Oatman main street and burros
— — a gold-town the burros never left.
Not only on a wall.
“A single street of weathered storefronts between the Black Mountain switchbacks, halfway between Kingman and the Colorado River. Descendants of the miners' pack burros wander the road, push their noses at car windows, and nap in the shade of the Oatman Hotel. The gold ran out in the 1940s. The burros stayed. — from the studio
Oatman main street and burros, 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.
Oatman is a small former gold-mining town in the Black Mountains of Mohave County, Arizona, at about 2,710 feet of elevation. It sits on a surviving stretch of old U.S. Route 66, roughly twenty-eight miles southwest of Kingman, on the road that crosses Sitgreaves Pass before dropping toward the Colorado River. The town was founded around 1915 and peaked in the early 1930s when the Tom Reed and United Eastern mines pulled more than thirty-six million dollars in gold from the surrounding hills. Population today sits around one hundred.
The wild burros that roam Oatman's main street are descendants of pack animals released by miners when the gold played out. They are protected by the Bureau of Land Management and considered feral, not tame; the recommended food is hay cubes sold by the shops, not human snacks. Staged gunfights run on the street most weekends. The Oatman Hotel, built in 1902, is where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard reportedly spent a night of their honeymoon in 1939. The town is open daily; expect heat above 100°F in summer.
The Black Mountains are a north-south range of Precambrian and Tertiary volcanic rock, dark basalt and andesite weathered into the broken silhouette that gives the range its name. Sitgreaves Pass crests at about 3,550 feet just east of town, and the road's tight switchbacks are one of the steepest surviving sections of original Route 66. The gold around Oatman occurred in epithermal quartz veins cutting the volcanics, worked from the 1860s through the 1940s before wartime federal order L-208 closed most domestic gold mines.