By Adrienne Logan

What was life like for a child in early Prescott? There were no televisions, computers, cellphones or other types of electronics available for their entertainment, unlike today’s counterparts.

Dolls repeatedly appear in Prescott-area family histories. Ina Muzik Brinkmeyer, who settled in Prescott in 1890 and raised children there during the territorial period (1863 to 1912), made hats, shoes and clothing for her daughters’ dolls. This shows that commercially obtained dolls could be supplemented with homemade accessories.

A Camp Verde oral history records a community Christmas tree in 1915 at which a rancher’s young daughter received a cowboy doll. Although this is three years after statehood, it reflects customs formed during the late territorial period: communal Christmas celebrations, individually distributed gifts and toys reflecting western life.

By Andrew Somerville

Colorful characters and odd circumstances converged to produce the unique O RO ranch and its magnificent horses. This story connects an ill-fated explorer, the claim of a sheep ranching family, one ranching family ruined by lack of water and another determined to will the ranch into existence.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca apparently treated his Indigenous American hosts well and learned from them during his wandering on the continent after his Spanish expedition’s 1542 shipwreck. He appears to have developed the reputation of being a faith healer to tribes he met along his journey. Later, he was appointed governor of Rio de la Plata (Paraguay), attempted to treat the Indigenous peoples there fairly, angered Spanish settlers and was charged with misrule. He died in poverty in Spain, c.1560.

Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca, seemed very different from the celebrated Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca he claimed as his ancestor. He was a wealthy sheep herder with a family hacienda in Peña Blanca, in what is now New Mexico, where the Indigenous Puebloans accused him of intimidation and fraud. He was likely killed in 1827 by a Mexican soldier over refusing to surrender contraband pelts belonging to an American. The Americans, among various other foreigners, often hunted pelts illegally in what was then Mexican territory in the 1820s.

By Kristen Kauffman
The tragedy occurred on the night of Sunday, July 13, 2025. The Dragon Bravo Fire was ignited by lightning on July 4, 2025, on the Kaibab Plateau within the Grand Canyon National Park, and that fire burned 149,399 acres, including 71,129 acres of Grand Canyon National Park-managed lands. The blaze swallowed 24 buildings (11 of which were historic), including 16 Deluxe cabins, 64 Budget cabins and an historic linen cabin (a cabin for storage of household fabric goods), along with damage to 73 miles of trail. While none of these losses were insignificant, we remember the most poignant loss on the one-year anniversary of the fire: The Grand Canyon Lodge, of which only 15% survives. 

The original Grand Canyon Lodge was built in late 1928 by Gilbert Stanley Underwood at the direction of Steven Mather, Director of the National Park Service. The 8,000 square-foot building featured a Spanish façade, much like Mission Revival style buildings in California, and was meant  as luxury on the frontier, hosting travelers riding the Union Pacific Railroad. This Northern Arizona monument also burned down in 1932. Starting from a kitchen fire, the only inhabitants (the manager, his wife and the maids) were able to escape in the early morning. They watched in horror as it burned down, along with many surrounding cabins. With 100 rangers and volunteer firefighters, the fire was put out before it could turn into the kind of wildfire we saw in 2025. 

By Kelly Cordes

One of the main reasons for the population growth in Prescott is softball.  Over the past 50 years, Prescott has been considered by many people to be the “softball capital of the world.” That designation was especially true in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. The individual most responsible for Prescott being a softball destination was long-time Prescott Parks and Recreation Director Archie Crouch Williams, who retired in 1983. Moving from Tucson in 1957, he was Prescott’s first parks director, the same A.C. Williams Granite Creek Park in Prescott is named after. 

We can’t talk about the history of softball in Prescott without mentioning A.C. Williams. He would become a member of the Arizona Softball Hall of Fame in 1976 and a member of the National Amateur Softball Hall of Fame in 2004. Williams brought highly competitive teams to Ken Lindley Field, formerly City Park, while forging a cooperative relationship between city school athletic programs and the Prescott Parks Department.

 Jim McCasland, who succeeded Williams as Prescott Parks Director in the mid-1980s until retiring in 2007, indicated that, “Williams just loved the game of fast pitch softball and was absolutely dedicated to promoting softball.” Longtime softball scorekeeper Larry Bender said, “He really made fast-pitch softball go in this town and we had a great men’s league here.” 

By Bill Otwell FAIA

The City of Prescott is a living laboratory of architectural preservation and restoration.  Early projects include the 1979 restoration of the 1903 Carnegie Library and the 1981 adaptive reuse of the 1896 City Jail and Firehouse for the Chamber of Commerce. These projects inspired forty plus years of preservation activity. The most recent project is the restoration of the 1931 Post Office and Federal Courtroom on Goodwin Street, where two vacant courtroom floors are now professional offices and an event space.  A postal station still occupies the ground floor.  These projects were successful due, in part, to historical resources available at the Sharlot Hall Museum archives.

Long before the current preservation era, in 1927, historian Sharlot Hall gained access to the 1864 Governor’s Mansion for a museum.   The structure was built as a home and office for John Goodwin, the first Territorial Governor, and Richard McCormick, the first Territorial Secretary. When compared to the shanties and tents on Granite Creek, it seemed like a mansion. The ponderosa pine log structure still stands on the museum campus as the oldest territorial building on its original site in Arizona. On June 11, 1928, Sharlot opened her museum in the restored building. 

