Prescott, AZ

Prescott was Arizona's first capital, founded in 1864 in the pine highlands a mile above the desert — a territorial seat deliberately placed among Union-loyal miners during the Civil War, and still wearing its frontier tailoring. Around the Courthouse Plaza, one of the handsomest squares in the West, runs Whiskey Row, the block of saloons that burned in 1900 and was rebuilt before the hangovers cleared; the Palace, oldest bar in the state, still pours under the pressed-tin ceiling its patrons carried out of the fire. The town's proudest institution gallops: Prescott's Frontier Days, held every July since 1888, is billed as the World's Oldest Rodeo, and the claim is defended with lariats.

Culture keeps serious company here. The Sharlot Hall Museum preserves the territorial governor's log mansion and the memory of its remarkable founder-poet; Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri's experimental city, rises in the desert an hour away. The archive's stage is the Performance Hall of Yavapai College, the town's community college, whose season of touring orchestras, chamber music and dance has long made it the concert room of Arizona's central highlands. Ponderosa air, courthouse elms and the state's oldest institutions of both drinking and justice: Prescott is "Everybody's Hometown", as it likes to say — with a rodeo.