Yarnell

In 1863, a group of prospectors headed by Abraham Harlow Peeples deserted California's waning gold-rush to search for new bonanzas in littleknown territory to the east. At Yuma, a famous mountain-man named Pauline Weaver joined the Party. His trapping forays into central Arizona had revealed rock formations pointing to the presence of gold.

Weaver, acting as guide for Peeples' Party, followed the Colorado upriver from Yuma to La Paz. There he turned east to cross the Plomosa range and the broad Cullen Valley. His goal and landmark was a flat-topped peak whose colossal size the veiled distance could not conceal.

Days later, Peeples, riding in the lead with Weaver, ran onto a herd of antelope that fled up a watered ravine just south of the Party's goal. Then and there he named the stream Antelope Creek and the table mountain towering above it Antelope Peak.

Just over its summit, in a quiet valley less than a mile square, lies Yarnell, 4782 feet above sea level. Through this hamlet of a few hundred souls passes Highway 89 to points north and south.

The southern approach to Yarnell climbs through progressively cooler air and two thousand vertical feet in less than four miles of breath-taking vistas. Beyond the crest of the winding road Yarnell slides into view, nestled in a gently sloping dell fortressed against extremes of temperature and the outside world by towering ridges of the Weaver Mountains.

To the right a stairway of rounded hills leads to Antelope Peak. To the left a sea of evergreen oak and holly, bebouldered with the tombstones of the centuries, draws man out of himself and awakens him to the marvels of ages past. Wonderment carries him back to the thunderous beginnings of the earth, when titanic forces staged a savage holocaust that filled the night with the fiery splendor of seething rock for untold thousands of years.

As the heat dwindled a slag formed, thickening into a shell. Pressures from underneath ripped chasms in the embryonic crust through which spurted white-hot rock that fell back to build up highlands of folded granite.

Millions of years later the crust had congealed, cooled and cracked. Incomputable eons of erosion by rain and frost shattered the seams, separating the surface rock into irregular masses. Later came upheavals which raised the mountains, tumbled the unshaped blocks into chaoticdisarray, and applied the finishing touches to what is now Boulder Park.

When the wandering Mongoloid ancestors of the American Indian passed over the Bering Strait, trickled down from Alaska and fanned out over the land that was to become North America, they found at Antelope a mountain barrier separating the regions of bitter winter cold from those of torrid summer heat.

Here eventually settled the Yavapai, hunters and gatherers of the tasty black-jack acorn, who gave their name to a county the size of Ohio, later to earn the accolade, the Mother of Counties, through repeated forfeitures of territory. Here, east of the Verde River, also came interloping Tonto Apaches, often confused with the Yavapai, the rightful sovereigns of the land.

The Yavapai (meaning, literally, man of the hills) made his summer camp in the valley of the mountain-top; his winter camp at its base, sheltered from the wind by a precipitous wall of rock and boulders two thousand feet high.

From the lookout of Table Mountain the Indian studied the movements of the whites in their frenzied quest for the gold of Rich Hill, a bold escarpment of preCambrian granite rising to the southeast in eroded contrast to the configuration of Antelope. This stronghold of the Yavapai, seen from the valley below, resembles a gargantuan tree-trunk, sawed off neatly hundreds of feet above its buttress roots.

During the boom days of Rich Hill, when its flanks were cramped with diggers, many prospectors turned their eyes toward the northern skyline, and a few of them profitably. One adventurous group of placer miners, working in the shadow of hostile Indians, struck a gold pocket on Antelope Mountain that netted $200,000 during Peeples' short term as treasurer for the group.

With this incursion the Yavapai and the whites of Antelope locked horns in a war to the finish. The Indians defended their sanctuary; the whites coveted their gold. Then it was that General Crook, with his detachment of cavalry from the Fort Lincoln (later Camp Verde), turned the tide. Maneuvering for the eventual surrender of Geronimo to the southeast, and zealous for the safety of the neighboring aggregations of people, he established local headquarters at the site where now stands Glen Ilha, a subdivision of Yarnell, forming virtually the nucleus for the town.

On October 18, 1892 a post office was established on the stage road in a combination store and saloon near the

Carraro's Grotto-Yarnell

old powder house. This mail service was designed for the few inhabitants of a wide area, including Peeples Valley.

Then, in 1893, a prospector named Harrison Yarnell struck gold on one of Antelope's sister peaks. Being in hard rock, its extraction required machinery. To finance operations, Yarnell sold the homesteading rights to part of his claims. The Prescott Courier and the Phoenix Herald of October 9, 1893, both carried the news.

"Harry Yarnell has sold Boulder Park to Sinclair & Walluth, who propose to make it a place of resort. It is said to be a most beautiful place, heavily wooded, filled with fantastic rock for building and well watered."

From its very inception the growth of Yarnell has not been world-shaking, like that of its neighbors, Stanton, Weaver, Octave and Congress, all of which expanded into a boom and burst. In contrast, Yarnell has gone forward slowly but steadily, sometimes almost painfully, with the sure progress of the turtle.

