Arizona's First Territorial Capital

The pine-forested highlands of central Arizona were not obvious ground for a capital city, but that is exactly what Prescott became in eighteen sixty-four, almost overnight, by the force of political will. The Arizona Territory had been carved out of New Mexico Territory the previous year, and President Lincoln's appointed governor, John Goodwin, needed to establish the seat of government somewhere in the new territory. The existing settlements in the south, particularly Tucson, were associated with Confederate sympathizers in the minds of the Washington establishment, and Goodwin wanted his capital in the northern highlands, where Union sentiment was stronger and where gold had been discovered in Lynx Creek.

In May of eighteen sixty-four, Goodwin chose a site near Fort Whipple as the capital, and at a public meeting on May thirtieth the settlers named it Prescott, after the American historian William Hickling Prescott, whose histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru had made him one of the most celebrated writers in the English-speaking world. The town was platted and its lots were sold that summer. By Independence Day of eighteen sixty-four, a community of several hundred people was in place around the new capitol building on the central plaza.

Prescott served as Arizona's territorial capital from eighteen sixty-four to eighteen sixty-seven, when the legislature moved the seat to Tucson. Ten years later, in eighteen seventy-seven, the capital was returned to Prescott, where it remained until eighteen eighty-nine, when it moved to Phoenix and stayed there permanently. The loss of the capital was a genuine blow to the town's ambitions, but Prescott survived it.

The buildings that went up during the capital years, the courthouse square, the brick commercial blocks, the Victorian homes of the merchants and lawyers and politicians who gathered here, remained. Prescott developed an identity as the cultivated, orderly, tree-shaded counterpart to the raw mining camps and cattle towns that populated the rest of Arizona. A place that had been a capital, even briefly, carries that in its bearing long afterward.