The Gold King Mine Ghost Town

Perkinsville Road leaves Jerome by the fire department building on the curve of Main Street. It passes headframes and an open pit on the left and runs another three-quarters of a mile up Cleopatra Hill. The entrance to the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town stands at the top of the second hill, and a short dirt road leads from there to the parking lot. Old cars and trucks start to appear along the drive before the gate. Tickets are sold in the Gift Shop, and the tour is self-guided.

Pathways among the machines

Inside, pathways wind across a terraced hillside under paradise trees. About a hundred vehicles line the sloping paths: trucks, cars, buses, tractors, bulldozers, cranes, Studebakers and Harley-Davidsons. Chickens keep a coop but spend most of their time scratching in the dirt beneath old Packards and flatbed Fords. Roger Naylor, writing for The Arizona Republic in 2024, said the place “looks like several garages exploded.” Among the finds he listed are a 1902 Studebaker electric carriage, one of only two known to exist, and a drivable buzz saw from the early 1920s. That toothy machine on wheels once cleared orange groves outside Los Angeles to make way for houses. The site also shows a converted school bus flat-track racer that Don Robertson built. Most of the equipment still runs, the carriage and the buzz saw included.

Among the vehicles stand the buildings, some original to the mining camp of Haynes and some brought in from elsewhere. Jay Harshman, who calls himself the site’s “main guy,” told Business Insider in 2023 that the mine’s elevator shaft and headframe, a boarding house, the assay office, and a set of jail bars belonged to the original town. The outhouse and a shoe repair shop came from Wickenburg. A service station came from Cottonwood, a town once called Clemenceau. Harshman said the one-room schoolhouse, still filled with its original desks, was moved from Perkinsville; the site’s own history page says the schoolhouse and the dentist’s office came from Jerome. The dentist’s office was the workplace of Joseph and Raymond Pecharich, by Harshman’s account Jerome’s first dentists, and the chair, equipment and paperwork inside are original to the building. Naylor wrote that the “painless” dentist’s office “actually resembles a torture chamber bristling with frightening instruments.” There is also a town laundry and a miner’s cabin. Ma’s Kitchen, named by Robertson, stands on the frame and floors of a communal kitchen that fed the miners of Haynes. In 2023 Harshman was restoring it. Inside were a pie safe, a vintage telephone, and a decades-old jar of vaporizing ointment.

“Nothing is a prop,” Harshman said.

The sawmill, the forge, and Big Bertha

The machines on the hill make noise. The sawmill dates to the turn of the century and is driven by a 1914 Witte engine powering an antique Belsaw. In 2010 Naylor reported that it filled lumber orders both commercial grade and for artisans making furniture. By 2024 it was cutting planks for new homes in the Verde Valley. He called the mill operator slicing through logs “noisy poetry in motion.”

Hammer on hot steel rings from the blacksmith shop. Its anvil dates to the late 1800s, many of its tools come from the same era, and a power hammer and other old equipment line the walls. William W. Weathersby has worked the forge on and off for about fifteen years, as of a January 2026 profile in the CITYSunTimes. He grew up in Jerome, came to the craft in the late 1980s through competition Dutch oven cooking, and took classes in Santa Fe from Frank Turley. He helps children and families forge hooks, hearts and crosses from horseshoe nails. When visitors ask how hot the metal gets, he said, “I like to hold a hot piece of metal against a piece of wood and hear their gasps as it bursts into flames.” Naylor reported in 2024 that demonstrations usually run on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday.

Everything stops when “Big Bertha” starts. She is a Chicago Pneumatic three-cylinder generator dating to about 1930, first used at the mine in Bagdad, Arizona. In Naylor’s account she belches flames and booms like a thunderclap, and the sound echoes down the mountain. She is run only on request, for a fuel fee. The ore-crushing stamp mill is quieter. The crew restored it during the site’s down time in 2020.

The 1,270-foot mine shaft is open, and visitors can walk into it. Gold panning is offered, and anyone who pans may keep the gold they find. Gemstone panning is offered for children. The petting zoo holds goats, among them Bonnie and Clyde, along with several kinds of chickens, turkeys, Bella the pig, two donkeys, a miniature pony, rabbits, and baby chicks in season. Bags of feed are sold at the Gift Shop.

