Ghost Town: From Fifteen Thousand to Fifty

The decline did not happen all at once. Jerome had seen bad years before, when copper prices fell or ore grades thinned. But the shutdown that came in nineteen fifty-three was different. It was final.

Phelps Dodge Corporation had been working the United Verde Mine since nineteen thirty-five, steadily extracting what remained of the profitable ore. By the early nineteen fifties, the math no longer worked. In nineteen fifty-three, the company shut down the last shaft. The smelter went cold. The payroll stopped. Hundreds of families packed what they could and left, some almost overnight.

Jerome's population, which had already been declining for two decades, collapsed. Within a few years, estimates put the number of remaining residents at somewhere between fifty and one hundred people, scattered through buildings that were crumbling, sliding, and slowly being picked apart by scavengers looking for salvageable copper wire and lumber.

Journalists arrived to photograph the wreckage and write about the ghost town on the mountain. The buildings were genuinely spectacular in their decay: Victorian storefronts with their false fronts still standing, mansions with grand staircases leading to rooms open to the sky, streets buckled by decades of underground blasting.

The town never completely emptied. A handful of longtime residents refused to leave, and they kept Jerome's name alive. Then, in nineteen sixty-seven, the federal government designated Jerome a National Historic Landmark, the same year it was still widely considered a ghost town. That recognition was the first signal that the ruin on the mountain might have a future after all.