Sierra Vista Historical Society Newsletter

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SVHS NEWSLETTERsvhsnewsletter@cox.net 520-458-0703 WWW.SVHSAZ.ORG Marion Margraf, editor

PresidentTom Shupert

Vice-PresidentEd Riggs Treasurer

Paulette DoyleSecretary

Ingrid Baillie

ARTICLES

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O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2Volume 10 Number 3

SOCIETY RECEIVES GRANTAn Arizona Community Foundation grant is applied to the plaque project.

HISTORICAL RESTORATIONTechniques of historical restoration at the Gadsden Hotel in eastern Cochise County.

MUSEUM NEWSA military focus.

Also inside:

A profile of a young

museum volunteer,

and a biography of

another Tombstone

rogue.

Fall

SVHS President Tom Shupert speaks at the Sierra Vista Library on Thursday, September 20,2012. The occasion was the receipt of an Arizona Community Foundation grant. p. 4

Repairing plaster, p. 5 WWII memorabilia, p. 2

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SVHS Newsletter Henry F. Hauser Museum Nancy Krieski, Curator! PAGE2

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Fall is in the air and that means we are gearing up for our winter visitors. Our Arizona Legacy Project exhibit, "Our Little Corner of Cochise County - 1912" will continue through February 2013 in celebration of Arizona's Centennial year. At the close of this exhibit, all information will be passed to the Arizona State Library and Archives Memory Project to serve as a lasting legacy to our area. How exciting is that?! Our new season of Amazing Arizona will begin Tuesday, November 6th, at 2:00 pm in the Ethel Berger Center with a presentation titled, "Military Camps and Forts of Southern Arizona: 1856-1916" with speaker Steve Siemsen of the Burnside Post, Grand Army of the Republic. December's presentation will be held at the Sierra Vista Public Library (our new co-hosts), at the Mona Bishop Room, on Tuesday, December 4th at 2:00 pm. Tom Miller, speaker with the Arizona Humanities Council will talk about "Thornton Wilder's Arizona Days." Please note that the day and time of this speaker series has changed. Our next exhibit, opening in March of 2013, will honor all those who served in

the Korean War. 2013 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement when the active stage of this war ended, signaling the beginning of the end of this so-called "Forgotten War," and it is our goal to shed light on this conflict and those who served so that they are never forgotten. Our first task in producing this exhibit is to encourage local Korean War veterans to tell their stories by offering a series of Storytelling Circles throughout the month of October which will hopefully lead to personal interviews. Our goal is to tell the story of this war through the eyes of those who were there, not only with our museum exhibit, but with a series of history panels and presentations.

As always, your many efforts in supporting the museum are greatly appreciated.

Our upcoming "Korean War--Through Their Eyes" exhibit will be based on our popular "World War II Veterans--Honoring Our Own" exhibit we featured a few years ago. This exhibit told the story of World War II through the photographs, stories, and

memorabilia of those who lived it. A delightful by product of that exhibit was the donation of World War II memorabilia and photographs to the museum. One such donation came from Lloyd Turner, now deceased, who was docked near Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. He was able to take a few photographs of the attack which he incorporated into a handmade wooden clock in honor of all who died there. We are grateful to him and so many others who have given such precious items to our museum. Our hope is to one day, in our new state-of-the-art museum, to honor our veterans with a display and to include this beautiful clock.

Curator’s Corner

Corner Cupboard

Until next time,Nancy Krieski(520) 417-6980Nancy.krieski@sierravistaaz.gov

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Elliott Larkin Ferguson, later to be known as Pete Spence, was born about 1852 in either Louisiana or Texas, and appears to have spent most of his early life in Texas. After enlisting as a Texas Ranger in 1874, he spent some of his time also on the shady side of the law. Ferguson was wanted for robbery in Goliad County, Texas by 1878 and headed west to Arizona Territory with his new name.

In the Tombstone 1880 census, Pete Spencer was listed as 28, a stock raiser and born in Texas. His new neighbors across

the street were Virgil, James and Wyatt Earp and their wives. He partnered up in a livery stable with Frank Stilwell, a sometimes deputy sheriff (and sometimes stage robber and rustler) for John Behan. Arrested by the Earps, first under State charges, and later on Federal charges, for a September stage heist, Stilwell and Spence were in and out of jail leading up to the October gunfight but did not participate in it. After Morgan Earp was murdered in March, 1882, Stilwell was killed in Tucson by the Earp faction, but Spence kept a low profile by turning himself in to Behan and hiding in plain sight during the Vendetta Ride.

