Castle Dome City

On February 24, Tuesday, we drove to Castle Dome Silver Mines and Museum/Ghost Town of Old Arizona.

The Kofa National Wildlife Refuge 

The Yuma Pruving Area has signs posted along the grid road to Castle Dome Mine.

From Yuma it was 20 miles north on #95 and turning on the Castle Dome Road for the first three miles paved, then onto gravel desert roads for next seven miles.

The admission fee into the museum was $20.00 and we toured for 3 hours. That's $3.50 a person for each hour in the sun.

The first Americans reached the Castle Dome Mountains in the early 1860s. It was generally held that Native Americans had engaged in mining in the Castle Dome Mountains some years before.

As the area grew, the town was renamed Castle Dome. By some accounts, the population of the town peaked at over 3,000 people, in 1880, other sources put the full-time residents at only 50. At its peak, it housed a post office, a hotel, a saloon, a general store and smelting facilities.

The school was shut down in 1950, and the mines went into and out of use as the price of silver, still found in the area, rose and fell. By 1978, the mines were all shut down, and the last of the residents left leaving everything behind.

The property that was previously Castle Dome town and mining camp was purchased in 1994 by Allen and Stephanie Armstrong, and turned into the Castle Dome Mines Museum. Seven buildings original to the town, and the rest are period representations built mostly from locally scavenged materials. Each building, among them a saloon, a hotel, a mill, and a blacksmith, is staged to look like it might have looked in the town's heyday, some 100 years ago.

“Castle Dome's silver mining began in 1864 and was mined until 1979. The characters who have come and gone have made Castle Dome City's history one of Old Arizona's most appealing chapters. There are over 35 restored buildings full of artifacts are diverse as the folks who lived there .”----from the brochure. Www.castledomemuseum.com

The Castle Dome mining district is a popular district for mineral collectors. The region is known for striking combinations of cerussite, flouorite, vanadinite, wufenite, barite and minetite galenite and anglesite.

So until next time remember to "Discover It and Live It".