ArizonaRealCountry.com 17 October 2017 602.524.7338 For Turn Key Priefert Walkers, Contact Digger: rocksolidframes@aol.com • WWW.ROCKSOLIDFRAMES.COM THE BOOM THEN THE SLIDE WW1 divert attention from rebuilding the Mexican Quarter. Labor unrest and the demand for copper created by the “Great War” diverted the attention of Jerome. These things also diverted the attention from a problem inherent to the mining town built on Cleopatra Hill, the instability of more than 80 miles of mine shafts honeycombing the hill that was the town’s foundation. It was eight years after the 1918 fire that the powder magazine at the mine blew up. From that day in 1926, walls began to crack in buildings in town. Plaster fell. Doors began to sag and not fit their frames. With creaking slowness, the hill that held up Jerome was beginning to shift along with the buildings clustered on the hill. The shifting was slow and hardly noticeable at first. Jerome’s attention was diverted in 1929 by the “Great Depression”. By the end of that year, however, few could ignore that there was something very wrong in Jerome. HOUSES SAG & COLLAPSE Three houses had collapsed between the post office and the swimming pool. Four others sagged dangerously. Roads between the Hampton house and Revel house were sinking. A slide had occurred in Mescal Gulch. The street between Hampton house and J.C. Penney’s store, which had been breaking up for two years, continued to self-destruct despite intense efforts by the town to keep it repaired. The street and the sidewalk in front of the Sullivan Hotel was breaking up and sinking. Between 1929 and 1937, Jerome continued to slowly disintegrate. By 1937, 40 houses were down or abandoned due to slides and shifts from the cave-ins in the shafts below. Kavochovich store was falling in on Main. The brick wall of the cigar store next to the post office had collapsed onto the sidewalk. SWITCHING A BLOCK OR TWO Soon the hill began to slide, the side of Main Street across from the present-day Mile High Grill & Inn down across Hull Avenue and on. The famed “sliding jail” found its present resting place in this slide as it gradually moved across Hull Avenue. The block where it had been was turned into a pile of rubble where the buildings from the Hull Avenue side of Main Street had slid and tumbled and collapsed. Nearly the entire block was gone. The old Bartlett Hotel, its shell still standing, marked the upper end of the chasm. The Flatiron building complex marked the downhill end. This was Jerome’s last great disaster. The town had earned the name of the “Great Survivor” off all mining camps along our highway, experiencing and recovering from more physical tragedies than any of the other camps. With the information above, today’s visitor can stand in front of the Mile High Grill & Inn or the Turquoise Spider and see the swatch cut by the slide. It is clean now, all the debris from the buildings that once stood on the vacant side of Main Street long ago cleared away. Try to visualize all of these disasters and what they must have meant for Jerome. With a little more, you can see Jerome citizens coping with fires and slides, clinging to the side of Cleopatra Hill, no matter what. You can’t but wonder, standing on Main Street today, that so much is left of this little town, considering the enormous devastation that has plagued its very existence. Charred but still standing, the four wood frame buildings shown here were total losses in the 1920’s fire in the lower Main area. After the slide, a gaping hole on the right side of the street is all that remained from Flatiron District to the Bartlett Hotel. Many others had to be demolished.