Sharlot Hall Museum

When Arizona became a separate territory during the Civil War, its first capital was set here in the mountains at Prescott, and in 1864 a rough two-story building of hewn ponderosa logs was raised to house the territorial governor. That building, dark and low and plainly frontier, still stands on the museum grounds, and it is one of the oldest buildings in Arizona and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Walking through it, you step straight into the earliest days of the American territory: the simple rooms, the heavy timber, the sense of a government run out of a log house on the far edge of the map. Around it on the campus stand other early Prescott homes and a schoolhouse, moved or preserved and furnished to their periods, so the whole site reads like a small village of the territorial and early-statehood years.

Sharlot Mabridth Hall came to Arizona as a child in the 1880s, when her family crossed the Santa Fe Trail and settled to raise horses and mine gold on Lynx Creek near Prescott. She grew into a ranch woman who could ride and work the land, and at the same time into a serious poet whose collections, with titles like Cactus and Pine and Poems of a Ranch Woman, were read across the country.

In 1909 she was appointed Arizona's territorial historian, the first woman to hold a salaried office in the territory, and she threw herself into the work, making long, hard expeditions by wagon across the wildest country in the region to gather its history firsthand. One journey took her ten weeks by buckboard across the remote Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon, guide and notebook her only company. She had visited the Grand Canyon itself years before it was a national park, camping her way there and writing poems about what she saw.

By the 1920s the old Governor's Mansion was falling apart, and Sharlot Hall took it on as her cause. She restored it, opened it as a museum in 1928, and spent her last years gathering and safeguarding the objects and stories of Arizona's past. The museum that carries her name is her monument, and the story of its founder is part of what makes a visit here stick with you.

The museum has grown well beyond the single mansion. Its grounds now hold a scatter of exhibit buildings and historic homes, several of them genuinely old and several purpose-built, telling the story of the central Arizona highlands from its Native peoples through the mining and ranching eras to statehood. Rare books, documents, photographs, and maps fill its library and archives, one of the best regional history collections in the state.

As much as the exhibits, people remember the grounds. The campus is planted with lawns, shade trees, and rose gardens, and it is a genuinely pleasant place simply to walk on a warm Prescott afternoon. Throughout the year the museum hosts festivals and living-history events on those lawns, when costumed interpreters bring the frontier buildings to life, and the whole place turns from a quiet garden into a window on the past.

The museum is an easy two-block walk from Prescott's Courthouse Plaza, the leafy square at the center of downtown, so it pairs naturally with a stroll through the historic town, its old saloons, and its shops. It is a paid museum and closes on certain days and holidays, so it is worth checking the schedule before a visit, and because so much of it is outdoors, comfortable shoes and weather-appropriate clothing help.

Plan on a couple of unhurried hours to walk the campus, step inside the log Governor's Mansion, browse the exhibit halls, and wander the gardens, longer if you catch one of the living-history days. For anyone curious about how Arizona went from a Civil War territory run out of a log cabin to a state, and about the remarkable ranch-woman poet who made sure that story was not lost, this is the place to start.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.