Sharlot Hall Museum

Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, occupies a five-acre campus in the Courthouse Plaza neighborhood and serves as the primary repository of the history of Prescott and the Arizona Territory, with a focus on the period from Spanish exploration through the early statehood era. The museum takes its name from Sharlot Mabridth Hall, a pioneering Arizona poet, historian, and the first Territorial Historian of Arizona, appointed in 1909, who worked to preserve documents, artifacts, and folk knowledge of the territorial period and who established the collection on the former site of the Arizona Territorial Governor's Mansion. The campus includes a cluster of historic structures authentic to the 19th century, the most significant of which is the 1864 Governor's Mansion, a log structure built to house the first appointed territorial governor, John Noble Goodwin, making it one of the oldest surviving governmental buildings in Arizona. Additional historic structures on the campus include the 1867 Fremont House, home of territorial governor John C. Fremont, the 1875 Bashford House, an early Prescott merchant's residence, the Superintendent of Public Instruction's Office, and several other vernacular Arizona frontier structures. A period transportation barn houses historic carriages and wagons. The Fort Misery Building, reputedly Prescott's first commercial log structure, was relocated to the campus for preservation. The museum's main interpretive building houses galleries documenting Prescott's role as the first capital of the Arizona Territory, the development of Whiskey Row on Montezuma Street, and the military history of the Prescott area including conflicts with the Yavapai-Apache in the 1860s and 1870s. The grounds also contain the Sharlot Hall Building, which houses research collections including maps, photographs, and manuscripts related to central and northern Arizona history, available to researchers by appointment.