Jerome: The Town That Refused to Die
Near Jerome, Arizona
Jerome sits on the steep face of Cleopatra Hill, a vertical mile above the Verde Valley floor, and it is hard to believe this crumbling collection of Victorian storefronts and tilted brick buildings was once the fourth largest city in Arizona. In its prime, more than ten thousand people lived here, packed onto terraces blasted out of the mountainside, building a town above one of the richest copper deposits ever found in the American Southwest.
The story begins in eighteen seventy-six, when prospectors filed the first mining claims on Cleopatra Hill. The town took its name from Eugene Jerome, a New York financier who bankrolled the United Verde Copper Company, though he never once came to see it. By the early eighteen eighties, smelters were firing and ore was moving. Then came the man who would transform Jerome into an industrial force: William Andrews Clark, a Montana copper magnate, bought controlling interest in the United Verde Mine in eighteen eighty-eight for around two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. It turned out to be one of the great bargains in American mining history.
Under Clark's ownership, Jerome boomed. Mine shafts plunged thousands of feet into Cleopatra Hill. A smelter roared at the base of the mountain. A railroad was threaded through impossible terrain to carry ore and supplies. By nineteen hundred, the mine was producing an estimated one million dollars worth of copper every single month. Immigrants arrived from Mexico, Croatia, Serbia, Italy, and Ireland, packed into company housing on terraces that spilled down the hillside. Saloons, brothels, hotels, and schools appeared almost overnight. The New York Sun visited in nineteen oh three and called Jerome the wickedest town in the West.
The copper kept coming for decades, through two world wars and the booms and busts that followed. But the ore eventually ran thin. Phelps Dodge, which had acquired the mine in nineteen thirty-five, shut everything down on March twenty-third, nineteen fifty-three. Hundreds of families left almost overnight. Within a few years, fewer than one hundred people remained.
Jerome sat empty and sliding on its unstable hillside, a ghost on a mountain. Then the artists came. Then the tourists. Today, with a permanent population of around four hundred sixty, Jerome has pulled off one of the more unlikely resurrections in the American West, turning its beautiful wreckage into a destination and its long, strange history into the main attraction.
