In the mountains south of the Verde Valley, prehistoric people discovered blue mineral deposits which they used to make ornaments and jewelry.

Jerome in early morning sunlight, with its full summer foliage

(viewed from the road to Douglas Mansion)

Materials to build a smelting furnace were hauled in on wagons from Prescott and Ash Fork, and mule teams took the refined metals back to civilization.  In 1894, a drop in copper prices made it uneconomical to continue on this basis, and a narrow-gauge railroad was carved into the treacherous mountain slopes between Jerome and Chino Valley.  This 26-mile track supplied Jerome with heavy machinery, food, and people.  By the turn of the century the population was well over 500 and the town was growing rapidly.  Schools and hospitals were built, and churches took their place among miners' cabins of rough-sawn wood scattered across the hillsides.

During the monsoon season in late summer, a storm moves through Verde Valley,

while the last light of sunset picks out the cliffs of Sedona 30 miles away

Jerome experienced several disasters: fires, epidemics of typhus and scarlet fever, and a landslide provoked by dynamite blasts, destroying many buildings and moving the old jailhouse more than 200 feet downhill, where it remains to this day.  Nevertheless the town prospered, and in the 1920s its population was estimated between 4,000 and 5,000, making it one of the largest in Arizona.  From 87 miles of mine tunnels and a huge open-pit excavation, an estimated one billion dollars of copper, gold, silver, zinc, and lead were extracted during Jerome's mining days.

Just before dawn, a winter snowfall covers Cleopatra Hill above Jerome

(seen here from the opposite side of Deception Gulch)

By the 1950s the richest veins were exhausted.  The last mines closed in 1953, depriving Jerome of its reason to exist.  It became a ghost town, until hippies, artists, and other wanderers drifted in during the 1960s and 1970s, attracted by the town's unique location and astonishing natural beauty.  They began the huge task of restoring the buildings that still remained.  Today, Jerome's population has stabilized at slightly under 500, and it has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the U. S. Department of the Interior, attracting an estimated 200,000 visitors each year.

Photographs by Charles Platt

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