How to Find the History of Abandoned Mines & Ghost Towns (in AZ)

hello everybody and welcome to another video from home so lately i've been getting quite a few questions asking about how i find out info about some of the mines and abandoned places i go to so i wanted to make a quick little video explaining that process some of the different resources i use to help share that with you so in this video i'm going to be going through some books some published resources that i have here at home that i use often in my research and the second half of the video will be focused on some online resources that are free that are really helpful for finding out about some of the lesser known places so i want to put those resources out there that way everyone has access to them without further ado let's dive into some of the books and then i'll get on later to some of the free websites that also have lots of great information so as far as ghost town books this book here has certainly been one of the most helpful it's actually one of the earliest books i got regarding ghost towns and mining camps it's put out by arizona highways it's by philip varney it's getting to be a little bit dated at this point and so it just goes through pretty much county by county talking about the main mines in that area it often provides a nice map of the area showing some of the sites it talks about and then it goes through a fairly detailed history but it's very helpful for getting a lay of the land getting kind of a historical context of the area so again this is an early book i had it really inspired me to kind of get out there and start checking some of these popular spots off the list and while it does get into a little bit of the lesser known places for the most part it's talking about the main stuff that a lot of people already know about but this book was first published in 1994 and was most recently published in 2008 so it's getting to be a little bit old but still a great place to start and i believe it's still available out there and if it is i'll put a link somewhere below this video i'm kind of on the same vein as that another arizona highways book kind of a recent release i just got this book last year but it's called arizona ghost towns by noah austin goes through 50 of kind of the most well-known and best representing places of ghost towns throughout arizona so this is a pretty good book as well and while it doesn't get quite as deep on the history you know normally it's about a page or two per site it does give some historical photos it gives the coordinates of how to get there and a little bit of backstory on some of these places so again this is kind of the more well-known spots you know fort bowie gleason gold king mansion kentucky camp and a few places like that but there are a few less popular places in here and again a great place to start i have a couple of places in this book that i have pinned on a map for future trips to go to and uh kind of pairs well with the other arizona highways book regarding the mining camps now there are a few other books that have been really helpful over the years this one's a bit older it's called the ghost towns of arizona by james and barbara sherman but it goes alphabetically through quite a few places here i'll get a closer up shot you can see the list but a lot of these places are pretty well researched it often includes old historic photos and sometimes some newspaper clippings which is really cool and gives you the general location you know when a post office was established if there was a post office there and just goes through site by site you know all kinds of different places throughout the state some are gone now no trace of them left some are you know kind of the more well-known spots but this book i think dives a little bit deeper into some of the wide variety of places that are left now not every site has a ton written about it you can see this one on constellation has just a paragraph written but again it's a good starting point for research you can blend well with some online resources and really give you some good information on some of these unique places so a more kind of site specific book is this one called crown king in the southern bradshaws it was last published in 1990 and i honestly don't know if it's still available but it's a really deep dive into the crown king area the oro bell area places like desoto and cleator and the bradshaw mountain railroad lots of historic maps a lot of old photos and it's just really well written and very specific to the crown king area but very thorough in its dive into the southern bradshaw so really interesting to read through this i've had this book for quite a while but i think i originally bought it at the general store up in crown king i don't know if it's still available but very helpful for the crown king area another book that is kind of site specific is this one called western arizona ghost towns also last published in 1990 so a bit older dives into the kofa area quartzite parker kingman that kind of swath of western arizona and the same kind of thing it's pretty well researched lots of historic photos some maps a little bit of directions on how to get there but it does a good job covering you know the lesser-known places again some places that don't exist anymore and a few of the more well-known places like swansea and some of the other ones around cayman just a few more books i want to talk about before i move on to the online resources this is actually a series of books three different books called the history of mining in arizona and again these are pretty old i think i got the first book back at the arizona mining and mineral museum back when it was still open and then i've since found the other couple of books online but this is probably the most comprehensive series on mining in general in arizona it's really fascinating i have yet to actually read through the whole thing it's so dense but it's about 200 pages per volume and there's three different ones to go through and it focuses on the whole story from the very beginning talks about you know all kinds of the major minds the major developments that occurred