Paying a Poll Tax in Phoenix, Arizona in 1891


I've paid a lot of taxes in my day - sales taxes, income taxes, gasoline taxes, but I'd never even heard of a Poll Tax until I saw this receipt for one from 1891.

The person who paid this tax was Christian Hanny, who lived in Phoenix, and he paid it to the County of Maricopa, Territory of Arizona. It cost him two dollars and fifty cents, which doesn't sound like much nowadays, but you have to consider that he could have gotten a shave and a haircut for two bits (25 cents), so it wasn't just pocket change back then.

There haven't been Poll Taxes for a long time, and as near as I can figure, it was just a tax for just being there. As if the government just said, "Hey you, give us some money!" It wasn't tied to income or outgo or anything, it was just a chunk of change that you had to hand over.

By the way, if the name Hanny sounds familiar, yes, it's the same name that you see on the restaurant in downtown Phoenix on 1st Street and Adams. Hanny's used to be a menswear store, going all of the way back in Phoenix to 1912, run by Christian's son Vic. Of course the restaurant has nothing to do with the store, or the family, they just kept the name on the building because it looks great. And there are still plenty of descendants of Christian Hanny living in Arizona. I borrowed this receipt from one of Christian Hanny's descendants to scan it in, and in spite of the fact that it's just a tax receipt, I get a big kick out of touching a piece of Phoenix history like this.
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
I'm still researching the names on this receipt and the only one I'm absolutely sure of is the Treasurer, R.L. Rosser. He's on the Maricopa County Treasurers webpage. The other names, H.G. Orme, and J.R. Lane (I think) I'm still working on. When I find out for sure, I'll come back to this post and update it. By the way, using the two initials like that was very common for men in the 1890s . You know, like H.G. Wells, and J.P. Morgan. And as far as I know, they greeted each other with those initials, as in "Hello, H.G.!" "Good morning J.P., how's business?"

I also find it fascinating that much of this official document in written in pencil. Yes, I'm looking at the original document right now, and that's pencil. This may have been because the collector went door to door, and it would have been very inconvenient to use a pen (they didn't have ballpoint pens in those days!). The number of the receipt, and the two signatures in the lower left are in ink, so that part of this was obviously done at a desk. If the collector was indeed walking around Phoenix, at least it was in December so it's wasn't terribly hot. Phoenix was only fourteen blocks wide back then, so he could have covered everyone living within the city limits fairly easily. For people on farms and ranches, I'd imagine that some type of hoofed transportation was used.

This Poll Tax was duly paid to the County of Maricopa. Hopefully it was put to good use!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more