Jerome State Historic Park

The Little Daisy ran beneath the view until 1938; mining companies used the house until the mine closed in 1953, by which point Jerome's population had fallen from its 1920s peak of fifteen thousand to a few hundred. In August 1962 the Douglas brothers deeded the mansion and 2.43 acres to the state for ten dollars, and Jerome State Historic Park — Arizona's fifth — opened October 16, 1965, with the brothers in attendance.

The Little Daisy Hotel nearby, built as the miners' dormitory, still stands as a private residence. The mansion became the mining museum: restored library, period bathroom, a Model A truck in the carriage house, and a three-dimensional model of the town that shows what made all of this possible — and nearly catastrophic: eighty-eight miles of mine shafts running under a town built on a 30-degree slope.

The town below supplied the context the mansion surveyed. Jerome's mines produced on the order of a billion dollars in copper, gold, and silver over their working life; fires burned the town to brick in the 1890s; and by the time Arizona papers began calling it the wickedest town in the West, the place had the payroll to deserve it. Douglas built his house to watch all of it — the mine that paid, the valley that glowed, and the town that burned and slid and refused to empty.

The reports are thin and honestly held: figures reported in the mansion, presences the file attributes to the Douglases as a collective. Jerome as a town carries one of Arizona's thickest haunting files — the Grand Hotel, the Mile High Inn, the whole collapsing grid of it — but the state park's own legend is quieter, befitting a museum that opens at nine and closes at four-thirty.

The record does supply the atmosphere gratis: a house built to impress investors, emptied by a market, and donated for a sawbuck's worth of ten-dollar symbolism. Whatever the reports are reporting, the setting has a documented right to it.

The park still opens daily, the adobe still holds the hill, and the view over the Verde Valley is unchanged since Douglas considered the house 'a gigantic success.' The Douglases, if the accounts are credited, kept the best seat in Jerome — the hill above the mine, the view over the valley, and a museum that tells the family's story in the rooms where it happened.