The United Verde Mine: Two Billion Pounds of Copper
Near Jerome, Arizona
The mine that built Jerome did not merely produce copper. It produced fortunes on a scale that seems almost impossible for a single mountain in central Arizona. The United Verde Mine operated continuously from eighteen seventy-six until nineteen fifty-three, a seventy-seven year run that made it one of the longest-producing copper mines in the history of the American Southwest.
When William Andrews Clark acquired controlling interest in eighteen eighty-eight, he inherited a promising but underdeveloped operation. He built it into something formidable. By the turn of the century, the mine employed around eight hundred men and was pulling an estimated forty million pounds of copper from the ground each year. During Clark's forty-seven years of ownership alone, the mine yielded over two billion pounds of copper, nine hundred thousand ounces of gold, and thirty-three million ounces of silver, extracted from roughly twenty million tons of ore.
The Arizona Geological Survey describes the Verde Mining District as one of the richest copper deposits ever found. The mine's combined output over its full life, including the adjacent United Verde Extension operation, is estimated at over four billion dollars in recovered metals. Phelps Dodge Corporation purchased the operation from the Clark estate in nineteen thirty-five and continued working the remaining ore bodies, but the richest days were behind it. On March twenty-third, nineteen fifty-three, Phelps Dodge shut the last shaft and Jerome's reason for existing vanished overnight.
