Jerome

Jerome hangs on the thirty-degree face of Cleopatra Hill at five thousand feet, and it hangs there because of what is underneath — one of the richest copper bodies in the West. Prospectors staked the first claims in 1876; the United Verde Copper Company, built up by the Montana senator William A. Clark and later matched by the Phelps Dodge operation on the Little Daisy claim below, pulled something close to a billion dollars in copper, gold, and silver out of the hill over the next seventy years. At its 1920s peak Jerome held around fifteen thousand people and ranked among the largest towns in the Arizona Territory. The newspapers called it the wickedest town in the West, and the saloons and cribs on the lower streets earned the name.

The ground never sat still. Blasting and open-pit mining shook the hillside loose, and buildings cracked, buckled, and slid; the town jail, jarred off its footings by a dynamite blast in 1938, ended up two hundred and twenty-five feet downhill from where it was built, sitting today across a road it was never near. The old United Verde hospital, high on the hill, is now the Jerome Grand Hotel.

When Phelps Dodge closed the mines in 1953, the town nearly died — the population fell to a few dozen, and salvage crews tore down sound buildings for their lumber. What saved it was the wreckage itself. Artists and craftspeople began moving into the empty storefronts in the 1960s and '70s, drawn by cheap rent and the long view down the Verde Valley, and Jerome reinvented itself as a hillside colony of galleries, studios, and wine-tasting rooms. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1967 and now calls itself the largest ghost town in America without much argument.

The copper story ties the whole region together: the ore that built Jerome was smelted down in Clarkdale, below the hilltop pueblo at Tuzigoot; the money and the law ran up from the territorial capital at Prescott, over the hair-raising grade of Mingus Mountain. Come for the shops and the ghost tours. The town underneath is a plain lesson in what copper gives and what it takes back.