By Elisabeth Ruffner 

National Historic Preservation Week has traditionally been observed the second week in May. Arizona has chosen to designate the entire month of April to recognize and celebrate the state's cultural heritage and the people and places for which the past holds great meaning and significance. The theme this year is "Moving Forward with the Past".

By Nancy Burgess 

It was 1898 and successful Prescott businessman Henry Brinkmeyer and his wife, Ina Muzik Brinkmeyer, were having a new house built in the 'country', in the Fleury's Addition on West Gurley Street. Mr. and Mrs. Brinkmeyer and their two children, Henry, Jr. and Marcella, had been living at the Brinkmeyer Hotel on North Montezuma Street. This hotel would later burn in the fire of July 14, 1900 and would be rebuilt of brick at the same location. Henry decided that it would be best to build a house with a yard so that the children would have a place to play.

By Sue Abbey 

History is alive and well! When you spend twenty years of your career in one place, many incidents stand out in your mind. When that career means dealing with people, some of them stand out in pivotal way; a way that can change you.

By William Bork 

Thumb Butte stands like a sentinel in full dress on an early postcard sold by W. H. Timerhoff, a Prescott druggist. Another card depicts in clear detail part of Prescott's other famous landmark, Granite Dells, then called "Point of Rocks," ten miles to the Butte's northeast. These two viewcards are finely printed vignettes of the landscape near our town, as they appeared in the early 1900's. 

By Norm Tessman

Tents to log cabins to shopping centers as seen from the 'Sphinx'. 

To the Yavapai People, Thumb Butte was Nymit-gi-yaka, "Mountain Lion Lying Down." Anglo pioneers called it "the Sphinx," and wrote legends about its powers. Thumb Butte has always been symbolic of our community, and generations of Prescottonians have looked down upon the town from atop its 6,522-foot summit.

By Evan Sage

Henry Waring Fleury was part of the first territorial governor's party (that "outfit" as early journalists would come to call it). Yet, while most of these politicos moved on seeking fortunes in the newly discovered mines of the Prescott region and to further their political notoriety, Fleury stayed on. Originally occupied as private secretary to Governor John Goodwin, he was also elected first chaplain for the two houses of the legislature, largely because of his resources to supply the lawmakers with whiskey and his general indifference to religion

By Carolyn Bradshaw 

In the early 1900s, Prescott and Yavapai County were moving out of the Territorial era and into a new period of prosperity. The urbanization and mechanization throughout the country, Arizona becoming a state in 1912, and the end of World War I fueled this trend.

By Mark Ziem 

Growing up in Williamson Valley in the early 1970s, a favorite place for my brothers and me to explore was the abandoned gunnery range behind our house. When we found enough nerve to hop the fence, the long sandy ridgelines and oak-sheltered washes made great places to "play army." Occasionally, on our treks we would find dozens of tarnished brass casings, grenade levers, and evidence of war games performed in earnest decades before our arrival. Today this 1000-acre tract is the home of Pioneer Park, our future County fairgrounds and the latest place to hit a homerun or jog a trail.

By Richard Gorby 

Those of us who love our Plaza - lunching under the trees, enjoying the beautiful Christmas lights, or just looking at it as we drive by - may be shocked to know how close it came to being lost to us.

On May 30, 1864, a meeting was held at the store of Don Manuel Yrissari on Granite Creek near the present Prescott Middle School (the store has since been moved to the grounds of Sharlot Hall Museum), for the purpose of adopting the best method of disposing of lots in the proposed town. 

By Norm Tessman 

Early in the morning of November 19, 1887, George Heisler arrived in Prescott to tell "in an excited manner" of horror on Lynx Creek. Wagons were sent out to William Zadoc "Zed" Wilson's sawmill to retrieve the bodies of Wilson and five other men. Sheriff Mulvenon hastily assembled a coroner's jury, and set out for the death site.