Charles Robson's Arizona Mining World

The Real Make-believe Mining World

A hundred years ago, many of Arizona's mountain ranges were like beehives riddled with gold and silver mines. As a result, today there are an estimated 500 to 1,000 ghost towns scattered about in various stages of decomposition, places where dried-out doors flap and squeak on their twisted hinges and corrugated tin roofs rattle in the searing winds. Other one-time boomtowns exist only in postal records or as items in yellowing newspapers long out of print.

If it were not for a man who loves beehives - real beehives a gold mine that was originally called the Gold Leaf would be like many others, just one more abandoned hole in the desert, largely forgotten and unvisited. Instead the remnant of an old mine in the isolated Harcuvar Mountains a few miles west of Wickenburg has been rebuilt into a one-street "town" and converted into a unique tourist attraction called Robson's Arizona Mining World. Nestled in a hollow near low hills covered with saguaros, ironwood trees, and ocotillos, Arizona Mining World encompasses a 24-room hotel built on the foundation of the original boardinghouse, a restaurant, replicas of old stores, and a collection of old mining equipment culled from territorial-day glory holes and major mining operations across the state, as well as a first-rate exhibit of mineral specimens. There is a small shop where visitors can buy crafts produced by local artisans and other products created in Arizona, but the other stores on Main Street are strictly museums displaying memorabilia from the early part of this century.

Charles and Jeri Robson found these trea-sures everything from pocketknives, new hightop shoes, and tin cans of Log Cabin syrup to unopened bottles of Hanford's Balsam of Myrrh ("For external use on humans and domestic animals") on their many trips to explore old Arizona mining towns like Tombstone, Globe, Bisbee, Pearce, Winkelman, and some in the Yuma area. The Robsons were born in Phoenix and grew up with an acute sensitivity to

the desert land-scape and the his-tory of those who settled here during an era when Stephen Foster songs were popular, travel was dangerous and slow, and air-condition-ing was provided by a breeze through a wet sheet hang-ing over an open window. Both are descend-ed from families of beekeepers and ran-chers, the occupa-tions that became the livelihood of many former min-ers and prospectors.

As a young man, Charles Robson worked briefly as a blacksmith but left that to develop his beehives on a full-time basis. Eventually Robson became a beehive king, moving thousands of his hives from one farming operation to another (the bees are used for pollinating crops). He also patented some inventions related to bee-keeping and pollen collecting, and then he branched out to health-food supplements produced by bees.

Throughout this frenetic business build-ing, Robson continued to collect black-smith tools and anything that was related to old mines.

"Charles and I always wanted to save these irreplaceable pieces of Arizona history, old build-ings, and the min-ing equipment that played such a big part in the develop-ment of the state," Jeri Robson said. "No one else was doing it, so we just had the field to our-selves."

Actually back in the 1940s, a mechanical engineer by the name of Wilbur Johnson had been collecting old mining equipment in a big way when the Robsons were still youngsters. Johnson had grown up in Arizona (his family moved here from Missouri when he was 12), was graduated from the University of Arizona in 1930, and then went to work for the Allis-Chalmers Corp. in Milwaukee. After 15 years there, he came back to Arizona, his wife, Barbara, said, determined to be "a junkman."

But Johnson was not a traditional junkman. He knew heavy equipment thoroughly and combined that knowledge with a purist's sense of history. He scoured the countryside buying or swapping equipment he knew was unique and brought it back to his five-acre lot in what is now central Phoenix. In 1985 he sold a portion of the collection to The Walt Disney Company for use at Tokyo Disneyland.

The bulk of the collection - enough to fill 27 huge trucks was purchased by Robson two years later.

Johnson said Robson first came to him many years ago looking for a ball mill, a machine that pulverizes rocks, to process some trace minerals he was mining in Nevada for use in his vitamin-supplement business. The two eventually built a friend-ship around their shared interest in old tools and mining machinery.

And yet, when Robson bought his ghost town-mining camp, Johnson must have felt a slight twinge. It was what he always wanted to do but never got around to.

"I wanted to set up a mining museum near Apache Junction in 1971," said Johnson, who is now 85. "I bought five acres of land contingent on my being able to get the zoning from Pinal County, but when they gave me the zoning they attached so many conditions to it that I just scrapped the whole thing."

When Robson bought the place that was called the Nellie Meda Mine, he brought Johnson out for a visit and asked his views on how he should reconstruct the community that once was there.

"I'm a purist on historical stuff, and he didn't do exactly what I would have done," Johnson said, "but what the hell, he owned it, and it's his business. It's much more elaborate than anything I would have done."

The machinery that Johnson had collected came from almost every mine in Arizona including the Christmas Mine east of Globe, various Tombstone mines, the Tiger (also known as the Mammoth-St. Anthony Mine) near San Manuel, and the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Now all the cranes and pumps and compressors and related paraphernalia are displayed at the place that once was the Nellie Meda.

Actually Nellie Meda was the mine's second name. Westley Rush, a rancher from nearby Aguila who filed the original claims in 1917 and 1918, named the operation the Gold Leaf because the rock that first revealed the area's riches was speckled with gold that formed a leaflike pattern. Rush had two daughters, Nellie and Alameda, who had helped dig a 115-foot shaft with hand tools. When Phoenix newspaper publisher Ned Creighton acquired the mine in 1933, he renamed it the Nellie Meda Mine in honor of Rush's daughters.

