by John Mason Glen, Ph.D., the Prescott Western Heritage Foundation
July 14, 1900, was a hot, sultry Saturday night in Prescott, and saloon keepers were enjoying a profitable evening as the miners, cowboys and locals enjoyed their favorite “adult beverage.”
Sheriff George Ruffner later testified that “in order to jail all the drunks, you’d have to put a roof over the whole town.”
In the wooden building that served as a rooming house adjacent to the Scopel Hotel, aka The Grand View at the southwest corner of Goodwin and Montezuma streets, an unknown miner left the candle in his miner’s pick burning when he left to join in the festivities. A gust of wind through the open window apparently caught this miner’s candle, ignited the cheap curtains, and the blaze was on!
Fires were a relatively common occurrence in the mostly wooden towns of the Old West. In May of 1879 the Arizona Miner had editorialized: “At least four deep wells should be made on our public plaza … which might be the means of saving our town, should a fire break out in the wooden buildings on Montezuma Street. We can’t afford a fire just yet.”
The wells were dug (one can still be seen at the southeast corner of the plaza), after the devasting fire of July 4, 1883, but on the night in question the pumping plant on Aubrey Street was undergoing repairs and inoperable. The four fire crews did the best they could, but with inadequate water, the fire raged.
It quickly destroyed Ferdinand Scopel’s pride and joy, jumped Goodwin Street and raced north through virtually all of the parched wooden structures in the 100 block of Montezuma Street, including the Sam Hill Hardware Store (the rebuilt building that the Western Heritage Center now occupies), the Cobb Well House, the Palace bar, as well as the Burke Hotel, which advertised as “the only fireproof hotel in Arizona.”
Local merchants set up temporary structures, including tents, on the courthouse plaza to continue business, with the saloons especially doing a “land office business.”
Total loss was estimated to be in excess of $1.5 million. Prescott rebuilt itself quickly, this time using concrete, brick and mortar, and stone.
Much more Arizona history and myth can be found at the Western Heritage Center, 156 S. Montezuma. Admission is free.
