As you might gather from the comments below, while we were
taken with the setting, the town of Sedona left us bemused at best. With Sharon
still ailing, our plan for Tuesday was to drive the Red Rock State Park and
then to take it easy and do a few travel chores.
Our host Sebastien, proprietor of Desert Rose B&B, had a
better plan for us, however. Just west of where we are staying in Cottonwood, a
working class suburb of Sedona proper, is an old ghost town, reborn as a rather
charming hillside tourist trap. Jerome began in the late 19th
century as a mining town. It has a rich history not just in mining, but as a
scene of violent attacks against labor carried out by the mine owners, the
Douglas family, in the second decade of the 20th century. By
mid-century, however, the town, which had suffered multiple fires and mine
collapses, was all but abandoned. It had 50 residents in 1950. When the family
tried to sell their home there for $10,000 in the 1960s they could not get it,
and instead gave the house to the state which made it into a park. From that
point, the town became a magnet for artists, hippies and the like, and then an
attraction
The family name was vaguely familiar to me and only as we
toured their home did it come to me that Lewis Douglas, one of the several sons
of the founder, was a minor official in the New Deal and then rose to greater
prominence as a supporter of Harry Truman. Their rather lovely house, built in
the 1910s, has been preserved, but sadly, as a museum rather than an historic
house, so only the exterior, surrounded by mining exhibits, endures. It was fun
seeing it, enjoying the setting and rambling through the town.
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| Side of the house, as you approach from the parking lot |
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| This is the front, pointed uphill toward the town |
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| Mine car exhibit in front of the house |
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| The town |
In the afternoon, we toured by car, and I managed to capture
a few more images of this amazing landscape.
Dinner was at a little place in nearby Cornville called
Harry’s Hideway, another suggestion of Sebastien’s. Harry, apparently, was a
programmer, turned chef, who worked in Phoenix and then decided to open a
restaurant here that would reflect purely his own style and values. Wow! Sedona’s
L’Auberge, the first night, was elegant and charming, if a bit overdone; Harry’s
Hideaway is the real deal, a place for folks who take dining and food
seriously.
Today, we are off to the Canyon de Chelly (thanks Jeanne), a
240+ mile drive.
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