Chloride: Arizona's Oldest Mining Town
Near Chloride, Arizona
Welcome to Chloride, a weathered cluster of tin roofs and desert brush on the southwest flank of the Cerbat Mountains, and one of the strongest claimants to the title of oldest continuously inhabited mining town in Arizona. Prospectors first found mineral color in these hills back in the eighteen forties, but the real story begins around eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-three, when silver veins were struck on the slope known as Silver Hill. The camp took its name from the ore itself, a silver chloride that glittered through the surrounding rock in such abundance that miners simply called the place Chloride.
For years the settlement grew slowly, hemmed in by conflict with the Hualapai people whose homeland this was, and it was only after that conflict ended around eighteen seventy that mining boomed in earnest. During the glory years, roughly nineteen hundred to nineteen twenty, as many as seventy-five mines were working the district at once, and the population is said to have climbed toward five thousand souls, with saloons, hotels, a bank, restaurants, churches, a pool hall, and a hospital lining the dusty streets. The two great producers were the Tennessee and the Schuylkill mines, pulling gold, silver, lead, and zinc from deep underground well into the nineteen forties.
When metal prices sagged and the cost of labor rose, the mines finally shut down around nineteen forty-four, and Chloride very nearly became a true ghost town, its census count falling to just over a hundred people. But it never entirely died. Today a few hundred residents, many of them artists and retirees, keep the town alive year round, and something like twenty thousand curious travelers roll in each year to see the false front buildings, the painted rocks in the canyon above, and the Old West staged in the street.
As you explore, remember that almost every leaning shack and rusting headframe here marks the ambition of someone who came to this hard, beautiful desert chasing silver. This is not a museum recreation. It is the real thing, still hanging on.