The Real Make-believe Mining World

Creighton had interests in about 20 other mines as well as a lucrative newspaper business. As a result, he was able to obtain financing to drop the shaft to 450 feet. He built a kitchen, recreation hall, and a half dozen cabins to accommodate the workers isolated in the southwestern corner of Yavapai County. While most businesses were struggling in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Nellie Meda Mine prospered, and its shares were traded on the Salt Lake Exchange.

One of Creighton's first employees was Harold Mason, a man who was destined to remain at the mine for 50 years. During World War II, the federal government closed down all mines that were not producing strategic metals, and the Nellie Meda suddenly became an all but useless chunk of 20 acres of lonely desert. Mason, a bachelor who had been living at the place as long as some of the vegetation, evidently liked the solitude, and Creighton liked Mason. He willed the mine to him.

Mason's closest link to civilization was an outpost called Aguila, a tiny farming community a few miles south of the mine, where Robson happened to establish a small manufacturing plant to fabricate wooden frames for beehives. In towns as small as Aguila, sooner or later everyone meets everyone else. Mason and Robson got to know each other. In about 1972, Mason went to Robson at his plant in Aguila and said he'd been having problems with vandals at the old mine. Looking for a way to keep people out, he asked Robson if he'd mind putting some of his beehives on the property. Robson complied, vandalism evidently declined, and the two men developed a closer relationship. At some point, Robson offhandedly mentioned to Mason that if he ever got interested in selling the mine, he'd like to make an offer. Mason kept that idea in the back of his mind for several years. Around 1979, he went to Robson and asked if he was serious about wanting to purchase the place. Robson said he was, and Mason indicated he would stipulate in his will that when he died Robson would have first crack at buying the place. Robson did not know at the time that Mason was suffering from cancer.

Later that year, Mason died in a Tucson hospital. He was 84 years old. He had lived at the mine for 50 years and never had the luxury of electricity or running water. About a year after Mason's death, the executor of his estate called Robson and told him that Mason had indicated in his will that he be given the first option for purchasing the mine.

"At first I wasn't certain what I was going to do with the place," Robson said. "But then we decided to build a mining museum. We brought in 150 semiloads of mining equipment. Fourteen buildings were here. There had been a community here at one time. We rebuilt almost everything and opened to the public January 19, 1992."

Since that time, 50 elderhostel groups have stayed at the place, accompanied by a geologist from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. Although the Robsons have done no advertising, individuals driving lightly traveled State Route 71 have discovered them.

Mining World consists of 20 acres surrounded by two square miles of lush desert leased from the Bureau of Land Management, and there's no shortage of things to do there. Visitors can spend time exploring the late Dick Wick Hall's grocery store, for example. Hall was a grocer at nearby Salome who was best known for his sideline, writing humorous stories about Arizona life. The Robsons bought his store, which had closed in 1950, and trucked it in from Salome, then supplemented its contents with the turn-of-thecentury merchandise from another historic store at Solomonville in the eastern end

The Real Make-believe Mining World

of the state. Adjacent to the grocery, there's a combination barber shop and assay office, and alongside that, there's the Hillside Press, an old newspaper office with an antique linotype machine and a hand press. There's also a museum containing some 20,000 pounds of minerals, including honey-colored wulfenite, deep blue azurite, bright green malachite, Apache tears, and much more. At the end of the street, a storefront houses a steam-run electric generating plant that once powered the lights in Kingman, a town in the northwestern part of the state. The plant is there only as an oddity. All electricity at Robson's is provided by a solar installation, which means there are no utility lines to mar the view. The "old" boardAdjacent to the few original miner's cabins that remain unrestored, the Robsons have installed a sluice visitors can use to pan for gold. Sand from Weaver Creek at the base of Rich Hill, once one of the most lucrative gold mining areas in Arizona, is brought to Robson's, and tiny nuggets can still be found. The area also offers wonderful opportunities for short hikes in a terrain thick with wildflowers, saguaros, and numerous pictographs of bighorn sheep etched in the rocks by prehistoric Indians. This rough terrain also is home to mountain lions, deer, coyotes, kit foxes, ringtails, and javelinas. Somewhere in the ground below the animal tracks, pockets of gold may still exist, but the Robsons aren't looking. Their "gold mine," it is clear, is the huge collection of memorabilia they have assembled on a mine site that is an authentic relic of Arizona's past.

inghouse with its corrugated tin roof has been resurrected as a three-story hotel with comfortable knotty-pine rooms on the inside and rustic pine planks on the outside. Fresh coffee is served each morning on the hotel's enclosed porch, which offers a postcard view of the saguaro forest below.

WHEN YOU GO

To reach Robson's Arizona Mining World, drive State Route 93 about 16 miles north of Wickenburg to the junction of State Route 71. Go west on State 71 for approximately 11 miles. The sign for Robson's is on the right between Mileposts 89 and 90. Turn right onto a maintained gravel road and continue a mile and a half to the entrance. Visitors arriving via U.S. Route 60 will see a big Arizona Mining World sign about 4-1/2 miles after they turn north onto State 71. Ask about panning for gold at the sluice, and be sure to explore the lush desert around Robson's. Wear comfortable walking shoes. Visitors can eat at the Gold Leaf Saloon, a turn-of-the-century restaurant which, despite its name, does not serve alcohol. Accommodations are available in the hotel, shown at the left. The three-story, 24-room hotel was built on the site of the original boardinghouse. An enclosed porch affords superb views of the surrounding saguaro forest. For additional information, contact Robson's Arizona Mining World, P.O. Box M-2, Wickenburg, AZ 85358; (602) 684-5838 or 684-3160.