Haynes, a gold camp on a copper hill

The site’s welcome text says it has been said that mining is the reason Jerome exists on the side of Cleopatra Hill. A Jerome Historical Society marker in town says the tent camp took its name from Eugene Jerome, a financier of the United Verde Company, and that the town grew to almost 15,000 people by the mid-1920s. In 1890 the Haynes Copper Company sank a shaft about a mile to the north. The site gives its depth as 1,270 feet. Naylor and Atlas Obscura give it as 1,200. According to the site, the copper veins the miners found were only 3 to 15 feet wide, too narrow to mine at a profit. Then they struck gold, and a camp called Haynes grew up around the diggings, separate from Jerome.

Accounts of its size do not agree. The site’s home page puts the 1901 population at 300. The CITYSunTimes, telling the same history, puts it at around 30. Harshman gave an average of 300 and a peak of 504. He said gold, silver, iron and platinum were all found in the ground but that copper was the main commodity. Haynes had its own post office from 1908 to 1922. Its end is also dated three ways. The state’s corridor management plan for State Route 89A gives the mine and town the years 1890 to 1914. The site’s history page says the gold ran dry after the post office closed. Harshman said Haynes was active until 1938. Harshman also said the ground where the ghost town stands was where the mining happened. The people lived on the mountainside above, where 305 structures once stood. In Naylor’s telling, the residents scattered when the ore played out. Jerome dwindled to a few dozen people, and Haynes emptied completely. In 2010 he called Jerome possibly “the only ghost town in America that has its own ghost suburb.”

A mechanic from an Iowa farm

Don Robertson was born on an Iowa farm on January 4, 1943. Naylor wrote that by age three he was taking apart and rebuilding his tricycle. He moved on to bicycles, tractors, cars and trucks, and then to mining equipment, which he collected. Harshman said Robertson came West in the 1960s and went looking for a place to keep his collection once it outgrew its space. The site and Naylor say Terry and Don Robertson found the Haynes slope in 1981. Harshman put Robertson’s arrival at 1978 and said he made a 100-year lease with the two corporations that still own the land. Robertson opened the grounds to visitors in 1982.

The site’s history page says that when the Robertsons arrived, only a single boarding house from 1909 remained. Naylor in 2010 described a clapboard hilltop house from the 1890s that served mainly as a boarding house and for a stint as a bordello. Starting from that building, Robertson built the town board by board with the 1914 gas-powered sawmill and hauled in historic buildings from elsewhere. Naylor described him with a bushy beard and slouched hat and photographed him on his ‘42 Harley-Davidson. “I’ve only got a little over 6 acres, but it’s covered with 20 acres worth of stuff,” Robertson told him. “I was put on this Earth to save this beautiful old machinery. This is the stuff that America was built with.” On the offers to buy him out, he said: “People tell me all the time I could sell everything and get rich. But I’m already rich… I get to play with my fortune every day.”

Robertson died on October 17, 2016, at 73, a resident of Jerome. His family said the mine would stay open as a tribute to his life’s work. A memorial was held at the mine on May 20, 2017, and that same year the family put on a Celebration of Life car show. The Robertsons’ daughter, Jeannie Leffew, and her husband, Mike, now run the place. In 2024 Naylor reported that they were adding to the collection and seeking donated tools, vehicles and equipment that tell the story of American labor.

The hill also hosts gatherings. The Jerome Jamboree, a Volkswagen event of the Arizona Bus Club, marked thirty years at the Gold King in 2021. In 2017 Walter the Bus arrived on a lowboy trailer with a Jerome Police escort up through town. The Jerome Historical Society held its first Jerome Mining Days on the grounds on October 23 and 24, 2021, with actors playing local history. Weddings are held among the trucks.

Some of the animals have histories of their own. Baby goats were born on the grounds in April 2019. Pedro the donkey, who in 2010 would repay anyone who fed him with a smooch, died in July 2022. The site gave his years as 1989–2022.