Goldfield ghost town
— — a town the desert tried to take back.
Not only on a wall.
“A clapboard town on the slope between Apache Junction and the Superstition Mountains. The original Goldfield boomed and broke twice in the 1890s, then sat empty long enough for the wood to silver and the rails to disappear. What stands today is a careful rebuild on the same ground, with a working narrow-gauge railroad and a mine tour that goes underground. The mountain behind it looks the same as it did when the first ore wagons came down. From the studio.
Goldfield ghost town, 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.
Goldfield sits about four miles north of Apache Junction along State Route 88, the old Apache Trail, on the shoulder of the Superstition Mountains in Pinal County, Arizona. The original camp was founded in 1893 around the Mammoth Mine and grew to roughly 1,500 residents before the high-grade vein gave out in 1898. A short second boom followed in 1921. The reconstructed town on the same ground opened in the 1980s as a tourist site and now operates a 20-inch gauge railroad, a reopened mine tour, and a working assay office.
The Superstition Mountains rising behind the town are volcanic, the eroded edge of a caldera that collapsed about 18 million years ago. The dark cliffs are welded tuff and dacite, the same rock that feeds the long-running Lost Dutchman legend and gives the range its name. Goldfield itself sat above a gold-bearing quartz vein in older Precambrian schist, intruded by later mineralizing fluids. The Mammoth Mine pulled gold from that contact zone. The contrast between the pale board-and-batten town and the bruised purple wall of the mountain is most of why the view holds.
Goldfield is open daily and free to walk through; the mine tour, the narrow-gauge railroad, and the reptile exhibit each carry their own ticket. The town sits at roughly 2,000 feet, low enough that summer afternoons run past 105°F and the comfortable window is October through April. Lost Dutchman State Park lies about two miles further up SR-88 and makes the natural pair for the visit. The drive from central Phoenix is around 40 miles east on US-60 and then north on Idaho Road.