Prescott A Singular Place

THAT LITTLE BIG TOWN CALLED Prescott

where excess was never wretched. The mansions are col-orful, tactile, shameless in mixing and matching architectural styles one blends Queen Anne and Greek Revival as if they'd spun in a Cuisinart. Each house, framed by stately trees, exhibits the Victorian idea of a "picture in a garden."

Al Smith was one of the first modern Prescottonians to buy one of the mansions. It was 1955, he had six children, and there was this 5,000-square-foot, 17-room wreck on Mt. Vernon. It was boarded up, but the local kids were still getting inside to play there. He paid $5,775 for it. His wife was steamed; she thought he'd bought a turkey. Today his 1902 wreck is a treasure, beau-tifully restored and clotted with antique furnishings. He has no intention of selling. A smaller Victorian up the street is listed at $350,000.

Three blocks east is the Smoki Museum, a private, nonprofit collection of prehistoric and historic Native American artifacts. The entire staff, including Director Ken Howell, are volunteers, and the entire collection is made up of donated items and, as Howell says, a bit sadly, "We're one of the best-kept secrets in Arizona." A mere 3,000 visitors a year find it.

The museum opened in 1935 in a dark building funded by the Civilian Works Ad-ministration and designed to resemble rather vaguely Pueblo Indian architecture. Until the last few years, the museum frankly deserved its obscurity; the collection was somewhat shabby and poorly docu-mented. Not today. There is a wide-ranging collection of prehistoric pottery from the Sinagua, Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi cultures, along with dramatic Hopi kachina dolls, ceremonial beads, dance fans, stone effigies, tools, weapons, and percussion instruments. There are many oddities, such as a prehistoric Prescott-area bowl decorat-ed with petroglyphlike figures.

"Something that's always bothered me," Howell says, "is that so many archaeological museums keep most of their collections in archives, where only researchers can see them. We've got over 90 percent of our collection on display."

Prescott's more famous museum was founded by a woman poet, Sharlot Hall, who served as Arizona's official historian even before Arizona was a state. The Sharlot Hall Museum's permanent collection is so enormous much of it has to be stored outdoors: six historic buildings, two architectural replicas, and a Victorian windmill listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The oldest building in the collection is the Governor's Mansion, a log cabin built in 1864 on this site; but the most significant building is the 1877 Bashford House, a petticoat Victorian structure carted seven blocks to the museum's grounds in 1974 after a fast-food restaurant franchisee had bought its original site and was about to demolish the house. That was the pivot point in Prescott's historic preservation movement; there haven't been many 19th-century buildings threatened since.

Two other museums deserve a look. The Phippen Museum of Western Art, founded in 1984, has a large collection of traditional and contemporary Western art, everything from a two-horse farm wagon sold by Sam Hill Hardware Co. of Prescott in 1900 to modern Central American wooden sculptures of mermen. For a chance at still more eclectic art, check the Prescott Fine Arts Association, a nonprofit gallery cradled in a downtown Gothic Revival church.

Enough art and history. Patty and I need some outdoor interludes, and another of the attractions of Prescott is their accessibility almost year-round.

We curl out of town on Senator Highway, which begins as Mt. Vernon Avenue, heading into the Bradshaw Mountains. There are dozens of trails available. We stop at the Groom Creek Nature Trail, designed for the paraplegic and blind, plop onto a bench, close eyes, and meditate on the forest's chamber music. An Abert's squirrel squirts up a ponderosa behind me, and the clicking of its claws on the brittle bark sounds like a gnome playing a miniature snare drum.

Eight miles from town on Senator Highway is the best hike we've ever found around Prescott: the Hassayampa Creek Trail. It has everything: grand views of the Bradshaws, Buick-size boulders for mid-hike lounging, a section paralleling the gur-gling creek, a modest granite gorge, and no steep death-march ascensions. It's about three and one half miles round-trip, and it's almost impossible to get lost.

Another easy and scenic trail circles 55-acre Lynx Lake, the prettiest of several lakes surrounding Prescott. It winds through countless coves sprouting tall cattails, fram-ing views of canoes and rowboats (no gaso-line-powered boats permitted) skimming the water. Normally I oppose man-made lakes Lynx was created in 1962 by damming little Lynx Creek - but this one seems like such a natural ingredient in its setting that it's impossible to dislike.

On the other side of town, about seven miles out of the burgeoning city, is Granite Dells, a Precambrian garden of piled weathered boulders intersected by Granite Creek and its riparian jungle. The Dells, unfortunately, is mainly private property with no of-ficial hiking trails, but it is possible to drive there, rockwhack a path into an uninhabit-ed area, and enjoy photographing the Dells in the late evening's lion-fur light.

Next morning we prowl several of Prescott's two dozen antique shops. “Unofficially, Prescott is the antique capital of Arizona,” Al Smith tells me. He opened his business in 1956, the year after he bought the mansion on Mt. Vernon. Ninety percent of Prescott's antiques, though, do not come from Prescott's antique homes - they're imports from the East or Midwest. Smith says that even in the '50s, Prescott's wealthy people weren't selling their treasured furnishings. For his stock, he'd buy from the servants of the elite. “They'd say, 'Oh, I used to work for Mr. Brown at the bank. He gave me these things when he refurnished.'” The most interesting antique store we find is the Prescott Folklore Center, which specializes in vintage guitars, mandolins, and fiddles. Owner Jerry Page says he moved to Prescott seven years ago, started to restore some old instruments he owned himself, and “it simply got out of hand.” Says Page, “Some people just want an old instrument that's got some miles on it, something that's got some music programmed into it.” History, too. One of the guitars in his shop is a 1929 Harmony guitar with a bridge shaped like a Ryan monoplane to commemorate Lindbergh's transatlantic flight.

Lindbergh's profound gamble inspires me to try a small one: five bucks in Bucky's Casino and Lounge inside the Prescott Resort and Conference Center on State Route 69 at the east edge of town. I am a baby gambler; the guy next to me, a construction worker who is operating a slot machine with each hand, says he's up $148 at the moment. He invested $20 to start. If he gets to $200 he'll stop; if the electronic bandits whittle him down to $21, he'll stop. Sounds like a perfect formula. I lose my $5 without a formula and leave.

Other gambles in Prescott have paid off. Most prominent is Prescott College, a nontraditional private college founded in 1966. It died of bankruptcy in 1974, but the faculty believed so deeply in it that half of them kept teaching without pay for a year, until the college crept back into solvency. Now it seems stable with 400 undergraduates in the residential program and 400 more in the individualized adult-degree program. Prescott College students start out with a three-week “wilderness orientation” program, rafting, climbing, camping, and suffering; then continue through an accredited four-year program which emphasizes learning through expe-rience. Typical courses: “Consequences of Technological Change,” “Transpersonal Psychology in the Wilderness,” “Taoist Health: The Chinese Art of Chi Kung and Nature.” Prescott is an anomaly among small cities, a place where diversity is delighted in, where history is not merely celebrated but lived, and where somebody can choose between a lecture on Taoist philosophy and a recital of cowboy poetry on a given night.

Eleven years ago, Arizona Highways pub-lished an issue on Prescott, billing it as “Everybody's Hometown.” Seems more true now than ever.

Editor's Note: Watch for We Call It Pres-kit: A Guide to Prescott and the High Country of Central Arizona, a full-color, 64-page, softcover Arizona Highways book which will be available in September.