Tuesday Treasures

December 2012 - Jerome AZ

More posts about Jerome.

Wordless Wednesday
Signs
Old Cars
2012 Sedona to Las Vegas

Known at one time as “The Largest Ghost Town in America,” Jerome, Arizona was once thought to have been lost to abandonment. The town has made a successful resurgence in recent years and is now home to a population of almost 500 people, a number of preserved historic sites, and an active artist community. However, its legacy of abandonment is far from forgotten.

It is more than 5,000 feet (1,500 m) above sea level. It is about 100 miles (160 km) north of Phoenix along State Route 89A between Sedona and Prescott. Supported in its heyday by rich copper mines, it was home to more than 10,000 people in the 1920s.

The Liberty Theater originally opened in 1918. It featured silent movies and vaudeville acts until its closing in 1929.
It was built to seat 536 people. Tickets were purchased at the front ticket booth for 20 to 30 cents, the cheaper seats being the balcony.

Jerome is referred to in the Barenaked Ladies album, All In Good Time, released in 2010. It is the title of Track 9 with references to Mingus Mountain, from which Jerome can be seen. Folksinger Kate Wolf wrote and recorded a song, "Old Jerome", first released on a posthumous album, The Wind Blows Wild, in 1988.

John Olson's model railroad, the Jerome & Southwestern, was originally developed as a series of articles in Model Railroader magazine and later released in book form. The plans for the model suggest a track layout (diorama) based on locations in and near Jerome.

The novel Muckers (2013) by Sandra Neil Wallace, a former sportscaster for ESPN, is a historical novel for young adults that is based on the Jerome High School football team of 1950. The team went undefeated that year, shortly before the copper mine closed and Jerome's population dwindled. Jerome is the setting for the Witches of Cleopatra Hill series of novels by Christine Pope the novel Jerome Times: Ghosts Upon the Page by Terry Molloy, and a collection of biographical stories, Rich Town Poor Town: Ghosts of Copper's Past by Roberto Rabago.

Built in 1898 by David Connor, the Connor Hotel of Jerome has a colorful past, ranging from the heights of luxury to the depths of squalor and back again. Originally designed with 20 rooms upstairs, this first-class lodging establishment also offered a barroom, card rooms, and billiard tables on the first floor. Rooms were rented on the “European plan” for the princely sum of $1.00 per night. The Connor’s telephone number was 8. The stone foundations were quarried from the hills around Jerome, and the brick was fired in nearby Cottonwood, in the yard of Messrs. Britton and Sharp.

The Connor Hotel circa 1899

Before the turn of the century, David Connor’s hotel had burned to the ground twice, along with many other fine buildings in Jerome’s crowded downtown.

David Connor was fortunate in that he was one of the only two business owners in town to carry insurance, in the handsome amount of $14,500. As a result, he was immediately able to rebuild the hotel, unlike many other buildings lost to fire in the conflagrations that swept Jerome before the turn of the century.
After it reopened in August of 1899, it enjoyed a heyday of being one of the finest lodging establishments in the booming mining towns of the West. The hotel had its own bus for delivering guests to the train depot, and was full to capacity much of the time. It was one of the earliest buildings in Jerome to be fully wired for electricity, and each room had a call bell for service.

Jerome had a post office by 1883. It added a schoolhouse in 1884 and a public library in 1889. After four major fires between 1894 and 1898 destroyed much of the business district and, in 1898, half of the community's homes, Jerome was incorporated as a town in 1899. Incorporation made it possible to collect taxes to build a formal fire-fighting system and to establish building codes that prohibited tents and other fire hazards within the town limits.