Sharlot’s museum will be 100 years old in 2028. The campus includes five additional historic structures worth exploration. Three of these were relocated to the campus to save them from demolition. Uprooting historic structures and moving them to a new location is not considered an ideal treatment, yet sometimes it’s the only option.

By Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D.
For at least a century Prescott has been a center of summer camps in Arizona. Like Arizona’s legendary desert Dude Ranches, which have famously operated in the warmer desert valleys since 1923, summer camps began operating in the state’s cooler regions. Three area camps have been operating over 80 years: Wamatochick (centennial this year), the YMCA’s Camp Sky-Y (1938) and Friendly Pines (1941).

Prescott boosters suggested in the January 2, 1877, Arizona Miner that the community was an excellent refuge for desert-dwellers seeking relief from summer heat. In early 1900, according to the February 15, 1900, Arizona Republic, the “Iron Springs Outing Club” was founded by 50 Phoenix businessmen as a summer colony. The community’s residents, the majority of whom lived year-round in Maricopa County, have been enjoying Prescott’s cool summers in their cooperative camp ever since. 

In 1929 Charles H. Orme Sr. and Minna Orme purchased the Quarter Circle V Bar Ranch along Ash Creek northeast of Mayer. The Ormes founded a rural accommodation school for their three children, Charles Jr., Morton, and Kathryn, as well as the children of Juan Almanza’s family, who worked and lived on the ranch with the Ormes.     

By Captain Don Baier

Ever wonder why the airfield at Prescott Airport is named after First Lieutenant Ernest A. Love?  Maybe you’ve seen his statue outside the airport atrium. You may even know of Prescott’s Ernest A. Love Post 6 American Legion that supports and advocates for veterans in our community. Ernest and his mother demonstrate the best of humanity – the helping hand, hard work and the heroic heart.

Ernest Alexander Love was born in Raton, New Mexico, in 1895 to Allan Love, a Scottish immigrant who worked with the railroad, and his wife Louretta Love (also known as “Etta”). Ernest’s family moved to Prescott when he was three years old. By the time he was eight, he had heard about the Wright brothers and fell in love with the dream of flying. He formed a close bond with his neighbor’s younger children, looking after them and writing to them throughout his short life. Much of what we know about Ernest comes from his letters to neighbors, family, and friends. 

By Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D.

From 1945 to 1964, the United States, the U.S.S.R, the United Kingdom, France and China set off approximately 663 nuclear tests above ground into our world’s atmosphere, with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. respectively testing 356 and 212 nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1964. The U.S. alone, according to the “Baby Tooth” exhibit at the St. Louis branch of the Missouri Historical Society, “conducted almost 200 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1958, most of them above ground” at atomic blast sites in Nevada (the Trinity site in New Mexico was the first in 1945). Fallout from the bombs “showered the country with nuclear radiation.” The West and Midwest were both particularly hard-hit and “cancer causing radiation seeped into the air, water, and even milk supply, as cows ate contaminated grass.”

One woman, St. Louis physician Louise Reiss, led the formation of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958. Reiss was inspired by Johns Hopkins University biochemist Dr. Herman Kalckar’s 1958 article on baby teeth in Nature, “The official public health agencies of every nation…should organize a large-scale collection of milk teeth…and conduct measurements of radioactivity on this material.”

By Gail Steiger
I grew up in the 60s listening to my grandfather, Gail Gardner, sing songs and recite poems he’d written about his favorite parts of life, most of which involved cowboying around Skull Valley in the 20s and 30s. “The Sierry Pete’s” or “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail” was his big hit. 
In the early 80s, I stopped by my grandparents’ house on Mount Vernon. 

“Hey Granny, where’s Papa?” “Oh, Big Jim Griffiths from the U of A and that nice young Warren Miller from Sharlot Hall hauled him down to the museum to sing some songs and tell stories to some school kids. He was giggling like a teenager when they wheeled him out to their van.”

Jim Griffiths, Warren Miller, Hal Cannon and other western folklorists were finding, interviewing and recording practitioners of what they feared might be a dying art, and one certainly unique to the west. They called it Cowboy Poetry. During the course of their research, they would meet at folklore conferences and discuss some of the colorful characters they’d encountered and some of the great poetry they’d discovered.

By Parker Anderson

In 1888 the small town of Prescott was planning a four-day July 4^th celebration and was looking for something to bring visitors to town and keep them there for the duration.  Ultimately, they decided on a “cowboy tournament” which would consist of bronc-riding and cattle-roping contests. This was Prescott’s first rodeo, which has been held over the Fourth of July every year since. Itis the world’s oldest rodeo. That fateful year of 1888, the “tournament” was held around where Forbing Park is today.

An excerpt of coverage from the Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner newspaper of July 11, 1888, stated: “The next and most exciting of all, was Juan Libas [sic]. His steer turned toward the herd, at break-neck speed. Libas made a beautiful throw with his rope, bringing the steer to earth so suddenly that it pulled his horse over, also throwing him to the ground, but quick as a flash of lightning he was up and again in the saddle, amid the loud and prolonged cheers of the audience, and was scored a record of 1:17 ½.”