“Certain Flies in the Ointment”: Mulford Winsor and the Development of Arizona’s Archives

Introduction

One day in 1972, navigating a convoluted pathway up three floors, I finally ascended a long open stairway from the mezzanine of the State Library’s reading room. At the threshold, without a door, I passed into a dimly lit stack area. It was gloomy and unfinished, a forgotten attic on the fourth floor of the Arizona Capitol Building. There was a single small table for researchers crammed in a stack aisle and two desks pushed into a dingy corner. I had just entered the Arizona State Archives.

My first visit left an indelible impression that has remained vivid for forty years. I thought: how could such a decrepit warren as this be the State Archives of a proud, prosperous, and booming Sun Belt state of over 2 million people? Why was it so tiny, and so uncomfortably warm? Why did the researchers and the small staff of two do their work in the stack area without an office? Why were there huge windows on two sides (covered with roll-down shades)? Why were there buckets in the aisles, obviously for catching rainwater? Why was there not even an attempt at security with no barrier at all at the entrance where there should have been a door? Why was it so difficult to locate? And why did it seem like the dead letter office, the end of the line?

With my midwestern sensibility of accessible, bustling, and active archival agencies, I was truly astonished. If ever there was a state archives stepchild, I thought, this was it. Blaise Gagliano, the state archivist, and her clerk were surprised—and pleased—to actually have a visitor. I learned that day she was relatively new as the first state archivist of the modern era. A librarian who had no previous experience in this area was merely asked in November 1969 by Marguerite Cooley, the state librarian and department director, if she would like to be an archivist. And she did.²

From that moment my curiosity was piqued about why Arizona was archivally so far behind other states. This is an article about the genesis of the archival enterprise in Arizona from its meager beginning in 1864 to seventy years later, when in 1937 Mulford Winsor, the state librarian, decisively established the State Archives officially with a strong legal foundation. He followed up this achievement the next year by the unlikely feat of constructing an imposing State Library wing of the Arizona Capitol amid the financial devastation of the Great Depression. However, from its promising beginning, this is a cautionary tale of his failures and the difficult circumstances the archives faced during Winsor’s remaining nineteen-year reign as state librarian, until his death in 1956.

Archival historians such as James O’Toole and Terry Cook have called for a new intellectual history of the profession.³ As Peter J. Wosh put it, “Archival history remains as much about interesting, time-bound, and very flawed flesh-and-blood people like Waldo Gifford Leland as about words and concepts. Understanding their dreams, actions, social networks, and institutional lives reveals much about the strange way in which our profession developed.”⁴ Nothing could better verify the truth of this assumption than by examining the complex life of Leland’s contemporary and the father of the Arizona State Archives, Mulford Winsor. Although he was for decades an important political figure, now he is little known in Arizona. Critical attention to Arizona’s cultural stewardship has been minimal, and only primarily in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. There has been no in-depth investigation of Arizona’s archival development and traditions.

An Archives in Name Only

In 1862 the creation of the “Confederate Territory of Arizona” by the Confederate States of America, and their occupation of Tucson for a few months prior to fleeing before General James Henry Carleton’s California Column, caused much concern in Washington, D.C. United States officials were vitally interested in maintaining southwestern lands, and especially their gold and silver resources, under Union control.⁵ Thus, at the height...