Four Fires in Five Years

For a town built mostly of wood, perched on a windy mountain slope above a smelter that ran around the clock, fire was not a question of if but when. Jerome burned repeatedly throughout the eighteen nineties, and each fire tore through the closely packed buildings with terrifying speed.

The series of disasters began in April of eighteen ninety-four, when two commercial blocks burned to the ground. Three years later, on Christmas Eve of eighteen ninety-seven, fire tore through the business district and dozens of homes. Less than a year after that, in September of eighteen ninety-eight, the business district burned again. Then came the worst: on May eighth of eighteen ninety-nine, a blaze that started at the Leland Hotel consumed twenty-four saloons, fifteen Chinese restaurants, homes, and a newly completed hospital.

Four major fires in five years. The destruction finally convinced residents that the town needed formal legal authority to fight back. Jerome incorporated as a town in eighteen ninety-nine, partly so it could organize a real fire department and compel building owners to take precautions.

The fires continued in subsequent decades. Nineteen seventeen saw a rooming house district go up, leaving ninety families without homes. In nineteen eighteen, sixty houses in a residential gulch burned. In nineteen twenty-six, the Jerome Hotel and twenty-six homes were lost. Each time, the town rebuilt in brick, gradually replacing the wooden frontier storefronts with the masonry buildings that still line the main street today.