To and Along a Ghost Town Trail

 

The Artist and I never took the Gleeson Road, never saw Gleeson, so I decided Sunny and I would make an expedition together and see what there was to see. 

First building on the Gleeson Road. It's for sale.

The Gleeson Road is the second road to the west after the Border Patrol checkpoint on 191. I stopped briefly to photograph the first building, but when we came to the Ghost Town Trail, I decided to stay on the Gleeson Road long enough to see Gleeson and then turn around. The Gleeson Cemetery is on private property, with a locked gate, so I had to turn back east without exploring that site. 

An old wreck of a building along the road, however, caught my eye on the way back, and I stopped to take a closer look. What could it have been?

Ready to move in? Turnkey? I don't think so.

Why is the weathering of materials so fascinating?

There were a few other old ruins to be seen, but one pretty little house right on the road looked quite habitable. At first I thought it was the historic Gleeson jail and was surprised at how homey a jail could look, with the overhang and the Chinaberry tree shading the tiny front yard.  

But no, when I got close enough to read the sign, I saw that the jail was a bit farther down. It too is on private property, though open to the public certain days and hours. Maybe another time. 

Historic Gleeson jail

High Lonesome

High Lonesome, this place was called! Was it a ranch? Mining offices?  Occupied? And why did the name seem so familiar? A week later I realized that it was the name of the fictional Joanna Brady’s ranch outside Bisbee in the mystery novels of J.A. Jance. A completely different High Lonesome.

Gleeson had a post office from 1890 to 1939.

 

John Gleeson … and his wife were an Irish couple who came to Arizona from Iowa and Colorado. They worked in the mines at Pearce – he as a miner and she as a boarding house keeper in the early 1890’s. Gleeson grub-staked a crippled friend and the man re-located [to?] the old mines at Turquoise. He sold out by 1914. Long before white men appeared in this area Indians were mining turquoise on Turquoise Mountain. Tiffany and Company of New York continues to work the mine when the demand warrants. The remnants of the older community of Turquoise came back to life in 1900 for a brief building boom, and there are still restricted mining operations here. 

 

-      Byrd H. Granger, Arizona Place Names, revised and enlarged, 1960

 

Of course, 1960 was a while ago now, so I don't know if Tiffany is still at work in the Gleeson-Turquoise area....

Mining activity on the mountainsides

But Gleeson had really only been a detour for me. My main objective that day was the Ghost Town Trail.

"Primitive Road" -- one of my favorite signs

The curves of the land are soft and beautiful to my eye, but looking closer one sees the scars left by mining. Now this, below, is it tailings or overburden? I have only just learned the difference: overburden is rock and soil merely removed; tailings have been processed in addition to being removed. 

But ah, here! This is the kind of thing I came for! Still handsome remaining walls of an old stone building. Could this be a remnant of the little town of Turquoise? I couldn’t stop photographing the building walls, inside and out, from different angles. Truly, this was vernacular architecture, made from materials at hand, and what more lovely materials could be found? 

Photographing the stone walls necessitated getting out of the car, which also provided Sunny with a little walk. Territory on both sides of the Ghost Town Trail is a patchwork of state and private lands. Some of it is for sale, though I would worry about water quality. 

I did not photograph every interesting ruin along the road. Some I simply missed. Then after the shot of this one below, staring me in the face, my camera battery ran out. If you want to see a little bit of Pearce, however, the last town before the trail rejoins the two-lane highway, here is an old post from explorations the Artist and I made together, and here is a post from the Historic Pearce Cemetery, a place I loved right away. 

Thank you for coming along on this expedition into the past of Cochise County, Arizona, and please join me for more adventures to come!