By Karen Despain

A small world of Murphys will descend on Prescott next week to weave more threads into their family’s tapestry.

Progeny of Billy and Julia Murphy already have one ancestral saga upon which to add more, and it is the anniversary of the particular episode – a tragic one – that will unite 80 of the clan for its first-ever reunion Nov. 6, 7 and 8.

By Dawn Dollard and Jean Petrie

Before there was a building on the chosen site in Arizona Territory (where the Governors Mansion stands today at the Sharlot Hall Museum), the Governor's Party camped among the pines. Atop one of the tallest trees, they raised an American flag to mark the spot where the government of the new Territory would be located.

By Sandra Lynch

On October 24 and 25, all day Saturday and Sunday, Sharlot Hall Museum will host its first Prescott Indian Art Market featuring over 50 Native artists.  The idea of Indian art, as market commodity, evolved within a history both Native and American.  Long before Spain's galleons put to shore in the Caribbean, American Indians had established art markets.  Pacific shell pendants, etched by acid and wax, crossed Arizona deserts in human caravans.

By Jay Treiber

On Jan. 19, 1922, my maternal grandmother was born in a cinder-rock building near the Arizona-New Mexico border, 25 miles northeast of Douglas. The place was then a general store: it has since been a post office, a barn, a general store again, and finally, someone’s house.
 

By Kim Rosenlof

A recent night flight brought a friend of mine and me to Ernest A. Love Field in Prescott.  At first, we had a rough time distinguishing the airport from the busy lights of the mountain-nestled town, but once we were over Prescott Valley, we could see quite a few aircraft in what had to be the traffic pattern of a busy airport.  Switching to Prescott's arrival frequency, the radio buzzed with traffic.

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.