Prescott, Arizona: On Saturday and Sunday, June 3 and 4, you can make a date for your family with Territorial Arizona history. That's the weekend for the 33rd Annual Folks Arts Fair at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona.
This is the kind of fair you can get right into and participate in the crafts and skills that Territorial Arizona pioneers used in their daily lives, from dipping candles to cornhusk doll making, tin punching, gold panning, and grinding corn with an Indian metate and mano.
Demonstrators will be tatting, making lace, quilting, and hooking rugs or watch how a horse is shod and iron is forged by a blacksmith. You can even visit a territorial print shop and see the 1865 Washington printing press in operation.
Learn about the early mountain men with their black powder rifles and soldiers at the military encampments and browse through the Old West memorabilia of the Arizona Rangers.
There is the rare opportunity to see a sheep lose its wool to the shears and watch the Mountain Top Spinners and Weavers card the wool, make it into yarn on a spinning wheel, dye it with vegetable dyes, and then see it woven into a shawl.
While you're enjoying homemade popcorn, you can hear some downright foot-stomping fiddling in the Amphitheater. Tap your feet to the tune of the one-cylinder "hit or miss engines" that will be operating on the Museum grounds, engines of every type that powered early mining equipment.