throughout arizona and goes up to fairly modern mining history at least until these were written in about the 1990s so this one is absolutely loaded with old historic photos maps newspaper articles and a lot of info on just kind of the whole story now i don't often use this just because it focuses more on kind of the big picture but i'll often check in the index in the back of the book to see if the place i went to is mentioned and if so i'll use this whenever possible very comprehensive guide lots of cool old photos and if you're into mining in arizona it really doesn't get much better than these books it is on my list to fully read through these one day and maybe make a longer format video um in relation to these but this is a great resource that really covers the whole entire picture of arizona mining so last but certainly not least is the arizona place names book now this one is really just a comprehensive list of different names that have popped up through arizona history so it gives a tiny bit of backstory it'll talk about if there was a post office established there when that happened some of the other names that the town may have gone by but this covers everything not just mining towns or ghost towns and so far i've never really come across a place that wasn't in this book but it can really be a jumping off point for online research give you a little bit more to go off of than what you previously had so again if i can find these books online i will put a link either in the description or in a pinned comment below this video but those are the collection of books i use specifically for mines and ghost towns and while that's not the complete collection i mean there's probably other great books out there but i found a lot of great things in those books it's helped to lead to many articles i've written and a lot of the videos i've made so i just wanted to share that with you so for the second half of the video i want to jump into online resources which i honestly use probably just as much as the books that i just showed you quite a few places i've been that are not mentioned in any of those books as good as they are the first really helpful tool for just finding a place name is something i've mentioned before in my google earth video and it's the mrds or mineral resource data system overlay for google earth now this is put out by the us geological survey and it contains thousands of different mines and prospect data across the state and this is a great place to start with finding a name of somewhere you went what they mined what kind of operation it was and it gives you another jumping off point to further research so using the mrds data you can easily hop into a specific place you can click on it get the name of it i've used this many times to find some of these lesser known places like the black pearl and the belmont mountains even places like the dragon mine or any other kind of smaller operation that may not have been widely worked or widely successful so once you find the name of it you can then search that in the usgs database or you can even take the specific site record number that pops up with every name you can put that in get a little bit more info you can find out if it was a past producer if it was a prospect what kind of minerals they were after and typically gives a teeny little blurb about operations you know how much was worked at the mine sometimes it'll give years when it was active or worked or last purchased by a different owner it's a great place to get just a little bit more info on one of the places you're looking at or somewhere you visited and then from there you can do more research so this is all through the usgs i talked about how to download the overlay and use it in my other video on google earth overlays you can just go directly to the usgs search i'll have a link for that and you can just put it in and you can see just a little bit more of the info you can get so another good place to do kind of the same thing get the same kind of info as a place called mindat.org it has at least some kind of info on almost every mine in arizona and you can see here i'm on the overall map page you can zoom around you can find out a place name and then when you click on it it takes you into a dedicated page on that specific site now some sites will have a lot of info some minds might have just a sentence written about it but oftentimes it'll talk about the minerals they were mining a little bit of the geology of the area how deep they dug the shaft stuff like that i'll put the link to this arizona map page where you can zoom around and from there you can dive deeper into any specific mine that is really helpful and paired with the overlay you can get generally a decent idea of what a mine was after when it was worked all that kind of good info so the last and possibly the best resource that i use the most is the arizona geological survey mining data now this is run through the azgs which is based in tucson at the university of arizona this website has a lot of great stuff that can be very helpful so i'm on the home page now you can click on the search button it's a little bit slow to load so i'll put in the dragon mine search term just for an example and you can see it pulls up every record of a mining claim or an operation named the dragon now here's where you have to spend some time and kind of pick out what's relevant and what's not so it'll give you kind of a title and then it'll have a little bit more info down here which will help you identify that specific spot so you can see this one's in arizona maricopa county wickenburg and then it usually gives the exact topo map it's located on so this one is in the wickenburg 7.5 minute san domingo mining district so this is the right dragon mine that i want to click on and very often there will be a couple of different files available you'll just have to click on them and read through a lot of times there will be duplicate information one will be the entire collection for that mine some will be just a map or a little bit of correspondence from that mine generally speaking this is a great resource to get a lot of info like i mentioned