Friday Dec 23, 2022 - Jerome State Historic Park / Douglas Mansion

 

We seem to get way more than 8 hours of sleep in this van. Nice and toasty, comfy bed. What I am getting to is we didn’t get our butts out of bed and on the road until mid morning. Cottonwood has the old downtown but if you go the other way you go through strip mall Cottonwood, which we did this morning. First stop was Home Depot to get something to hang the National Park shade with (already changed the idea this morning, but I bought a couple of needed clamps for the shop back home out of it) and some AAA batteries for Deb’s reading light.

Next stop Micky D’s for coffee and free WiFi to upload the blog. Next stop was Walmart to get a collapsing wash tub (with no @#$% plug in it), and some groceries. Finally we headed back up the twisty narrow road again to Jerome to go to the Jerome State Historic Park housed in the Douglas Mansion. We had someone tell us to make sure and see the 30 minute movie they have playing there, and they were right, it is great. Jerome struck copper a little before Bisbee and went through the same boom cycle and rough and ready times as Bisbee, except they did it on a steep side hill that kept sliding down the hill what with all the dynamiting going on. A big focus of their history is how many fires and slides they had over the years. It is a crazy steep side hill the town was built on. We were getting confused about the James Douglas connection here, as James Douglas was one of the founder men in Bisbee and who they named our adjacent town after. Turns out it was our James Douglas’ son James, brother to Walter Douglas who ran the Bisbee mine in later years.

Jerome had the same history as Bisbee in many respects. They ran out of room up on the hill so they moved the smelter down the hill to Clarkdale and built a narrow gauge railroad to haul the oar, just like Bisbee and Douglas. The rounded up 60 pro union sympathizers in the first week of July in 1917, Bisbee rounded up 1100 union sympathizers the second week of July 1917. Maybe the two Douglas brothers, Walter and James Jr, were talking? They both put them in box cars and dropped them off in the desert far away.

The other cool thing they did in this museum was to create a 3 dimensional model of the town that showed all the shafts, tunnels and ore bodies underneath. Bisbee should make one of those!

Turns out James Jr built this huge mansion perched on a knob with a to die for view and only lived there a very short time. He wrote a letter complaining about how it was way too big for just him to live in and there was too much air pollution (of course, from his mining operation).

The town was hopping with tourists. I think Jerome draws a lot more tourists than Bisbee. They added a big free parking lot up past the town with a shuttle bus, which is smart, since the town’s narrow twisty streets (street) does not lend itself to easy parking. We had a late lunch/early dinner at the Haunted Hamburger Restaurant, then back in the van and back to the campground. Late snacky dinner, watched some Jack Ryan shows, followed by reading (Treasure Island!!) and sleep. Another great day in Sally Ann. 

Odometer 2799 - Day 14