Two Unusual Revitalized Arizona Mining Towns
JEROME IS A SMALL TOWN of a few hundred people, but it is also a community of transplants that have created a unique, postmodern environment. It is a scrappy old mining town, half fallen down and half tarted up, which, like much of the New Old West, has a facade of restored storefronts that serve the tourist trade. But behind this facade is a settlement composed of an unusual and haphazard assortment of people, almost all of whom arrived in recent years, who share an attraction to the mixture of geography, architecture, decay, and potential that make Jerome stand out.
Jerome is geographically isolated, a thousand feet above the Verde Valley, in Northern Arizona. The town was built on a precarious slope, with the buildings perched on a system of terraced walkways and roads, and the town has suffered many floods, landslides, and fires as a result. A literal boom-town, Jerome rocked with the excavation blasts from the mine, now a big abandoned pit right next to town. From a peak population of 15,000 people, the town was almost entirely abandoned when the mines shut down in 1953.
Many old Southwestern mining towns were transformed in the late 1960's when people seeking different ways of living moved out of the cities. Unlike the commune option, where the building usually had to be done from scratch, these communities were already built (and had romantic, abandoned Victorian houses that could often be had for a song). With enough "alternative" minded transplants to reach some sort of saturation point, local politics and community standards could remain favorable to these liberal-minded transplants.
Like Jerome, Bisbee is an old mining town that was revitalized with an influx of alternative-seeking city folk in the late 1960's. But Bisbee was never close to being abandoned (the mines didn't shut down until the mid 1970's), so it's population is a mix of transplants and tenacious old-timers. The town sits in a gulch, and houses built on the hillsides are on an often ridiculous slope, making for some interesting and precarious architecture. Unlike Jerome though, Bisbee is basically solid, both structurally and economically, with a more established tourism/handicraft industry to sustain it.