"To the mother that bore my body; to the land that mothered my soul."  
-dedication from "Cactus and Pine," Sept. 10, 1924

Hand colored image of Sharlot Hall at the Grand Canyon about 1911

Sharlot Mabridth Hall was an unusual woman for her time: a largely self-educated but highly literate child of the frontier. Born in 1870, she traveled with her family from Kansas to the Arizona Territory in 1882. Her impressions of this journey remain with her all of her life. She loved ideas and the written arts and expressed her fascination with Arizona frontier life through prose and poetry.

The Hall family raised horses and mined gold on Lynx Creek, then built a homestead which they called Orchard Ranch. James and Adeline along with their children, Sharlot and Ted, kept pigs and cows and grew vegetables, apples, and pears. Sharlot attended school for a couple of brief terms in a log-and-adobe schoolhouse four miles from the ranch, then boarded in Prescott for one year of schooling in town. There she met Henry Fleury, who had come to Prescott in 1864 as secretary to the first governor, John Goodwin, and who lived in the old log Governor's Mansion. The gruff, grey-bearded Fleury told Sharlot many fascinating stories of Prescott's early times.

In 1909 Sharlot was appointed Territorial Historian and became the first woman to hold territorial office. At about this time she was also very active in the national political arena, first as a lobbyist and later as a presidential elector.  In 1927 Sharlot agreed to move her extensive collection of artifacts and documents into the Old Governor's Mansion and open it as a museum. Her diligent efforts inspired others to contribute to the preservation of early Arizona history. After her death in 1943 a historical society continued her efforts to build the complex that bears her name. In 1981 Miss Hall became one of the first women elected to the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.