Photo courtesy of the Pinal County Historical Society, In 1891 citizens hoped the Pinal County Courthouse would impress upon Washington, D.C., that Pinal County was part of a territory ready for statehood.
By LYNN SMITH and PAT FAUX
Pinal County Historical Society
Editor’s Note: This story is re-printed from the Winter 2012 edition of Pinal Ways magazine.
Florence was the earliest town organized in the Gadsden Purchase in what became Pinal County, Arizona Territory. The town was named the county seat in the 1870s.
Pinal County and Florence might be considered stepchildren of Central Arizona. The county and the town are left out of the exciting activities of the neighboring counties north and south of them. Important sports events, even the Super Bowl, occur away from Pinal County. Major universities are part of these nearby counties, not Pinal. Politics and its accompanying intrigue are part of the largest state capital in the United States — Phoenix — in Maricopa County! Even the mainline railroad and the interstate highway bypass the town of Florence.
Pinal County and Florence are expected to take care of many unpleasant tasks of the state. Although there are now branches of the state prison, for many years Florence was the only location of first, the Arizona Territorial Prison, then the Arizona State Prison. So Pinal County was required to keep under lock and key the miscreants arrested, tried, and found guilty in other counties besides Pinal. To this day one prison in Florence, Eyman Complex, is the one that contains death row. The first prison, Florence Complex, does execute those convicted of capital murder. These unpleasant tasks are those with which other counties may be happy not to have to concern themselves, but Florence has offered so much more.
During territorial days and Arizona’s hundred years of statehood, Pinal County has contributed much to the state of Arizona. Four men who were prominent in Pinal County history became territorial or state governors. One became majority leader of the U.S. Senate. These men contributed much and then moved on. Others lived an active life before coming to the county but set down roots and became important citizens of Florence. This article focuses on some of the people who came and stayed, some who moved on and on some of our enduring institutions.
Pinal County is proud of its courthouses. The first was an adobe building that was outgrown quickly. By 1891 the county had built the brick Victorian courthouse with its imposing clock tower that still dominates the town. Town and county citizens hoped the building would impress Washington, D.C., with the fact that Florence was not a dusty old adobe town anymore but part of a territory ready for statehood.
It was decided to include a jail in the building, but that left no money for a clock. The painted-on clock faces show the time in Florence as always 11:44.
Why precisely 11:44 remains a murky matter. Some claim that is the hour the clock hands happened to be painted, while others claim shameless boosterism, with town fathers hoping tourists might glance at the clock and decide to stay in Florence for lunch.
Former court reporter John Swearingen loved to tell courthouse stories, some involving the basement jail. One had Judge W.C. Truman holding court when additions were being made to the building. He asked the bailiff to tell the carpenters to stop making so much noise. The bailiff returned to report that the prisoners were breaking through the brick wall directly under the judge’s bench. The hole wasn’t yet quite large enough for someone to escape.
That Florence was chosen as the county seat and has been so for 130 years has been a boon to the town. In 1908 the re-location of the territorial prison from Yuma to Florence added to the town and county’s economy. Under the supervision of Warden Thomas H. Rynning, a group of prisoners from the Yuma prison came to Florence by train and were ferried across the now-dry Gila River to help build the prison.
Rynning was a military man, a member of the 8th U.S. Regular Cavalry in the late 1880s. He participated in 17 battles against the Indians. He re-enlisted as one of Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War and, according to Burt Goodman in an Arizona Republic column, participated in the charge up San Juan Hill.
In 1902, the Arizona governor and then-President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Rynning as second captain of the recently formed Arizona Rangers. The Rangers were established to go wherever such a group of lawmen was needed, regardless of jurisdiction. Capturing outlaws and keeping the peace during such times of unrest as labor strikes in mining towns were part of what they did. Rynning served five years as captain and set standards for their success in bringing law and order to the territory before statehood.
In 1907, the governor asked Rynning to become warden of the Yuma Territorial Prison. Ironically, many of the inmates in the prison he had put in there during his Ranger years. The Legislature wanted a new prison. Florence wanted the prison, too, and had the land for one.
Gov. Joseph H. Kibbey was concerned about the lack of funds to construct the prison. Rynning wrote in his memoir, “Gun Notches”: “I said I could build it with the convicts and pay them with time.” Under a plan set up for the prison’s construction, two days’ work by an inmate meant that one day would be taken off his prison sentence.
