The Town That Slid Downhill

Jerome does not sit on flat ground. It clings. The town occupies a steep terraced slope on Cleopatra Hill, one of several peaks in the Black Hills of central Arizona, at an elevation of more than five thousand feet. Below it, the Verde Valley spreads out like a map. Above it, the mountain continues to climb to the summit.

Beneath the streets and foundations, decades of mining left an estimated eighty-eight miles of shafts and tunnels honeycombing the hill. The blasting required to dig all of that rock destabilized everything above it. Buildings began to shift, crack, and migrate downhill. Some moved inches per year. Others moved more dramatically.

The most famous case is the Jerome Jail. A concrete cellblock, it was left unusable by shifting ground beginning in the nineteen thirties and slowly slid down the hillside, coming to rest about two hundred feet from where it started. It never made it back. The jail still sits there today, a freestanding concrete box that wandered away from its original site, now a tourist landmark and a vivid demonstration of what happens when you blast eighty-eight miles of tunnels under a mountain town. Other buildings in town have shifted and cracked over the years. The Jerome Historical Society acquired the old jail structure in two thousand seventeen. It has not moved since, as far as anyone can tell.