Spence worked as a lawman in southern Arizona and New Mexico in the post-gunfight times, and eventually was accused of killing several men, and sentenced to five years in Yuma Prison for one of the shootings. Beginning his time on June 10, 1893, the occasion for the only known photograph of Spence, he was pardoned by the Arizona Territorial Governor Louis Cameron Hughes on

November 29, 1894 and released early.

Spence partnered up with old friend Phin Clanton (older brother of Ike and Billy) near Globe and they operated a goat ranch. In 1900, Phin is listed as a boarder with his future bride Laura Bound. Four years after Phin died in 1906, Pete married the widow Clanton. The 1910 census indicated Pete was her 5th husband. Laura Jane Neal was born in Texas on February 14, 1859 and died October18, 1935 in Miami, Arizona, and was buried in Central Heights Cemetery, Globe. She had married cattleman Benjamin F. Tomerlin after Pete’s death. In the 1910 census entry, Laura Bound, with her son William Bohme, was listed as a laundress, and Phin, along with 3 other miners, were shown as her boarders. Other purported husbands were Allen Clippenger, Ben Bound, Cornelius Rufus Jackson, and Louis Bohme. Spence died in 1914 and is buried in an unmarked plot in Globe Cemetery next to Phin Clanton.

Tombstone 1881: A Sampling of Rogues--A Glorification of Thugs by Ed RiggsPete Spence

Besides the prospectors and miners who came to Tombstone to search out wealth in the form of silver ore, others arrived to search out alternate ways to strike it rich. This is one of a series of articles about those who came to Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Some were rogues, some were thugs, some were not. You get to decide in which category they belong.

Elliot Larkin Ferguson, also known as Pete Spence,

Peter W. Spencer, Larkin Hickman, Lark Ferguson, E. L. Ferguson, Eli F. Ferguson, Elliott Ferguson,

and possibly others

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The Sierra Vista Genealogy Club, formed in 2006, is hosted by members of the Tombstone Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It became a project of the Sierra Vista Historical Society in 2009. The club meets on the first Wednesday of each month, October through May, at the Ethel Berger Center from 1:00-4:00 pm. The club's purpose is to foster genealogical research. The season’s first meeting is Wednesday, October 3rd at the Ethel Berger Center from 1:00-4:00 pm. The program, Overview of a New Format, starts at 2:00 pm with a catalog of local resources and will conclude at 3:00 pm. From 3:00 to 4:00 you can explore these interest tables: War of 1812 (B. Day); New Members (K.Childs); and Computer Helps (B. Schirmer and J.Thrall).

For information: Call 803-7906 or go tosierravistagenie.wordpress.com.

November 7th: Turning Family Folklore into Family History

December 5th: Your Family's Story

January 2nd: Back to the Old Country: Researching other

Countries & Languages

SV Genealogy Club

Member Meeting & LuncheonMark your calendars!

The next SVHS Meeting and Luncheon will be

Friday, October 19th. Invite a friend!

Details to follow.

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SVHS Recieves Arizona Community Foundation Grant

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On Thursday, September 20, 2012, SVHS President Tom Shupert received a grant of $500 from the Arizona Community Foundation. Thanks go to SVHS member Bob Bobar, pictured here, who had the idea and wrote the proposal for the grant. Tom related the following at the Mona Bishop Room of the Library upon receiving the grant: “This money will be used to purchase a historic site plaque for the Garden Canyon Service Station which was located at west end of

Fry Boulevard, now vacant land. The station was opened in 1942 by Paul Keating and was leased from Standard Oil. Paul Keating was one of the men on the incorporation committee for our community and was the third mayor of Sierra Vista. When Keating retired in 1957, Chuck Schrader was asked to take over the station, which he did, and ran it until 1993, when he retired. “The historic site plaque project is a project of the Sierra Vista Historical Society. The idea for the project arose after my wife Marjy and I visited our daughter in Hood River, Oregon. Hood River is a small town on the Columbia River that was incorporated about the same time as Sierra Vista. I had ample time to walk around town reading the plaques that they had put up. “As we drove back home I kept thinking it would be neat to have a similar program in our community. But, I thought, unlike Hood River, we don't have any of the original buildings--well maybe a couple. Kept thinking and suddenly I thought, not having original buildings actually makes it more important to have a plaque project. So we began. “Our first plaque dedication took place in April, 2008 at the Landmark Cafe. To date we have done 14 plaques and on Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 10:00 we will be dedicating the 15th plaque at the site of Sue and

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Upcoming meetings:

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When he was in high school in central Illinois, Hereford resident Darryl Mathewson painted

scenes of beaches and mountains on his bedroom

walls. Not only was Darryl already an accomplished artist, he had wanderlust, and while he did not quite make it to the ocean, he has spent much of his adult life in southern Cochise County surrounded by the mountains he loves. I met him while he was restoring some doors in Sierra Vista and our conversation led to this article.

