By Bob Cornett

Next to the west door of the Sharlot Hall building on the museum grounds in Prescott is an 1859 map of the United States commissioned by Col. Carlos Butterfield. It shows ocean shipping routes, mail and stage routes, and four proposed railway routes west.

By Marjory J. Sente

October 27, 1948. What a day for Prescott: Navy Day, former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 90th birthday anniversary and, yes, the first day of issue of the Rough Riders commemorative postage stamp at Prescott, Arizona. For that one-day in October of 1948, the eyes of the stamp collecting and first day cover world were focused on Prescott.

By Katherine Krieger Pessin

My mother, Medora Hooper Krieger, was one of the most prolific geologic mappers at the USGS during the twentieth century. Although her early training and work was in the eastern United States, particularly in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, she is known mostly for her 35 years of mapping in the State in Arizona, where she did what was considered a man’s job in a world that was considered a man’s world.

By Richard Cunningham McCormick

(Edited by Parker Anderson)

(Richard McCormick was the second Territorial Governor of Arizona who lived in the Governor’s Mansion in Prescott with his wife Margaret. Previously, he had been a prominent politician on the East Coast and, in 1866, wrote a series of articles for the New York Evening Post. One detailed his own personal memories of President Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated the year before. On March 14, 1866, the Arizona Miner printed a few excerpts from this lengthy article. These are reprinted below; probably the first widely circulated reprinting of Governor McCormick’s comments since 1866. – ed)

By Darla Anderson

(Darla Anderson was born on a small stock farm in Postville, Iowa, and lived there until she reached adulthood. In 1958, she vacationed in Arizona with her parents, Alpha and Vera Hangartner, and fell in love with the state. They moved to Yarnell in the early 1960s. There she married Harry M. Anderson of North Dakota and they lived in Congress at the base of the mountain below Yarnell.)

By Edna (Ballew) Patton and Parker Anderson

Edna Mae (Ballew) Patton lived in Skull Valley for over sixty years. In the late 1990s, she committed many of her memories to paper. Following are her writings. Edna died on July 31, 2008, only five days after meeting with Sharlot Hall Museum volunteer, Parker Anderson, and giving permission for her memoirs to be published.

My husband Warren and I arrived in Prescott with a very sick son on March 31, 1940. That summer, Warren asked me to fix a picnic lunch. He said he had something he wanted to show me. We picnicked in the woods and then drove out on the narrow ledge road above Copper Basin.

By John Huff

President Lincoln finally declared Arizona a separate territory from New Mexico on February 24, 1863. Other names, including "Gadsonia," "Pimeria," "Montezuma." "Arizuma" and "Arizonia" had been considered for the territory. However, when President Lincoln signed the final bill, it read, "Arizona."

By John S. Huff

The origin of the name of our state has had many interpretations and translations. Even today, on various websites, you can find several explanations. The most logical and accurate interpretation shows the name to have begun in about 1734-1736 in a community some fifty miles southwest of Nogales on today’s Arizona/Mexico border.

By Jeb Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D 

The following article was adapted from an article initially published by the Society for American Baseball Research in "Mining Towns to Major Leagues: A History of Arizona Baseball." It is re-printed by the author's permission.

In January 1873, a Prescott paper, the Arizona Miner, reported one of the first games played in the Arizona Territory, a Christmas day match at Camp Grant in southeastern Arizona. "In the afternoon, an exciting game of base ball took place. This occupied the attention, [of] both of the combatants, until one o'clock, when the welcome call to dinner was wafted to our ears, and readily responded to." No score or outcome of the game was reported. With the first professional league organized in the East in 1871, and baseball being played in the far corners of the Western Territories, the game of baseball was on its way to becoming ingrained in America's consciousness - and Arizona's - as the national pastime.

By Ken Edwards

This is one of two articles.  Part two is titled, "Squatting on the Plaza: 1867 Style - Part 2," published December, 27, 2008 and is in the SHM Days Past Archives.

A squatter is an individual who settles on property belonging to someone else or to the government. After a certain period of occupancy he may claim the property as his own. In so doing, he is claiming squatters' rights or the right of adverse possession. This two-part article is the story of H.W. Ward, who attempted in 1867 to claim half of the Prescott Plaza as his own by using squatters' rights.