Described as a workaholic, he worked at a dairy in Phoenix during the day and also at a night job before suffering a serious relapse.

By Sandra Lynch

What is a Museum?  "Museums are about cannibals and glass boxes," writes University of British Columbia Museum Director Michael Ames.  For many, a place with "glass boxes" and "cannibal tours" might sound like an enticing place to go.  Ames, however, was not writing a side-bar for British Columbia's Office of Tourism.  "Museums," Ames claims, "are cannibalistic in appropriating other peoples' material for their own study and interpretation, and they confine their representations to glass box display cases."  We expect there should be more to a museum, but when the institution first came into the world, glass boxes were the drawing cards.

By William Bork

One Hundred Years 
U.S. Post Office 
Dewey, AZ 
1898 July 18 1998 

So reads the special "cachet" being applied upon request to letters mailed at the Dewey post office at the junction of Arizona highways 69 and 169 opposite Young's Farm until August 18, 1998. Here is the story behind the celebration.

By Anne Foster

He was a Yavapai County probate judge, sheriff and tax assessor, ex officio school superintendent, reporter, editor and publisher, court recorder, and mayor of Prescott. She, although few remember, was a legislator, suffragette, teacher, businesswoman, writer, community leader, presidential elector, clubwoman, volunteer, musician, artist, wife, and mother.  He was, of course, Prescott's hometown hero-Buckey O'Neill.  She was his wife- Pauline M. O'Neill.  A woman of talents as remarkable as her husband's, her story has too long been eclipsed.