Where is vulture city

Sabrina was buried in a the nearby cemetery. Over 90 souls were buried in the town cemetery and many more in unmarked graves in the area. In , several miners working in one of the large underground chambers were killed. The mining company left much of the ore in place as supporting columns. One large chamber had ore columns that were very rich in gold. The miners were chipping away at these columns when the roof caved in.

One hundred feet of rock collapsed on top of them. The cave-in killed seven miners and twelve burros. They are still buried there legend has it, creating more possible spirits to inhabit the City of Vultures. But fact and fiction seem to blur together in the dust of this historic place. Exploring the nearby restored two story Assay Building, built in , made me feel that I was going back in time.

A Singer sewing machine with its empty chair is poised by an open window, a wooden cabinet with a phonograph stands ready for the next record, a kitchen with canned food still on the shelves seems to waiting for a cook, an old metal bed frame and creaking floor boards enhance that feeling that the people that lived and worked here could be back. I could almost hear music playing and bed springs creaking as I walked through the rooms. A nearby cook house, saloon and brothel with adobe walls are being restored to support the sagging and sometimes missing roofs.

Several more buildings with collapsed walls and rotting roofs stand nearby. The sheet metal covered fuel shack still has the famed red Mobil Pegasus sign above its doorway with a giant Saguaro cacti standing like an attendant by the old fuel pumps. The wooden head frame and engine that lowered mining cars down into the earth and brought them back full of ore still stands above the main shaft of the old mine. A mining cart is perched half way up the steeply inclined frame with cables ready for someone to throw the switch.

The town site has much to offer in its current state. You check in at an old shack now called the tour office. The half mile self guided tour allows you to wander among motors, pumps, rusting car bodies, and old elevator cages as well as the several buildings.

The guided weekend tour will give you all the history and legends of the sites you will experience. The gold mine itself was recently purchased and has reopened to mine the remaining gold due to the recent high gold prices.

However, the ghost town was kept by former mine owner Ron Prat, who is investing a lot of money to restore Vulture City. The previously abandoned mining town has been carefully restored over the last several years and is open for the public to explore. Over a dozen of the original buildings still stand, with more planning to be restored in the near future.

Tour the original assay office, the brothel, the cookhouse, and even stand over the original Nichols Raise, a mineshaft that runs feet straight down.

Self-guided tours are available year-round. Git your fixin's here in our virtual corral, a one-stop shop for brochures, video tours, posters, maps and more. There are tons of events coming up in Wickenburg that you just can't miss! The rock missed and split, and Wickenburg noticed gold inside of it. In another, a vulture he shot fell onto an outcropping with gold. The third is that he simply noticed the white quartz in an outcropping large enough to see miles away, and, knowing that gold is often found with white quartz, decided to investigate.

In some stories, Wickenburg was close to starving at the time of the discovery and vultures were circling him overhead, and he named the mine after them. Whatever the case might be, he staked a claim on the land and began working the mine alone, most likely unaware that his breakthrough would change thousands of lives.

Vulture City sprung up around the mine and stamping mills were brought in to refine the ore. In , it had a number of offices and buildings related to the mine, general stores, saloons and brothels, a butcher selling 10, pounds of meat a month, fruit stands, a cook house and mess hall, a blacksmith shop, boarding houses, even a school. The town was also home to an old ironwood tree that 18 men were hung on throughout its history.

In a recently constructed dam on the Hassayampa River burst after heavy rains, sending a foot wall of water crashing downstream towards Wickenburg.