by Parker Anderson
The initial crime had gone unnoticed for months and the victims were not missed. Once the crime was discovered, it became a story that chilled Yavapai County citizens in 1887, and still resonates to this day.
Read Moreby Parker Anderson
The initial crime had gone unnoticed for months and the victims were not missed. Once the crime was discovered, it became a story that chilled Yavapai County citizens in 1887, and still resonates to this day.
Read MoreBy Karla Burkitt
An artist, historian or living history interpreter whose job is to bring historical activities or people to life for an audience, faces a tremendous challenge. Sharing details of another time period or another person's experience with sensitivity and accuracy is a delicate balancing act.
Read Moreby Robert L. Spude
Among the collections at Sharlot Hall Museum is a finely hand-made wooden box. Inside, slid between wooden tracks, stand the glass plate negatives of Clarence H. Shaw, photographer of Arizona Territory during the 1890s and early 1900s.
Read MoreBy Tom Collins
Visitors to the Sharlot Hall Building will find in the military exhibit a faded photo of Carrie Wilkins, the second daughter of Colonel John D. Wilkins of Fort Whipple. Carrie and her sister Ella were, according to military legend, much courted and much desired by the young officers in the 1870s, when women were scarce in this Arizona Territory's rough and male-dominated mining town.
Read MoreBy Al Bates
On May 10, 1863, at a location just a few miles south of today's Prescott, an event happened that had a significant impact on the future development of both this area and of Arizona Territory. On that date, twenty-five men signed a contract that established the first mining district in the Central Arizona Highlands.
By Carol Powell
Sometime in the late 1860s, Clara S. Olmstead Howard, a widow with children, met Louis Miller, an immigrant from Germany. They met and were married in Texas, where seven more children were born, including the sons who were destined to go on the become Arizona railroad men; two of them lost their lives on the trains.
Read MoreBy Rhonda L. Tintle
During the latter nineteenth century, immigrants from the Eastern and Midwestern parts of the United States, along with immigrants from around the world, invaded the homeland of Indians and took possession of over 430 million acres of land. Some of those immigrants settled in Prescott and the surrounding districts. The children of those immigrants would become the first American-style Arizonians. On the ranges in and around Prescott, harried parents struggled in cabins, shacks, and tents simply to sustain their families.
Read MoreBy Mona Lange McCroskey
In January, Prescott lost one of its grand dames with the passing of ninety-year-old Alice Mackin. She was the eighth child of Irish immigrant Peter Mackin and Alvina Bennett, who herself was born in what is now "the smack dab middle" of Goldwater Lake. Peter went riding by Alvina's home, saw her shoeing a horse and took a fancy to her because she was able to do such things; they married in 1902. Alice was born in 1916 and lived at Groom Creek in a house that was also a bar and stage stop (the house is still in the family).
Read MoreBy Pat Atchison
Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was then called, was first widely observed in the United States on May 30, 1868. The original intent was to honor the Union soldiers killed during the Civil War by decorating their gravesites.
Read MoreBy Parker Anderson
Those familiar with the history of comedy in entertainment have heard legions of stories about the vaudeville circuit, which began in approximately the late 19th century and started to fade in the 1920s as motion pictures became more sophisticated.