It was Rynning’s plan to make the new prison self-sustaining. The prisoners grew crops, raised pigs and chickens, and maintained a dairy herd that saved money for the territory and, after 1912, the state of Arizona. Eventually private enterprises complained that the prison’s production of milk, eggs, chickens and pork was unfair competition. (Extra milk, for instance, was supplied to public institutions such as schools.) The prison is no longer self-supporting.
In the 1930s murderer Eva Dugan was unexpectedly decapitated when she was hanged for her crime. This caused quite a sensation, and the state legislature turned to lethal gas instead of hanging. The double chair on exhibit in the museum was used for the first lethal gas execution of two brothers who had murdered a prospector in Casa Grande. They were scheduled for execution in the gas chamber on the same day.
Statehood came to Arizona in February of 1912. Arizona’s star was the 48th on the flag. The state was often called the “Baby State.” After Alaska and Hawaii entered the Union, “Baby State” no longer applied. Sometimes, because of gaining statehood on Feb. 14, Arizona was called the “Valentine State.” Arizona also was called the “Copper State,” and ultimately “Grand Canyon State” became the state’s official nickname.
Florence and Pinal County have proudly supplied local and county attorneys for the office of territorial or state governor. Territorial governors who at one time resided in Florence were Joseph H. Kibbey and Richard E. Sloan.
Kibbey was a lawyer who came to Arizona in 1888 to become an attorney for the promotion of the Florence Canal Company. In 1890 he was appointed an associate justice of Arizona Territorial Supreme Court. In 1892 Judge Kibbey rendered the decision determining the right of appropriation of water for irrigation known as the Kibbey Decision. He was appointed territorial attorney general in 1909 and the next year, territorial governor. Kibbey immediately faced problems regarding a bill in the U.S. Congress that would have created statehood for the Arizona and New Mexico territories, combining them into one state! He threatened to resign his office rather than allow the joint statehood bill to pass. It failed.
Kibbey’s brother, Frank, made headlines in Arizona Territory in 1892. On Florence’s Main Street he shot Wood Porter in the back, believing his wife was having an affair with him. Wood Porter was prominently connected. He was the nephew of a former associate justice of the Territorial Supreme Court, William Wood Porter. Defense attorneys asked for a change of venue because sentiment ran heavily against Frank Kibbey. Judge Richard E. Sloan presided over the jury trial, which was held in Pima County rather than the new Victorian-style Pinal County Courthouse.
Rather than as an adult woman, the defense represented Mrs. Kibbey as a “victim, a vulnerable child” of the Victorian culture, protected by her husband, the defendant. She didn’t testify against her husband, perhaps realizing that since her lover was dead, her only provider would go to prison and leave her destitute.
Gov. Kibbey desired reform in the territory. He wanted to outlaw gambling, restrict tobacco and liquor, and prohibit prostitution. He also wanted to tax the mines. This hurt his re-nomination as governor. President Taft nominated Richard E. Sloan to be the next territorial governor.
Like so many others, Sloan had moved to Arizona from Ohio in 1884 for health reasons. A lawyer by profession, he settled in Florence in 1886 and quickly became active in his new hometown. The same year that he arrived in the Pinal County seat he was elected district attorney. Sloan’s career flourished. After judicial appointments by Presidents Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, President William Howard Taft in 1909 appointed Sloan as territorial governor, the office he held until Arizona became a state in 1912.
In his 1932 book, “Memories of an Arizona Judge,” Sloan wrote of how he married and brought his bride to his desert home. According to his book, she thoroughly enjoyed the strangeness of her new surroundings and, in a “spirit of playfulness,” wrote to her mother of housekeeping in a “mud house.”
While he was governor, Sloan’s family lived in the Adams Hotel in Phoenix. As reported in an April 12, 1990, Arizona Republic interview with his younger daughter, Mary, a fire broke out in the hotel at 6 a.m. on May 17, 1910. His wife and daughter were sleeping on the building’s wooden porches at the time while he slept indoors. He did not like the sun waking him up early. The family got separated but did re-unite safely. The governor carried his daughter’s teddy bear under his arm. Mary said, “I don’t think he knew he had it.”
Not one who resided in Florence but who frequently visited the town and the prison was Arizona’s first governor after statehood, George Wylie Paul Hunt. He served more terms (although they were short at the time) than any other governor of the state. A strong advocate of prison reform, he would often come down from Phoenix to Florence to visit the prison on weekend trips, spending Saturday nights in the spare room at the warden’s house. His interest in prisons came from reading Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” He became president of the Anti-Capital Punishment Society in America in 1914, and Arizona did away with capital punishment during that time. He believed in having inmates build highways and bridges and did away with the inmates’ regular black-and-white-striped uniforms.
