Jerome is one of my favourite mining towns, I came here with mum on the great road trip of ought eleven, which also included Wupatki, Montezuma’s Castle, and Tuzigoot. We missed them all this trip but Jerome was lovely. From 2011:

And now:

We went this time to Crown King Mine, which was once Haynes Arizona. It is full of mining equipment, old house fittings, a monument to the Evil Dead in the form of a shed filled with every kind of chain saw, wondrous old cars including an old electric model, dentist chairs and mangles and school desks. All of it is collected from this ruined town and others, from the shacks that grew up everywhere around these holes in the ground filled with copper, silver, zinc, molybdenum.

So much abandoned and left, either when the minerals and the jobs ran out, or when people grew too old to stay there. I keep thinking about extraction, the way it demands that people come and then it expects them to go. Very few people ever get rich and they generally were rich already, lived elsewhere, dabbled in claims that others had prospected and staked. Most of those doing the mining itself eke out a living at great risk to life and health, but there is something about it that most of them love even as their labour is extracted from them just like copper or gold. Until there is nothing left.

Somehow in the midst of that they come to come to love, grow to feel a connection with a place. I was thinking about the fight to keep towns like this alive, how it comes from the lives built here, the memories, labour, laughter, friends, family. Things worth fighting for.

I was thinking also though, that maybe it’s best to leave as easily as you came so many years ago, let the land return to what it was before machines ripped the heart from it or return to the wild with it.

Impossible to say which way I fall, but then, it is not for me to decide for others.

I love what remains standing.

I mourn what stands no longer, like the Mexican community of Daisy Town just outside of Jerome, where nothing remains but foundations. As the sign says: ‘Small ethnic communities were common around the mining developments of the West,’ it doesn’t mention of course this was usually for their own protection, though in some cases I expect they might well have been there first.

There is of course, also a long history of labour organizing here too — La Liga Protectora Latina (not much about that), and the IWW (some awesomeness about that).