One outlet for Darryl’s artistic bent was becoming a painter and sign painter, which resulted in 1995 to his being hired to paint sets for a movie being filmed in the lobby of the Gadsden Hotel--not the first time the venerable Douglas hotel had lent its historic charms to Hollywood. And it was not the first time that Darryl had done work at the Gadsden, for he had painted the exterior in 1990, returning the color scheme to the original cream and brown.

One day the film crew left a ladder leaning up on the plaster cornice of the Gadsden Hotel lobby, which broke out a large section. This plaster work had been laid by artisans hired

from Italy to work on rebuilding the hotel, which burned in the late 1920s, two decades after it was first built in what was then Arizona Territory.

The movie company’s insurance paid for the materials and two scaffolds to repair the damaged section. Darryl did this work. The hotel had been listed on the U. S. National Register of Historic Places in 1976, which means that restoration work must copy original techniques as much as possible. For example, the Italians had used horsehair as the bonding agent in the plaster, so Darryl scrounged up horsehair. As it turned out, when he finished the damaged section, there were 22 days remaining on the contract for the scaffolding. Darryl approached hotel owner Robin Brekhus about further repairs. She asked for a bid to include repair of the whole ceiling, which was failing because of water damage. Darryl figured eight months was needed for that--but in fact, it took two years. The ceiling was clad in a very soft plaster that had baling wire to hold it together. It was sloughing down over the steel-reinforced concrete pillars (arrow). The State Historical Society disallowed raising the roof, which challenged Darryl to work from the inside and camouflage repair work on the cornices.

Here are the steps Darryl took to effect the restoration-- that is, after removing 75 years’ worth of dust: Patch the plaster and do repairs as needed. Then, apply base coats; Darryl hand-mixed colors using linseed oil. Next, apply gold leaf to the size. Fourth, burnish the gold leaf. Last, add flourishes and some faux aging so the new work will blend with the intact plaster.

The next time you visit the Gadsden, you can admire Darryl’s work.

GADSDEN RESTORATION

SAGGING CEILING

RESTORED CAPITAL

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On Thursday, September 13, 2012 at the Sierra Vista Library, the Huachuca Area School Retirees’ Association (HASRA) hosted Mr. Robert A. Flores’s presentation outlining the chronology of the historical capitals of Arizona. Mr. Flores is the Special Project Coordinator for the Arizona Capitol Museum. The area that is now New Mexico, Arizona, and part of Nevada was enlarged and shrunk, and divided horizontally and vertically several times in the second half of the 1800s. In that short time, boundaries for Arizona changed according to its status as a territory of the United States, of the Confederate States, or as a state. Of particular interest to us in Sierra Vista is the acquisition of the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, because if the United States had not bought that area from Mexico, Sierra Vista would likely not have come into being. As a state, our capital has always been Phoenix, but as a

territory other sites served as the capital. In the photo Mr. Flores is holding a photograph of the capitol building erected in Prescott. On the floor to the right is a photo of the capitol in downtown Phoenix that preceded the present capitol building. Behind him to the left is a photo of the adobe building that served as a capitol in Tucson.

Mr. Flores offered an enthusiastic, detailed account of the twists and turns in the location of the capital of Arizona.

When you walk into the Henry F. Hauser Museum there is a small table to your right that holds a stack of papers with 10 questions. This activity challenges younger visitors to seek the answers as they walk through the museum. Finished questionnaires are deposited in the mailbox on that table. Teen Education Volunteer Jenna Glazier is in charge of this Junior Historian Program. She comes up with the questions, and changes them about every four months. She grades the papers, enters the data, and sends a letter to the youngster with a certificate,

membership card, button, and small gift. In addition to this program, Jenna spends her volunteer hours cataloguing and verifying donations. This summer she worked 8-10 hours a month, and now that school is back in session, it is 2-6 hours a month. Jenna is an 8th grader this year at Joyce Clark Middle School. Her mother suggested contacting the museum as a place to volunteer as part of the requirements of being a member of the National Junior Honor Society. She chose the museum over the animal shelter or a nursing home because of her interest in old things. This spun off from her delight in playing her dad’s vinyl records and VHS tapes--remember those? Her favorite item in the museum is the old cash register--“It’s so big!” Nancy Krieski is full of praise for Jenna’s efficiency and dedication.