Another governor was Robert T. “Bob” Jones, a self-educated engineer with a varied resume. He worked in Mexico, on the Panama Canal and in Nevada. He moved to Arizona in 1909. The Southern Pacific Railroad put him in charge of building the railroad line between Kelvin and Hayden Junction. In 1912 Jones left engineering and went into pharmaceuticals. He opened his first pharmacy in Superior and later opened two more, one in Florence.
After eight years in the state Senate, the “friendly pharmacist” known as Bob Jones easily won the office of governor and was sworn in on Jan. 2, 1939. After his two-year term he chose not to seek re-election and retired from politics in 1941.
Florence’s favorite son, future Arizona Gov. Ernest W. McFarland, was born into a homesteading family in Oklahoma and always cared about the farmer. He completed his B.A. degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1917. After service in the Navy during World War I, he completed a master’s degree in political science and obtained his law degree from Stanford University in 1922.
McFarland began his practice of law in Casa Grande. In 1924 he was elected Pinal County attorney and held that office for six years. He was elected Superior Court judge in 1934.
Of great importance to Arizona is water. As Gov. Kibbey had been before him and as many officials have been after, McFarland was concerned with irrigation and water law. He made an extensive study of the problems concerning such laws, and as Superior Court judge heard many important cases concerning water rights.
Perhaps it was issues such as these that led McFarland to run for Senate. His 1940 election was a stunning defeat of a fellow Democrat, incumbent Henry F. Ashurst, the “Arizona Legend since 1912.” McFarland became a member of the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, where water legislation was initially considered. He worked for passage of the Central Arizona Project that became a reality years after he left the Senate.
Americans of both major parties praised legislation passed in Congress that benefited returning World War II veterans. McFarland was co-sponsor of this bill known as the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” a benefit program that provided housing, insurance and college tuition to veterans of World War II. The citation for McFarland’s Veterans’ Hall of Fame Award states that McFarland’s “most notable achievement” was being co-author of this bill.
Republican Barry Goldwater defeated Democrat McFarland in the election of 1952. The former senator returned to Arizona and became involved in the new industry of television by being a co-founder of Phoenix’s Channel 3. McFarland returned to politics by running for and being elected governor of Arizona in 1954 and re-elected in 1956. He was elected to the state Supreme Court in 1964 and became chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court in 1968.
Ranching and produce farming had been part of Florence’s history since its days as a supplier of food and forage to the military in the 19th Century. In the 1920s President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill into law authorizing the construction of Coolidge Dam on the Gila River. It would provide water for the irrigation of acres and acres of Pinal County cotton farms.
Photographs of the dam’s dedication on March 4, 1930, show former President Coolidge and his wife, Grace, as well as spectacular views of the dam’s unique dome construction. Missing at first was the invited celebrity, Will Rogers, nationally known humorist, who enjoyed poking fun at politicians. He was found outside with the general public, eating a hot dog from a vendor. When finally brought to the head table, he looked at the slowly filling reservoir behind the dam and announced, “If they’d named that lake after me, I’d mow it.”
In 1932, Florence rancher Charles A. Whitlow Sr. became aware that there was a shortage of money for milk for the school children. He suggested a junior rodeo where children competed for prizes. It was so successful it became Florence’s signature event and includes a parade, known as the Junior Parada.
Thanksgiving weekend in Florence is Junior Parada time. The events have drawn celebrities, including parade marshals such as singing cowboy Gene Autrey and Ken Curtis, who played Festus on the television show “Gunsmoke.” Another parade marshal was the popular warden at the prison, Frank A. Eyman. He rode in the parade more than once, often with an inmate band, “Stars behind Bars,” and mounted guards.
Eyman was a Tucson policeman for 20 years. He participated in the only nonviolent capture of notorious gangster John Dillinger in 1934. He later served as sheriff of Pima County. He was appointed warden of the state prison in Florence in 1955 and served until 1972. In 1958 he ended a threatened prison breakout with two guards held hostage by firing a gun four times and shouting to inmates, “If you SOBs even so much as scratch my men, I’ll kill all of you.” The guards were released unharmed. His tenure as warden came at a time when there was prison unrest nationwide and much prison overcrowding. The community admired Eyman for his law-and-order stance.
Lynn Smith and Pat Faux are sisters. Since 2000 both have been members, Lynn as chair, of the Collection Management Committee of the Pinal County Historical Society.
