Museums in Clarkdale

Clarkdale exists because of copper, and its two museums take that from different ends.

Arizona Copper Art Museum, 849 Main Street, is about copper as a material: what was made from it, how it was worked, and the objects that resulted. It sits in the old high school building, which is part of the interest.

Clarkdale Historical Society and Museum, 900 1st North Street, is about the town: the smelter, the company that built the place in 1912, and the people who lived in it.

Between them they answer the question a visitor usually arrives with, which is why a town this deliberate exists at all in the middle of nowhere. Clarkdale was planned and built by William A. Clark to serve the smelter processing ore from the mines up the hill in Jerome, and almost everything you can see from Main Street follows from that.

Doing it in a morning

The two are a few minutes apart. The Verde Canyon Railroad leaves from the Clarkdale depot and runs three and a half to four hours through country you cannot otherwise reach, and Tuzigoot National Monument is five minutes away, a hilltop Sinagua pueblo with a $10 ticket that also covers Montezuma Castle for seven days.

A sensible morning is one museum, Tuzigoot, and lunch; a sensible day adds the train, which needs booking.

Hours

Both museums are small operations, and small museums keep short and sometimes seasonal hours that change more often than a directory can track. Each listing shows what we hold and when we last checked it. For either, a phone call before setting out is the difference between a visit and a locked door, particularly on a Monday or in the quiet months.

Jerome, fifteen minutes up the switchbacks, has three more museums covering the mining end of the same story; they are on the Jerome museums page.