Jerome's story is the story of copper. A silver strike in 1876 drew the first prospectors to Cleopatra Hill, but it was the copper beneath that built everything — the mansions, the hospitals, the schools, the saloons, and the labor wars. Between 1876 and 1953, Jerome was one of the most productive mining towns in American history. Then the ore ran out and the people left, and what remained became a ghost town that refused to stay dead.
Understanding this history changes what Jerome looks like. The unstable hillside, the hospital-turned-hotel, the half-empty streets — all of it makes more sense when you know what happened here.
The 1876 Strike on Cleopatra Hill
Prospectors reached Cleopatra Hill in 1876 looking for silver — and found it, along with copper ore that would prove far more valuable. The United Verde Mine was incorporated in 1876, and within a decade it was clear that the real fortune lay in copper, not silver. The timing mattered: the spread of electrical infrastructure across the United States in the 1880s and 1890s created insatiable demand for copper wire, and the United Verde Mine was positioned to supply it.
In 1888, William A. Clark — a Montana copper baron and U.S. Senator who was one of the wealthiest individuals in American history — acquired the United Verde Mine. Clark understood the scale of what he had purchased. He invested massively in infrastructure: a narrow-gauge railroad connecting Jerome to the main line at Prescott Junction (later Jerome Junction), a smelter at Clarkdale in the Verde Valley below, and the facilities to support a large permanent workforce on the hillside.
By peak production, the United Verde and UVX mines together had yielded over $1 billion in copper, silver, and gold — equivalent to tens of billions in today's dollars.
Jerome at Peak: 15,000 Residents on a Hillside
At its peak in the early 1900s, Jerome was home to approximately 15,000 people — making it one of the largest cities in Arizona Territory and one of the most densely populated places in the Southwest. The entire population was packed onto the steep switchbacks of Cleopatra Hill, at an elevation between 5,000 and 5,400 feet.
The town that grew on this hillside was not a rough camp. Jerome had multiple hotels, dozens of saloons and restaurants, a hospital, multiple schools, a library, churches, a post office, and a red-light district that earned it the nickname "the wickedest town in the West." The built environment was real masonry and concrete construction — buildings that would prove too solid to tear down when the time came.
The physical challenge of building on Cleopatra Hill was immense. Streets ran at steep angles along the hillside contours. Buildings were notched into the slope, with one side at grade and the other suspended over the drop. The hillside was already being honeycombed with tunnels below, a fact that would become catastrophic over time.
Two Mines, One Hill
The United Verde Mine
The United Verde Mine was the original operation, owned by William A. Clark and later by his estate and the United Verde Copper Company. It operated from 1876 through the early twentieth century, with Clark's capital investment making it one of the most productive copper mines in the United States. The mine used a combination of underground shaft mining and, later, open-pit extraction, which accelerated the geological destabilization of the hillside.
The United Verde Extension (UVX) Mine
The United Verde Extension Mine — known as the UVX — was a separate operation that struck a massive secondary ore body in 1914. The Douglas family (James S. "Rawhide Jimmy" Douglas, whose mansion is now Jerome State Historic Park) owned the UVX. At peak production, the UVX was the more profitable of the two operations, generating extraordinary returns from a rich ore body that extended deep into the hill. The Douglas Mansion was built 196 feet above the UVX mine pit in 1916 — a vantage point that made the scale of the operation viscerally clear.
Together, the United Verde and UVX mines produced over $1 billion in combined copper, silver, and gold output between 1876 and 1953. Adjusting for inflation, that figure represents tens of billions in modern terms.
Working Conditions Underground
The Underground Fires
One of the most extraordinary facts about Jerome's mining history: underground fires burned continuously beneath the town for years. Spontaneous combustion of sulfide ore deposits ignited fires in the mine works that proved impossible to extinguish. The fires generated toxic gases, accelerated tunnel collapses, and forced mining operations to work around active combustion zones. Jerome's miners worked in conditions that would be unacceptable by any modern safety standard — not as a matter of occasional accident risk, but as a daily baseline.
Accident Rates and Occupational Disease
Jerome's mining accident rates were among the worst in the American West. Blast injuries, cave-ins, equipment accidents, and falls were endemic. Equally devastating over the long term was occupational disease: silicosis — caused by inhaling rock dust from drilling operations — was widespread among miners who spent years underground. The disease was irreversible and fatal, attacking lung tissue over years while the worker remained apparently functional. Many miners who survived Jerome's accidents died years later from silicosis.
The United Verde Hospital, built in 1927 (now the Jerome Grand Hotel), was the primary medical response to this toll. It was designed and staffed to handle traumatic injuries at scale — blast victims, crush injuries, emergency amputations — rather than routine medicine. The hospital's location at the top of Cleopatra Hill placed it physically above the mines whose casualties it treated.
The Jerome Deportation — July 10, 1917
July 10, 1917: 67 IWW union organizers and sympathizers were loaded onto a train in Jerome and shipped to Kingman, AZ without legal authority. One of the most brazen labor suppression actions in American mining history.
The Industrial Workers of the World — the IWW, or "Wobblies" — organized aggressively in Jerome in 1917, building on years of worker grievance over dangerous conditions, low pay relative to corporate profits, and the complete absence of worker protections. The IWW chapter in Jerome was part of a broader organizing wave across Arizona's copper belt during World War I, as copper prices and corporate profits surged while worker conditions remained brutal.
