Cerro Gordo style headframe Crown King
— the wood that outlasted the silver.
Not only on a wall.
“A wooden headframe still standing above an old shaft in the Bradshaws, the kind that once hauled ore from the Tiger and the Philadelphia. The road up from Cleator is twenty-six miles of dirt. The town below has a saloon, a few cabins, and the ponderosas that grew back after the mines went quiet.
Cerro Gordo style headframe Crown King, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Crown King sits at roughly 5,800 feet in the Bradshaw Mountains of Yavapai County, Arizona, a former mining settlement built up in the 1880s around the Crown King Mine. Silver and gold drew the first prospectors; what kept the place alive long enough to leave behind cabins and a saloon was the narrow-gauge Bradshaw Mountain Railroad up the canyon, since dismantled. The nearest paved road ends below in Cleator. The climb in passes ponderosa pine, manzanita, and a long sequence of switchbacks gaining about four thousand feet.
Most of the wooden headframes in the Bradshaws came down decades ago, scavenged for lumber or burnt by lightning. The few still standing above the Tiger and Oro Belle workings lean a little, but the joinery holds. Below them, the shafts go dark fast. Ravens nest in the cross-bracing. There are no signs at the structures, no railings, no recorded guide explaining anything. The wind through old timbers does what wind does through old wood, and the rest of the canyon stays quiet.
The road to Crown King climbs from Cleator on the Crown King Road, roughly twenty-six miles of unpaved switchback gaining about four thousand feet. High clearance is recommended; four-wheel drive is wise in winter, when snow does fall above five thousand feet. The town has a general store, a saloon dating to 1898, and a handful of cabins. The mining headframes scattered through the surrounding hills sit on a mix of patented claims and Prescott National Forest land. The shafts are open and unstable; stay out.