Tombstone Boothill
— — the desert keeps its dead in plain sight.
Not only on a wall.
“A sloping rectangle of caliche and mesquite on the northwest edge of Tombstone. Wooden boards stand where stones never came, painted and repainted by hand over a hundred and forty years. The Clantons and McLaurys rest here, three of them killed in a thirty-second gunfight in 1881 that a small mining town never stopped retelling. The Dragoon Mountains hold the eastern horizon, dry and unbothered. from the studio
Tombstone Boothill, 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.
Boothill Graveyard sits on a low rise at the northwest edge of Tombstone, Arizona, in Cochise County, about seventy miles southeast of Tucson at roughly 4,560 feet. The town was founded in 1879 after prospector Ed Schieffelin filed the Tombstone silver claim, and the cemetery served the community until 1884, when the new city cemetery opened. More than two hundred and fifty marked graves remain, including Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury, and Tom McLaury, killed in the gunfight near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881.
The grave markers at Boothill are not stone. They are pine boards, mostly rectangular, each one painted white and lettered in black, replaced as the desert sun and Cochise County wind wear them down. The epitaphs are blunt in the old Western way: George Johnson, hanged by mistake, 1882. Lester Moore, four slugs from a .44, no Les no more. The Boothill restoration began in the 1940s after years of neglect, with the Tombstone Restoration Commission rebuilding plots from old maps and county records.
Boothill is at the north end of Tombstone on State Route 80, open daily with a small donation requested at the gate house, where a printed plot guide lists each grave by row and number. The walk is short and exposed, with little shade and high summer temperatures often above 95°F. Most visitors come in spring or late fall. The cemetery is run by the City of Tombstone and pairs naturally with the O.K. Corral site and the Bird Cage Theatre, both four blocks south on Allen Street.