Sharlot Mabridth Hall's
Orchard Ranch

Historical Significance:
Orchard Ranch is the original home of Sharlot Mabridth Hall, a poet, journalist, and historian. With the proposed the admission of New Mexico as a state that included what is now Arizona, her poem, Arizona, put forth a case for Arizona statehood. It opens with these lines:

No beggar she in the mighty hall where her bay-crowned sisters wait,
No empty-handed pleader for the right of a free-born state.
No child, with a child’s insistence, demanding a gilded toy,
But a fair-browed, queenly woman, strong to create or destroy—

The plaque reads, “Historic Site of Orchard Ranch / Home of Sharlot Mabridth Hall (1870-1943) / In 1890 James and Adeline Hall purchased 130 acres here above the junction of the Agua Fria River and Lynx Creek. The Halls named their homestead “Orchard Ranch” and, with the help of their children, Sharlot and Ted, produced apples and beef. / Life on the ranch instilled in Sharlot a love of Arizona’s pioneer ways. She wrote about early Arizonans and collected documents and artifacts. In 1927, after the deaths of her parents, she sold the ranch and moved her collections into the 1864 log “Governor’s Mansion” in Prescott which she opened as the museum that now bears her name.”

Dedicated:
May 3, 1997

Sponsor:
Yavapai Chapter, NSDAR