ArizonaRealCountry.com 33 July 2017 The mill closed down in 1913, having produced nearly $1.5 million in silver lead from the Poland and other mines in the area. The Humboldt Connection In 1899 as the P&E tracks reached Humboldt, a smelter was built by Val Verde Corporation. The smelter operated successfully until 1903 when a furnace blew up and the wooden structure was destroyed by fire. In 1905, Murphy and his associates bought what was left of the destroyed smelter and built a new, larger and more efficient smelter on the site. When completed it was the largest in Arizona Territory operated by Consolidated Arizona Smelting Co., a Murphy firm. In the crash of 1907, Consolidated went bankrupt. Southwest Metals Company took over the smelter and it operated into the 1930s. Ores from a large number of mines throughout the Big Bug and Walker Districts and from other parts of the territory and state were processed at the Humboldt smelter, all arriving on Frank Murphy and Santa Fe’s railway system. Humboldt was named after German explorer and geographer Baron Alexander Von Humboldt. Rivers, mountains, towns and mines across the west were named after the famed 18th century explorer. Long before Humboldt predicted Primeria Alta, the area that was to become Arizona, would be a treasure vault of minerals, Indians had discovered the silver lodes around Humboldt. Miners arriving in the 1860s at what was to become the Silver Belt mine found shallow digs and pit houses where the Indians had taken colorful surface rocks from the area. While production of ore could be tracked from the Humboldt area from the 1860s when King Woolsey had a water- powered quartz mill on the Agua Fria below what was to become Humboldt, the big boom for the town came with the opening of the Iron King mine by Prescott mining engineer Fred Gibbs. At a time when lead was worthless, Gibbs convinced investors in 1934 to back his scheme to build a 100-ton mill to process low grade lead ores. The mill was enlarged to 1000 tons per day and Humboldt, which had never had a population of more than 1000, boomed to a town of 2000. The Iron King ore did not run out until 1968.