INTRODUCTION
When people think of ghost towns they think of somewhere like Body, California. It’s under the protection of the State of California and has lots of standing buildings. It looks like what people think a ghost town looks like.
There actually aren’t many like that. The best ones in Arizona are on private land where they've been protected. These are mostly in southern Arizona, largely because the sites are more remote and difficult to access.
Kurt Wenner has photographed these forgotten places to make a record of them before they are gone forever – many of the sites he visited 10 to12 years ago no longer exist today. There are only a few with standing buildings where you can really get a sense of how people once lived.
EVERY TOWN HAS A STORY
Ghost towns were not randomly created – there were reasons for their existence (and decline). Someone found a mineral deposit (which petered out), or there was a forest to be logged (and clear cut), or water to power a mill (but the river changed course).
There are a number of different kinds of ghost towns across Arizona – mining, lumbering, agricultural, river towns (on the Colorado River where shipping went north from Yuma), small shopping hamlets, trading posts, tent cities.
Railroad towns that were just for the railroad are fairly rare – such towns generally had additional functions, acting as locations where supplies were traded, cattle taken off to market, or mined ore received for processing. There are also a few resort towns like Castle Hot Springs near Phoenix and Agua Caliente near Yuma, built to provide spa facilities.
DECLINE AND DECAY
When the main reason for a town disappears, then the people disappear, and then the town itself starts to disappear. As soon as a mine plays out people move away because there’s no other source of income.
There are several ways that these actual towns can disappear. Vandals destroy them for the pure pleasure of destruction; they’re used as a locale for paint ball wars; treasure hunters knock down walls of remaining buildings to search with metal detectors for coins, gold, buttons.
Natural weathering causes a lot of damage. Rain gradually destroys adobe buildings. Several towns have been destroyed completely by flash floods. In some places there may be little remaining other than a low rise in the soil marking where a wall once was.
GRAVEYARDS
For many Arizona ghost towns, the cemetery is the only part that’s left. Graves often have a wooden or cast iron fence around them to protect the buried bodies from being dug up by animals.
On one visit to Swansea, Kurt Wenner found vandals digging up the graves, going through them with metal detectors looking for coins, buttons and other trinkets that might have been buried with the bodies. Thus are ghost towns destroyed.
Graves are often decorated to commemorate the individual buried there. Visitors leave mementoes at graves like that of Big Nose Kate, the mistress of Doc Holliday. All that marks her grave site is a piece of granite with her real name, birth date and death date on it. But there are always bar tokens, coins, necklaces and such left by the curious.
RELICS AND REMAINS
In all ghost towns there are remains of one kind or another aside from the buildings, as inhabitants never take everything with them when they leave.
What people leave behind varies tremendously. In mining towns people with no intention of going back to mining leave shovels, picks and other heavy metal that’s not worth carrying. Elsewhere they leave dishes, kitchenware, clothing.
People take what is of most value to them and leave behind their cast-offs. Everything from dishes and silverware to a pair of child’s sandals gives evidence of the transitory nature of life.
CANYON DIABLO AND RED ROVER
Red Rover is one of Arizona’s more recent ghost towns, seemingly abandoned from one day to the next. When Kurt Wenner first photographed it, every imaginable possession in a town with several hundred residents was still there, dating from the 1930s and 1940s – books, mining equipment, clothing, dishes, cookware, pictures on the walls, an old piano. Little is known about the town – it may have had a different name when it was active.
Canyon Diablo, the “wildest town in the West,” started as a railroad town when the line moving west reached its namesake and required the construction of a sizeable bridge to cross it. When the bridge was finally constructed it was so badly built that it had to be re-built, giving the town a second shot at life. After the second bridge was completed, people abandoned the town as there was no further reason to stay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Kurt Wenner would like to thank Nigel Reynolds and Ben Barstad who accompanied him on most of his journeys into the back country, as well as Todd Underwood, the main operator of the ghost towns www.ghosttowns.com
The audio tour was produced for the Desert Caballeros Western Museum by Diane Hope, www.dianehope.com
The Museum would like to thank the Arizona Commission on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wellik Foundation for their generous programming support.