Kentucky Camp

The gold came first: an 1874 placer discovery by a prospector named A. Smith sparked the Greaterville rush on the Santa Ritas' east slope, one of the richest placer districts in southern Arizona — miners hauled paydirt to distant streams or packed water in on burros, since the gulches ran dry. When the easy gold played out, California businessman George Bird McAneny hired Stetson in 1901 to engineer the deeper deposits: 5.5 miles of ditch, 2.5 miles of pipeline, two tunnels totaling about 1,400 feet, and a dam to bring water down from Bear Spring at 5,600 feet to Kentucky Gulch a thousand feet below.

The first hydraulic test, August 23, 1904, was reported in the Arizona Daily Star as 'tearing up the ground with splendid results.' The company built five buildings that year, connected by telephone, the headquarters boasting running water and a flush toilet — and then Stetson went out the window. McAneny had spent perhaps $175,000 and was burning another thousand a month; he foreclosed, bought the property at the 1906 sheriff's sale, and died himself in 1909. Total recorded take for the whole district: some 30,000 ounces of gold.

Attorney Louis Hummel took the property in 1927 in settlement of McAneny's estate, and Kentucky Camp spent four decades as the Santa Rita Ranch — Flossie Hummel and Wick Fenter ran cattle from the old headquarters. The record's second hard entry came in 1963: the Fenters' son Jake, his wife Mary Ann, and their infant daughter Lori died in a small-plane crash flying from the ranch toward Douglas. The family sold to ANAMAX Mining in the late 1960s; nobody has lived at Kentucky Camp since.

Reported activity is what you'd expect from a camp that guests rent overnight: footsteps on the headquarters' broad porch, a presence in the bunkhouse adobe, the sense — repeatedly filed by Rooms with a View guests — that the buildings are not entirely vacant. The file anchors the lore on Stetson: an engineer who died the night before his reckoning, in a town sixty miles from the camp he built.

The Forest Service acquired the site in a 1989 land exchange; the Friends of Kentucky Camp and adobe specialists stabilized the walls; the district entered the National Register in 1995. The Arizona Trail passes through. The record is five adobe buildings and one unexplained fall. The lore is a camp that still takes overnight guests — and, per the guests, a camp that may already be occupied.