there will be other operations name the dragons so this one you can see is in santa cruz county this one's in pima county these are not going to be relevant for the specific place that we're talking about and then these with the kind of the numbered system have pictures associated with them so when you click on them it'll pull up a historic photo now unfortunately not every mine has kind of these cool historic photos to use and reference but you can also just use the photo tab if you want to search for photos but it'll also pop up in the main search as you're going so once you do find the right mind you're looking for you click on it and it takes you into this kind of more detailed page gives some keywords some tags and stuff information on when this was published how to cite it properly who to contact if you want more info but to access the actual info you got to click on this resource url which pulls up a pdf which can be anywhere from five pages to a hundred pages and what this is is essentially the mind record that was on file with the state and generally this has a ton of great info to use it usually starts with a couple of cover pages you can just start scrolling through this and it'll talk about all kinds of random things it'll have correspondence between mine owners it'll have forms that were submitted from the property directly to the state talking about operations and different things that the mind was doing sometimes it'll include newspaper articles and there will be maps included topo maps survey maps geological maps that were drawn by the early developers all kinds of cool stuff and even sometimes a diagram of the underground structures left at the mine today and this is where it really gets pretty tedious you have to just scroll through read all these little random articles and letters that went back and forth and from there is when you can start to piece together the story of a specific operation typically during this section what i'll do is i'll have the main mine file up i'll have a second document up or maybe even take hand notes and just start jotting down bullet points of specific facts because oftentimes the pdf will be kind of out of order and it can be a little bit confusing if you're trying to just read through this on one go that's where the taking notes really helps you can just jot down little tidbits and oftentimes there will be site visits from the mine office they send someone out to check on the property or survey and physically note all the things they saw this can be a great source for what was actually happening at any number of different points throughout the history of the operation and it's really just the grind this part you have to go through and just read through skim through a great resource here and not every mine is this detailed some will have you know less info to go on but still it's typically enough to get some kind of backstory just have a little bit more info to go on and when you combine this with the other resources online like the mndot or the usgs stuff and then even if you get lucky sometimes it'll also be well published in a book of some kind but this does also take the most time you could spend a solid three to four hours just reading through all these different pdfs jotting down notes and then once you have all that done you can start to rearrange it put it in the right order you know add a little bit of commentary in between and before you know it you now have a nice backstory for a very specific and maybe not very well known operation that luckily has been well preserved in the mine offices and is now available for free to everyone out there and i really like to use this to get the right history and get these first-hand accounts these primary sources that can really tell so much about an operation so that is about it for this video i've talked about some of the great books that are out there hopefully most of them are still available although you might have to maybe find a used copy somewhere i also mentioned quite a few online resources that are great and when you combine all that together with a lot of time and care you can typically get a lot of good information on any spot you want to look at i hope this video was helpful maybe you are also interested in doing this kind of research and you want to tell the story behind a place you go or maybe you just want to fact check some of the stuff i say i always make it a point to be as accurate as i possibly can if there's an error it's done out of ignorance and not done on purpose not for drama or for whatever other reason but going forward from here at least on the videos i'm going to start adding in kind of a works cited or list of resources i used in the video description when i write articles on my website i always put the info in but i'm going to start also including that somewhere in the video as well just as kind of a accountability thing i want to be very transparent with where i get my info and i want to share that that way if you are also interested you can dive in and do the same research thank you very much for watching this one i know it's a little bit different i'm not actually out at these places talking about him showing what's left but i will be back to that in the next video have a fun revisit to an old historic mining district in western arizona that will hopefully be very interesting and informative and it's based off this info that i just showed you but in the meantime thanks for watching this one and we'll see you on the next one you

Channel: www.azoffroad.net

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Keywords: arizona abandoned places, arizona ghost towns, arizona mines, azoffroad.net, arizona offroad trails, arizona mine sites, abandoned mines, mindat, mindat.org, USGS, AZGS, AZ Geological Survey, ghost town books, mining books, mining camps, arizona mining camps, history of mining in arizona, mines, ghost towns, ghost towns of the southwest, mines of the southwest, us geological survey mines, history of old west, history of ghost towns, history of old mines, arizona history, azhighway

Id: 6QlmbtQBCx4

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021