Timeline of capitals: 1864 Ft. Whipple / Prescott 1867 Tucson 1877 Prescott 1889 Phoenix

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Museum Volunteer Jenna Glazier

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Historical Capitals of Arizona

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Herb's restaurant--the southwest corner of Seventh Street and Fry Boulevard. Next comes a plaque for the WW II air raid siren and sometime later we will dedicate this 17th plaque, sponsored by the Arizona Community Foundation, as we mentioned earlier, of the Garden Canyon Service Station. “Some of you know the Sierra Vista Historical Society’s mission is to research and share historical information about this area and to raise funds to aid the City of Sierra Vista build a new museum. These efforts are coming along so nicely that we recently joined the Arizona Community Foundation Legacy Program, which will provide guidance in our fund raising, financial fund management, and offer many more contacts than we could ever reach on our own. “Thank you very much for your support to this community project of the Historical Society.”

The mission of the Sierra Vista Historical Society is to collect and share information about the natural and cultural history of the Sierra Vista area. It is actually to our credit that we have outgrown the Henry F. Hauser Museum at the Ethel Berger Center. Our collections and archives have expanded, demands for research capabilities have increased, and the number of vistors has gone up, although space for storage, exhibits and hands-on activities remain the same. We have only 800 sq. ft. of display area and 800 sq. ft. of storage area at the museum proper, plus several rented storage units. The new museum plan show 15,000 sq. ft. for displays over a basement for storage. In 2006 the City of Sierra Vista, City Resolution 2006-044, designated property on Garden Avenue for the new facility.

While the Society provides day-to-day financial assistance to the Museum, the larger goal of many Society activities is to raise money to assist the city of Sierra Vista build a new museum facility that will be able to deliver what current and future residents need. The Sierra Vista Historical Society was established in 2002 and the building fund was started in 2005 to raise money for a new museum, with 100% of the money in the fund going to the museum. The economic slow-down of recent years and a lack of professional guidance have had a negative effect on our fund, which, however, has grown to $75,000 at present. At a recent board meeting members decided that the fund now has enough money in it that the Society should explore ways to maximize its potential. Members therefore voted to move the fund monies from a simple savings account to the Arizona Community Foundation. The Arizona Community Foundation (ACF) offers professional guidance, broader money management strategies and has a wider reach for publicity. ACF fiduciaries have the experience and scope to boost the return on our monies. ACF provides administrative, marketing and technical support plus fiscal and fiduciary oversight of endowments. The

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Legacy Donors

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Foundation leverages the management advice of experienced investment professionals and provides quarterly reports measuring investment performance against standards in the equity and bond markets. The average administrative fee is 0.75% of assets, declining as the fund balance increases. All grant making decisions are made at the local level, according to the wishes of legacy gift donors. ACF can manage the building fund, keeping the goals of our mission intact, and also administer an endowment, which will provide for the maintenance and operations of the new museum when donations and legacy gifts exceed what is necessary to build a new facility.

Libby: Just what is a legacy gift donor?

SVHS: A gift donor is a person or family that decides today how some part of their estate will be used after their lifetime, and completes a revocable testamentary instruction for the use of some part of the estate.

Libby: You know, I wish I could make a generous donation to the museum building fund, but the reality is that I’m on a fixed income and I can’t gamble with my future.

SVHS: Yes, that is the case for so many of us; however, a legacy designation allows you to choose how much to leave to a cause or program in your name, but you do not make a financial donation until after your death.

Libby: But, how can I know what I will have left when that final day comes?

SVHS: Again, none of us can know how our resources will last or what we will have to give.  Simply designating a percentage of whatever resources remain eliminates the worry of promising a specific amount.

Libby: That does sound very good, but I really don't have much and I am just hoping what I do have lasts for me.

SVHS: Whatever amount does remain can be shared with loved ones plus a cause you designate, be it a small amount or a very large amount.  Making the legacy gift will insure you are leaving a part of yourself to a cause you feel strongly about and have supported for a long while.

Libby: You said shared with loved ones--how can I share and leave a legacy?

SVHS: Most have loved ones they want to leave some part of their estate, and that is great.  Just have an estate planner update your trust or will to leave some percentage to the cause you choose and then the balance goes to the other causes or loved ones.

Libby: You think the new Sierra Vista Museum is the right cause to leave a legacy to?

SVHS: We sure do, but that is an individual’s choice.  The new museum will be a lasting entity that will benefit the Community of Sierra Vista for many generations.  Leaving a legacy to the SVHS designated for the new museum will not only help the City build the museum, but also, when complete, the project legacy will be transformed into a foundation which will provide support for continued operations of the museum.

Libby: Thank you so much.

SVHS: You are welcome and thank you.Libby, the

museum mascot, has some questions about legacy gift donors:

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In MemoriamElizabeth “Betty” Bernheim

August 10, 2012Cecil Carlisle

September 1, 2012

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