On July 10, 1917, a group of company-aligned citizens — acting as self-appointed deputies with no legal authority — organized a roundup of IWW members and union sympathizers in Jerome. 67 men were seized, marched to the railroad depot, loaded into cattle cars, and shipped east to Kingman, Arizona. There was no arrest, no charge, no trial, and no legal process. The men were simply removed from Jerome by force.
The Jerome Deportation of 1917 happened the same day as the Bisbee Deportation — a larger, more notorious action in which 1,286 miners were deported from Bisbee, Arizona in the same manner, loading them onto cattle cars bound for New Mexico. The Bisbee event drew far more national attention due to its scale, but both were equally illegal. Neither the organizers of the Jerome nor the Bisbee deportations faced meaningful legal consequences. The actions effectively destroyed union organizing in both towns for years.
A historical marker in Jerome's downtown commemorates the deportation. It stands near the site of the former mine company store — a reminder that the same corporate interests that ran the mine also shaped the political and social life of the town completely.
The United Verde Hospital (1927)
The United Verde Hospital opened in 1927 as the only significant medical facility in the Verde Valley region. Built in Mission Revival style at the highest point of Jerome, the hospital served as the essential infrastructure for keeping the mining workforce operating. Its existence was not a charitable gesture — it was a business necessity. A mining operation that couldn't treat blast injuries in the field was a mining operation that couldn't attract or retain workers.
The hospital operated from 1927 to 1950, treating thousands of patients over 23 years of mining's most intensive period. It closed when the mine wound down, sat vacant for decades, and reopened as the Jerome Grand Hotel in 1996. Today it is the most investigated paranormal site in Arizona — the physical record of what a mining boomtown required to keep running, and what it cost in human terms to do so.
For the full history of the building and its paranormal reputation, see the Haunted Jerome guide.
Physical Instability — The Hill Is Still Moving
Underground Voids and Surface Collapse
Decades of underground mining left Cleopatra Hill honeycombed with tunnels and voids. As the underground fires burned away ore bodies and the tunnel supports aged, sections of the underground network collapsed. These collapses created surface subsidence — ground that sank unpredictably, pulling foundations with it.
In addition, the United Verde Mine used massive open-pit blasting in the later phases of operation. These explosions — some involving hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosive — shook the entire hillside and accelerated the destabilization of structures that had been built on already-compromised ground.
The Sliding Jail
The most visible evidence of Jerome's geological instability is the 1928 town jail, which has moved 225 feet downhill from its original position over the last 90+ years. The jail was built on ground that the underground explosions had already destabilized. It started moving in the 1930s and has never stopped. Today it sits tilted at the edge of a turnout on AZ-89A, serving as an interpretive site about mining geology. The jail is visible from the road below Hull Avenue with no admission required — see the free things to do in Jerome guide for directions and context.
Jerome's geological instability is not just historical. Sections of the underground void network continue to settle. Ground subsidence has affected multiple structures over the decades, and portions of the hillside remain geologically active. This is one of the things that gives Jerome its uncanny quality — the ground itself is unreliable.
The Bust: 1953 and the Population Collapse
The United Verde Extension Mine — Jerome's primary employer — closed in 1953. Copper prices had fallen after the post-World War II peak, and the accessible ore body was nearing depletion. The closure was not a surprise — the mine had been winding down through the late 1940s — but the speed of Jerome's depopulation was still stunning.
From a population of approximately 5,000 at the late boom, Jerome fell to under 500 residents within five years of the mine closure. Businesses closed, schools emptied, and the commercial district on Main Street went dark. The buildings that remained were constructed from masonry and concrete — too expensive to demolish, too solid to collapse on their own. They stood empty on the hillside, their windows dark, their interiors slowly deteriorating.
Jerome was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "largest ghost town in America" during this period — not because it had no residents, but because of the gap between its physical scale and the population it now supported.
The Artist Colony — Jerome's Second Life
The 1960s and 70s Arrival
Starting in the late 1960s and accelerating through the 1970s, artists and craftspeople began moving into Jerome's vacant buildings. The combination was irresistible: masonry buildings with dramatic views, available at negligible rent in an era when cheap real estate and dramatic landscape were the two things the counterculture most wanted. Painters, potters, glassblowers, weavers, and sculptors arrived — first as a trickle, then as a sustained flow.
By the early 1980s, Jerome had a functioning arts colony in what had been a ghost town. Galleries opened. The Jerome Artists Cooperative took root. The architecture that the mining era had built — and that poverty had preserved by preventing demolition — became the physical infrastructure of a new cultural economy. Jerome's second life had begun.
Jerome Today — 450 People, 1M+ Visitors
Jerome's permanent population today is approximately 450 residents — less than 3% of its 1900s peak. The town has over 40 working studios and galleries, a concentration of wine tasting rooms connected to the Verde Valley wine region below, and a tourism economy built around its layered history of mining, labor conflict, physical instability, and artistic revival.
More than 1 million visitors come to Jerome annually. Most come for a day trip from Sedona, Flagstaff, or Phoenix. The town's compact geography — everything within a few walkable blocks on Cleopatra Hill — makes it accessible without diluting its character. The buildings that the copper era built, and that poverty preserved, are still here. The ground is still moving. The history is still present in the physical fabric of the place in a way that's unusual for any American destination.
To see the mine model that shows the underground tunnel network — and understand why the hillside is still unstable today — visit Jerome State Historic Park. To walk the history with audio context, the Historic Jerome Walking Tour covers the major sites with GPS-triggered narration.
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Audio Historic Walk
Our GPS-guided Historic Jerome Walking Tour covers the mining sites, the deportation marker, the hospital, and the copper era's physical legacy. No reservation required.
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