The story of Jerome, Arizona begins back in deep time, with the formation in the Black Hills of two bodies of copper ore. For ages, these unusually rich deposits of this valuable material, used around the world in making tools and weapons and for jewelry and currency, lay under the surface of the ground in between present day Cottonwood and Prescott, just awaiting human discovery.
The larger of these two ore bodies, being exposed to the open air sometime before the arrival of Europeans, had been found by the indigenous Yavapai. People from this tribe had been gathering the brightly colored material to use for dyes, first from the surface and later through the digging of a small mine. This mine was shown in the 1580’s to some Spanish explorers who, being more interested in the quicker profits they hoped to turn from gold and silver, paid it little mind and moved on.
It wasn’t until the area became part of the United States territory that serious attention was paid to mining the copper. Two men who staked the initial claims in the 1880’s, appear to have lacked the resources for extracting and refining the metal, and their claims were soon sold to the United Verde Copper Company which mined for a year, using expensive wagon transportation to move the materials, and shutting down when the price of copper dropped.
Not long afterward, in 1888, the United Company was sold to William A. Clark who made a number of modifications to the operation, including the installation of a railway system that enabled the materials to be transported on more profitable terms. With these and other improvements, Clark was soon extracting a million dollars’ worth of coal per month. In time, the second ore body was discovered, and additional companies joined in the mining.
Operations of such size naturally required a significant labor force, and so, hundreds of imported workers were the first inhabitants of the camp that would eventually become the town of Jerome. These laborers, as was usual in mining settlements, were almost exclusively male. Most of the time, they were men without families and, aside from their work duties, men without a many responsibilities. This tended to make them a rowdier crowd.
It also made them prominent targets for some particularly unsavory entrepreneurial endeavors. In a short time, the mountainside saw the growing establishment of saloons, opium dens, and houses of prostitution. Thus was laid the foundation for all the chaos, debauchery, and violence that characterized many mining towns but which plunged to such depths in Jerome as to win it the New York Sun’s 1903 designation as the “Wickedest City in the West.”
Of course, it isn’t possible for a town’s internal economy to be supported solely on alcohol, drugs, and fornication, and so the town’s destructive enterprises were gradually supplemented with purveyors of more wholesome goods and services. Soon the town saw the establishment of numerous stores and hotels and schools and churches, in addition to its own post office and police and fire departments. This more stable economic and civic presence began drawing in more and more residents with families, and thus increased the number of homes being built in the town, many of them impressively perched, level upon level, on the town’s thirty-degree slope. This less debauched constituency did not, however, wholly replace the seedier scene in town; it merely set it back off the main drag into the nether-portions of the town, from which places it continued to drain the town’s well-being.
The whole idea of a mining town is inherently impermanent. Such a settlement usually survives only until the natural resources of the site have been exhausted, and then it fades into a ghost town. In this sense, then, any mine is a gradually disappearing foundation for the attendant settlement. But some of the Jerome mining operations seemed especially bent on destroying the town’s structural foundation even before the copper ran out.
Over the longer term, fumes from these smelters killed all the vegetation for miles around and facilitated the erosion of the hillside. This instability was exacerbated by the nearly eighty-eight miles of mining tunnels which were eventually dug under the hillside, and then by the severe blasting which began after the mine shifted to an open pit operation. In time, many the houses and business buildings began to be undermined and to collapse, and to slide down the hill. The town’s jail traveled over two hundred feet down the mountainside, where it sits to this day. The residents, however, determined to hang on, just kept rebuilding.
Eventually, however, the inevitable happened. Mining activity and population numbers had fluctuated over the years, following the rising and falling tides of copper prices, but finally, by the early fifties, the copper had all been extracted. It had been an impressive billion dollar run. But now it was over. By 1953 the population, which around World War I had crested at 15,000, dropped to less than a hundred. A few houses and buildings were sold; most were simply abandoned.
It’s usually at this point that a relatively isolated mining town usually goes extinct. But the town’s few remaining residents possessed a special kind of tenacity, and they were determined to keep the party going. It’s hard to say for sure why humans do this- why we fight to hold on to things with which we’re familiar, long after the original reasons for those things have become obsolete. But sometimes, we really do find new reasons, and sometimes good reasons, for holding on to something, and with the right conditions in place, such efforts can succeed.
And in this respect, the almost completely abandoned town had a few things going for it. For one thing, it had a fascinating history. It was around this history that the immediate preservation efforts revolved, taking initial shape in the 1953 formation of the Jerome Historical Society. The history of the mining operations alone might have been enough to draw sufficient crowds to maintain the town’s existence, especially given the excellent job that the JHS did in preserving equipment and establishing museums through which tourists are still able to immerse themselves into the town’s mining past.
Of course, the historical draw of the town received some extra spice from the more sordid elements of the settlement’s story. Drunkenness, death, occultism, and the sexual exploitation of women can serve as lucrative attractions when they’re airbrushed, cutesified, and sufficiently removed from the horrors of the people who actually experienced them. Observing some of these elements during my first couple of visits to the otherwise charmingly quirky town, I was repeatedly struck by the similarities in the town’s vibe to that of my ancestral New Orleans. Consequently, while still a bit mystified, I wasn’t entirely surprised to notice in one of the residential windows, and old campaign sign urging the re-election of Mayor Nagin.
Jerome’s salvation and preservation was further occasioned by the discovery of its available real estate, soon after the closing of the mines, by a significant number of artists. These moved up the mountain for inexpensive places to live and work, but also, as it turned out, to use as retail space for selling their art. Shops of this sort abound in the town to this day, one favorite being the amazingly impressive Nellie Bly kaleidoscope shop. There’s also lots of interesting art spread out though the town’s residential and public spaces.
Finally, the town is endowed with of a number of stunning visual aspects. The layout of the town itself is a thing to behold, winding back and forth along a number of tight switchbacks, creating the impression of multiple layers of buildings piled atop one another. Scattered throughout these occupied buildings, many of them painted bright colors, remain the fascinating ruins of buildings from the more distant past. But to top it all off, there are the views from the town into the Verde Valley. This whole valley, in all its brilliance and majesty is fully visible from each of the town’s streets, as are the clear outlines of the San Francisco Peaks just beyond Flagstaff to the north.
Thus the town which arose in connection with an abundance mineral resources, the exhaustion of which threatened it’s ongoing existence, has done an impressive job of repurposing resources of different kinds to redefine itself and sustain its life. It’s not hard to see why it attracts over a million visitors each year.
