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Phoenix’s First Light Rail System
Just about every city of any size in the early days had a streetcar or trolley line. In Phoenix, there was the Phoenix Street Railway System, which operated from 1887 to 1948. It was owned and operated by the great promoter and subdivision mogul, Moses H. Sherman, until 1925, when the city of Phoenix took over operations.
Princess Margaret visits Arizona
When Tucsonan Lewis W. Douglas was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1947, his daughter Sharman left Vassar to accompany her parents to England and became a close friend of Princess Margaret.
The Mertz Family
This photo shows 444 Monroe Street in downtown Phoenix in 1936. The building in the background is the former convent of the Sisters of the Precious Blood, who taught St. Mary’s Elementary School classes for nearly a century.
Swigarts’ Irresistible Arizona
In 1910, Esther Rothrock, who lived in Elgin, a town southeast of Sonoita in Santa Cruz County, invited her sisters, Carrie and Rhoda Swigart, to come out to Arizona to homestead land.
Annie Daniels, Schools Superintendent
Annie Evalena Stakebake Seayrs Daniels, a schoolteacher and Pima County superintendent of schools, was born in a log cabin on a farm near Windsor, Indiana, on Oct. 3, 1869. Her parents were Henry Harrison and Louisa Cropper Stakebake.
Thriving St. Mary’s
Several generations of Phoenix’s Catholics attended St. Mary’s Elementary School, which closed in 1992 and was eventually demolished to make way for new Diocesan offices.
Promoting Tourist Travel in 1884 Northern Arizona
The following article appeared in the Weekly Champion, a Flagstaff newspaper, on March 22, 1884. Today’s reader may enjoy the flowery writing style of the time; may be curious as to why the route would travel so far to the west unless it was to reach the waters of the Colorado River instead of viewing the Canyon from the rim?
Cochise County Attorney Allen R. English
Allen Robert English, born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1858, earned a law degree by age 19. His father was a well-to-do shipbuilder and his mother was from a pioneer Irish family, the Fitzgeralds of Maryland.
Scarce Funding for 1920s Early Education
Every year that teacher Anne Tinsley taught kindergarten at Flagstaff’s Emerson School, the 40 or so members of her class got to visit the fire department and sit on the huge fire truck.
The Class of 1920
These students are the first graduating class of St. Mary’s High School in Phoenix. Founded in 1917, the school first held classes in the tiny second floor of St. Anthony’s grammar school (since razed) next to St. Mary’s Church.
Mining Man & Mayor
Abraham Hyman Emanuel was an Easterner who made his fortune in the gold and silver mines and mining towns of the American West.
Nogales Pioneer Leopold Ephraim
Leopold Ephraim, born in Chulm, Prussia (now Poland) on April 16, 1850, left Europe for America in 1869 to avoid military service for Russia.