The Arizona Business Directory mentions Yarnell for the first time in its volume of 1907-08.

"A post office in Yavapai County, 13 miles northeast of Congress Junction, the nearest railroad point. Some mining, stock raising and farming. Population 25."

When Providence tires of creating new patterns she repeats the old. Certainly it transcends coincidence that the gold of Rich Hill and the esthetic wealth of Antelope Heights both owe their rediscovery by the white man to the search for lost horses. And here the repetition of pattern ends. Rich Hill's most fabulous placers were found by Mexicans with bullets in their guns. The romantic appeal of Antelope was found by a young girl with poetry in her heart.

It was in the year 1904 that Antelope Heights came to the attention of brave little Flora Gillette. Her Dunkard father, the Rev. Gillette, was in the east when he was transferred from the parish of Glendale to that of Camp Verde. Mrs. Gillette and the children started overland to their new home, driving a surrey and a wagon.

During an overnight encampment at Kirkland their team of horses disappeared. Flora Gillette, hardly in her teens, mounted a wagon mule bareback and tracked the horses up through Peeples Valley and along the old stage road that wound through the picturesque rocks and oaks that now ornament the town of Yarnell.

At the foot of Antelope Mountain she concluded that two thieves, instead of one, commanded the horses. Realizing the odds against her, she gave up the pursuit, turned back, and proceeded alone to Camp Verde.

The stage road on which she travelled had been built according to an Act, approved Nov. 9, 1864, when the Prescott, Walnut Grove and Pima Road Company was authorized " to build a toll-road from the town of Prescott in an easterly direction, via Groomdale to Turkey Creek, thence in a southerly direction to a point on the Hassayampa Creek, in the vicinity of Walnut Grove, and thence to the Pima Villages with a branch extending to the town of Weaver, to connect with the branch of the Arizona Central Road Company at that place."

The road from Weaver, built by Charles Genung, was then the only means of stage access to Antelope and Peeples Valley. In 1922 the new road from Congress to Prescott, via Antelope, was surveyed and work soon started, but not till 1926 was it gravelled. Finally, in 1933, as Federal Aid Project E. 72-B, it was paved and the traffic from Congress to Prescott started rolling on a carpet known as the White Spar Road.

This was twenty-nine years after the enchantment of Antelope Heights had left its impression on the little girl. Flora Gillette, then Mrs. Stattler, decided again to visit the wonderland of rock. Under its spell she decided that it would make an ideal summer resort for the people of the desert towns. She purchased 640 acres from Elzy Pike, a Valley resident who had homesteaded the area in 1921, and proceeded to organize the town of Yarnell.

Mrs. Stattler associated herself with, and later married, H. C. Ludden, a real estate agent in Glendale. This link with the business proved of great help when she decided to take Yarnell under her wing and make it her pet project.

The noble vision of a mushrooming community, however, was fraught with disappointment. For many years the population was insufficient to justify the postoffice, which transferred operations to Peeples Valley.

Under the late Mrs. Ludden's loving persistence, Yarnell became more than a geological phenomenon. Today it is also a town, entrenched within mountain ridges and cliffs to the south and east, boulder-strewn mountains to the west, and the rich grazing lands of Peeples Valley to the north.

Although Yarnell's expansion is limited by the nature of its surroundings, it has measureless possibilities for enthralling the passer-by. So far its potential as a resort and recreational area has not been scratched.

Glen Ilha is a subdivision of Yarnell that explores the potentialities of rocky coves not included in Mrs. Ludden's original plans. The area was homesteaded in 1921 by J. M. Pike, having been open range until 1916. P. W. Womack, a building contractor of Phoenix, bought the site and named it after his daughter, Ilha. The Womack Developing Company sells the lots. Buyers do the building on their own.

Yarnell and Glen Ilha possess a wealth of enchanting homes which blend into the natural surroundings and are themselves pleasant scenery to their neighbors. The communities are served by an intricate network of roads that winds among mammoth boulders infinite in number and shape. These lend a charming rusticity to the immediate landscape and a privacy to the front yard.

The combined summer population of Yarnell, Glen Ilha and Peeples Valley is about seven hundred. This falls twenty-five percent in the winter-time, though the number of year-round residents is increasing.

SHRINE OF ST. JOSEPH TURN LEFT 1000 FT.

Weather statistics for the area come from amateur meteorologists, who estimate the total annual precipitation at fourteen inches. Snow falls about three times a year, but rarely remains more than twenty-four hours.

Nighttime winter temperatures average close to freezing. Once or twice in years these may drop below eighteen degrees, but the invigorating winter days are usually warm and bright, even in February and March, when a few are overcast.

Summer daytime temperatures average 85 to 90 degrees, the dryness of the air making it seem much cooler. Summer nights are delightfully cool.

Almost anywhere in the surrounding creek beds one can enjoy the thrill of panning his own gold, and pockets of the metal still exist in the mountainsides. Arrowhead collecting has been a rewarding pastime and Indian graves are not uncommonly discovered.

