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WEDNESDAY, JULY23, 1975TIKBicentennial profileMrs. Kittadopted fledgling local historical groupBy JOHN BRET HARTECitizen Staff WriterWien someone asked Edith S. Kitt late in her life how she had preserved the record of Arizona's history, she replied that she had been “a pretty good beggar.”In 22 years as historical secretary of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society (now the Arizona Historical Soci-ety), she wheedled, cajoled and implored Arizonans to tell her what they remembered and let her write it down and deposit it in the society for the use of historians and citizens in times to.come.TUGS0N1775 - 1A7E BICENTENNIAL)And in the process she converted the society from an institution almost defunct from inactivity to one of the finest research institutions in the American West.Born in Florence, Arizona Territory, in 1878, the daughter of a rancher-pros-pector, Mrs. Kitt was a genuine Arizona pioneer. She was schooled in Florence and Tucson and at the Normal School “7 *ater UCLA — in Los Angeles, then taught in a succession of schools before her marriage to George Farwell Kitt in 1903.Mrs. Kitt was incapable of laziness. When her two children were grown she returned to the University of Arizona — where she had done one semester’s work before becoming a school teacher — and earned a degree in English. She was 41 when she graduated.She then launched into a round of civic activities that included helping to organize the Tucson Fine Arts Association, serving as a director of the YWCA and of Tucson Organized Charities, and becoming president of the Arizona State Federation of Women’s Clubs.But ail this was a prelude to the day in 1925 when Monte Mansfield, then president of the historical society, asked her to become the organization’s historical secretary.The society, Mansfield told her, had only a handful of members, and was losing more by death each year than it gained in new memberships. No dues were paid, and the organization had to live on a tiny state appropriation.The society even lacked a permanent home, being headquartered in a single room on the ground floor of the old Tuesonia Hotel at the comer of Main and Congress streets. Its furniture consisted of a roll-top desk, a few chairs, one long table and a few spitoons.The society had no museum worthy of the name, and its library holdings comprised a few shelves of newspapers and government documents.So little happened at the society, Mansfield told Mrs. Kitt, that if she declined the offer to become historical secretary — at $50 per month, — he would “have to shut up shop,”Because she couldn’t resist the challenge, she guided the fortunes of the society almost singlehandedly for the next 22 years.She started her begging by soliciting free subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, 'and by urging authors of books on Arizona to provide free copies for the library. She spent endless hours talking to old timers and taking down their life histories. She lobbied ceaselessly with interested groups in Phoenix and elsewhere for the preservation of historical materials.In her effort to secure historic papers, books and artifacts for the society’s collections, Mrs. Kitt never.missed a pioneer's funeral. Usually they were solemn and decorous, but she remembered at least one that was not: the dead man had drunk himself to death, and the minister who preached the eulogy exhorted the mourners to follow in his footsteps.Under Mrs. Kitt’s direction, the society soon began to prosper. Library collections swelled with written recollections of pioneers and with an ever-increasing flow of scholarly books. The museum also grew with the addition of artifacts as small as buttons and as large as stagecoaches.Soon it became obvious that the society would need a permanent home. In 1928 the president of the University of Arizona offered space in the basement of a campus build-Edith S. KittShe preserved Arizona histoiying; from there the society was transferred to rooms under the UA football stadium. Outgrowing each location, the organization finally moved to its present place at 949 E, 2nd St., in 1954.Meanwhile, in 1947, Mrs. Kitt had retired, but her retirement was more fictitious than real. She continued for six years to assist Sen. Carl Hayden in collecting biographical data on persons who came to Arizona before 1865. In 1953 she “retired” again — and became a full-time volunteer at the society under another historical secretary.In 1961, -at .the age of 82, she embarked on the huge task of sorting the papers of General John C. Greenway, the Spanish-American War officer who developed the open-pit mining process, and his wife Isabella, founder of the Arizona Inn and Arizona’s first woman in Congress.This project took Mrs. Kitt four years. In 1965 she retired — for the last time.Mrs. Kilt lived on until January of 1968. The last two years of her life she spent with her daughter in California, but even then she continued a voluminous correspondence with historians, students and writers who realized that she alone knew the answers to thousands of questions about local history.If she had not spent her life as she did, historians would have a much harder time writing about Arizona's past.
Newspaper Details
Tucson Daily Citizen
Tucson, Arizona, US
Wed, Jul 23, 1975
Page 40
Full Page
Clipped by
Wikipedia U.
USA 11 Mar 2024
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