Description

Sharlot with her mother, Adeline, posing in a formal studio portrait wearing long dresses and beautifully veiled and floral decorated hats.

SHARLOT MABRIDTH HALL (b. October 27, 1870, d. April 9, 1943) moved from Lincoln County, Kansas to Arizona in 1882. She moved twelve miles southeast of Prescott, Arizona at Lynx Creek, with her father, James Knox Hall, her mother, Adeline Susannah Hall, and her brother, Edward "Ted" V. Hall.

Sharlot became a poet, a writer, a journalist, an associate editor of "Out West" magazine, and served as Arizona's Territorial Historian from 1909-1912. In addition, she became the first steward and curator of the Arizona Governor's Mansion in Prescott, which she eventually turned into a Museum beginning in 1928. Today, she is the namesake of the Sharlot Hall Museum.

ADELINE SUSANNAH (BOBLETT) HALL was born on September 23, 1844 in Dayton, Ohio.  She lived with her parents for a while in Indiana, where her mother died.  The surviving family then moved to Iowa.  Adeline served as a nurse during the Civil War, then moved to Kansas where she became a schoolteacher.  There she met James Knox Polk Hall and married him on January 31, 1869.  They had three children: a daughter, Sharlot (b. 1870); a son, John (died in infancy in 1872); and a son Edward (b. 1874).

Adeline, James, and their surviving children moved to Yavapai County, Arizona, in 1882, where they homesteaded land they later renamed Orchard Ranch.  Adeline spent the rest of her life as a ranch wife, taking pride in her daughter’s budding accomplishments as a writer and poet.  She died on August 12, 1912.  Her body was cremated, and her ashes interred in the Simmons section of what is today the Pioneer’s Home Cemetery.

NOTE:  There is a sepia-toned, oversized oval print of this same image, which is located in MS-12,  MS/PC Oversized case, Drawer 8, Folder 1.