“This opportunity came up in July, and I was excited. I thought this is kind of similar to what I did at school, but with business. … I love Prescott. I love this community, and that's where my heart is, and I just want Prescott to be the best that it can be. If I can have a small role in that I would very pleased,” Cobb said
Her attachment to Prescott goes back a good ways. In Cobb’s office, on the wall behind her desk are photos of scenes in the area, including .one of her grandfather at work at a newspaper that he ran (she didn’t take that one), one of a Curley Wolves emblem displayed in front of one of the Prescott water towers, one of the steeple of the city’s First Presbyterian Church and a stone from the former Cora Donnell hospital. The other two photos are of the more recently built Prescott Water Tower (the other one she didn’t take; a drone did the honors) and a 19th century replica railroad engine steaming forward.
Her grandfather, Archie White Johnson, ties her to one of the founding families of Prescott. “His family are the Johnsons and the Whites, and they were some of the first settlers in Nevada County. That's my grandfather and his type desk. But they owned and started Nevada News, The Prescott News and The Picayune,” Cobb said. The table Johnson stands over in the photo is in Cobb’s parents’ home today.
The carved stone bears the name Cora Donnell Hospital. Donnell was Cobb’s 3x great grandmother. The two brothers who helped found the hospital, Doctors Al and Gill Buchanan, named the place—which was built about 103 years ago--after their mother, Cobb said. “That is the stone that was at the top of the building and that stone is at my mother and daddy's house. So I took a picture of that.” The hospital once stood where Prescott’s Pizza Hut is today.
With such illustrious forbears, Cobb has gone about following their work up. A Prescott High graduate, she went on to Henderson State, earning a degree in business administration. After that, with a son attending Prescott Elementary as a kindergartener, she joined the Prescott Public Schools in teaching and administration, hired by longtime principal and counselor Howard Austin himself (who I ran into in the chamber waiting room and said a hearty hello to just before interviewing Cobb).
“It was never my plan to stay as long as I did at school. That was not the career path I necessarily thought I would take, but I loved it, and I loved the people. Mr. Austin was who hired me, and he and Janet Gordon and I worked at the elementary school for about 10 years, and those people were like my family. Then I moved to the admin office. Mr. [Robert] Poole hired me. Then I came back to where I retired. In the last, seven or eight years I was the Child Nutrition Director and Public Relations [Director] at the school,” she said.
Now the son who helped bring her there is 31 and working in finance. Her daughter is 23 and finishing up the coursework she needs toward becoming a Certified Public Accountant. Photos of them can be seen on the western wall. On the northern wall is a large team photo of the undefeated 2015 Curley Wolves 3A Champions Football Team (only Fordyce really challenged them) propped on a table behind three photos of Cobb, with her husband and her two children.
Now that she has been Prescott-Nevada Chamber’s director for three months, she already has a big success to build on, which took place in Prescott’s downtown around the county courthouse. “The Fall Festival was my first big event. I have never planned a festival before that,” Cobb said. She expressed thanks to her predecessor Jamie Hillery for lending advice and the many other community volunteers who got involved, “the people that jumped in and called and said ‘Do you need help? What do you need me to do?” Cobb said the experience was a demonstration of the value of being willing to ask for help.
Cobb made clear that she plans to do a lot with the position she now holds, maintaining the traditional community coffees but also taking the chamber forward, especially as a way of expanding the number of businesses in Prescott and Nevada County. With 110 business members and 40 individual members, Cobb still sees opportunities to add to what the chamber currently does, as she did in bringing back the basketball tournament to this past Saturday’s Fall Festival. Her experience building the Prescott Public Schools website will come in handy with another goal she mentioned, increasing the presence of the chamber on social media.
In her off-hours, Cobb said she loves camping with her family, the abovementioned photography and travel. “I love to travel. And both of my kids love to travel. My husband has kind of become a homebody, but we get him to go with us a little bit. I love to read and just spend time with my my family. Whatever my kids are doing, I love to do.”
One of those things remains local history, especially given her family’s connection to it, which her son has also become engrossed in. “We have all kinds of pictures and family history. He can tell you much more than I can tell you. He sat with my daddy, and of course, I listened to stories growing up, but he can tell you much more.”
And there you have it, the Cobbs of Prescott. Not just keeping up with local history but making it.