As for the other side of the picture, not every Yarnell enterprise goes over with a bang. The lack of a basic economy limits the expenditures of the residents, most of whom are retirees or pensioners primarily interested in events close to home. These and other considerations militated against the success of a movie theater and a newspaper, the Mountain Messenger, which folded up.

Yarnell has a grammar school and four churches: the Community (often considered Presbyterian), the Mormon, Baptist and Catholic. The town has a Chamber of Commerce and one civic club, the Wranglerettes, a semi-social organization, whose first major project was the purchase of the Community Hall, now used as a church, Chamber of Commerce, banquet hall, get-together club for teenagers, and miscellaneous headquarters. This building cost $3750, every cent of which has long since been paid.

At the present time the Wranglerettes have more irons in the fire than ever before. They have made a $250 initial payment on a fire truck, housed in a building of its own and ready to serve the common good.

Adjoining the Pioneers' Cemetery, where some Indians and old-timers are buried, is the Genung Memorial Park. It was made possible by the combined efforts of Ed Genung, who donated the first acre of land, and the Wranglerettes, who paid $400 for the second acre.

Although the Wranglerettes have $1200 of their own money invested in the project, on August 2 last year the Park was officially dedicated to the people of the surrounding areas. Coughlin, the cattle man, donates all the water for irrigation of the Pioneers' Cemetery and the Memorial Park, while the Wranglerettes furnished the irrigation system at a cost of more than $200.

The street signs throughout Yarnell, like nearly all major improvements in the town, were initiated by the Wranglerettes, toward whose projects the men contribute freely of their time and labor in an amazing demonstration of goodwill and cooperation for the benefit of all. One of Yarnell's chief claims to world-wide fame is the Shrine of St. Joseph of the Mountains, which fittingly puts to a sacred use the beauty of the town's natural surroundings.

In 1934 a small group of inspired men and women organized as the Catholic Action League of Arizona to carry on works of spiritual or corporal mercy, regardless of race or creed.

They selected a rocky fastness half a mile from Highway 89 as the site of the Shrine. Here a wild growth of mountain oak and holly, and grottos built of boulders, form a natural setting for the theme of the Shrine, the Way of the Cross.

Work was started in 1938 with a treasury fund of Alessio Carraro, born near Milan, Italy, comes from a long line of rock artisans. After arriving in this country he combed the west for an appropriate place to realize his boyhood dream of building a rock wonderland of grottos and arcades.

Only the topography of Yarnell could satisfy his stringent requirements. Throughout four years, now, in a space of four acres, he has worked to accomplish his dream. The latest addition to his rockland is his home, atop the long stairway that winds through the grottos, and whose walls are literally penetrated by massive boulders still in place.

Both the Shrine and the Grotto are dedicated to the edification of mankind, and are devoid of any commercial intent.

$38.00 netted from a box social. Much of the work was contributed by League members and others interested in the project, but none of them were artisans in working with stone.

In the search for a sculptor to build the statuary for the Twelve Stations of the Cross, the entire story of the suffering and the death of Jesus, the League came across Felix Lucero, dishwasher in a Tucson cafe. He was a figure that had often been seen building statues in Arizona riverbeds in fulfillment of a vow made twenty years before, during nine days of isolation in No Man's Land.

The League hired Lucero to build the statuary, which he sculptured from reinforced concrete. The finished figures, life-like statues of great beauty, are painted in deep ivory and radiate the inspiration which made them possible.

The words of an inscription at the Shrine summarize the motives behind it.

"The Shrine of St. Joseph of the Mountains was built as an appeal to Americans to promote the spirit of peace in their homes, with an unwavering loyalty toward our beloved America."

The mountainsides neighboring the Shrine lent themselves to the carving of another outstanding project. It is Carraro's Grotto, where a willing imagination can see, in boulders with animal-like features, a host of rocky ambassadors from the world of the wild.

Yarnell is a discovery for arthritics and asthmatics. Some of them, having experienced spells of difficult breathing after drinking chlorinated water elsewhere, made a special request to Mr. and Mrs. Shobe, owners and operators of the Yarnell Water Systems, that they avoid using chlorine.

During a visit of the Health Department official, Mr. Shobe asked about the eventual necessity of chlorination. The official said that all of the five wells, most of them several hundred feet deep, derive their water, not from pools but from veins in granite, and that chlorination should never be necessary. Bacteriological tests conducted by the competent department indicated that the water is safe for drinking purposes without the use of chlorine.

Yarnell is justly proud of its water. Its total hardness is less than one part in five thousand.

The town's battle with the lack of a basic economy has yielded several answers, and Bob Wagner, who built a business out of bones, has proven that other answers exist. When Bob prospered on knick-knacks made of old bones and sold from his covered wagon, he set a pace for originality and fearless determination that others might well follow.

Yarnell needs more pioneers, like Mrs. Ludden and Bob Wagner, whose faith can transform the possibility of failure into the certainty of success. And to those who will receive, Yarnell can also give faith.