Helvetia: One of Arizona's Forgotten Ghost Towns

Suffering from years of exposure to the Sonora Desert's baking sun, annual monsoons and voracious termites, a single rusted strand of bailing wire is all that held the makeshift wooden cross together. It's gained a weather-beaten tilt in the last century, but somehow the posture gives the marker an odd, almost knowing stance as it keeps watch over Helvetia's cemetery. It may last another 100 years if its fate remains overlooked by vandals and untouched by developers.

The rotting cross bears no markings. Anything that may have once indicated the person's name has long since vanished.

When he or she died will remain mystery as well. The cemetery's best-kept marker, a beautiful, though small marble headstone, is for a baby who died back in 1907. This cross, by way of its rudimentary construction, predates that marker by some time.

That it was an adult is moderately certain though. Back then as little energy as possible was expended in burials. Sure the mourners cared, but the concrete-hard soil, and supreme effort required just to scratch out a living made gravesites a simple affair. Its occupant, will probably forever unknown--much like the residents and tireless souls who once called the ghost town of Helvetia, Arizona, home.

Copper was discovered in this region before the Civil War. By the late 1890s, the first three productive claims had been consolidated into the Helvetia Copper Company, based out of New Jersey. When the price of copper plummeted in 1911 the mines closed, though they did briefly reopen during WWI.

Today the buildings, which once included saloons, a post office and smelter, are marked only by piles of adobe silently migrating back into the soil. There are, of course, a few rotting timbers that have been overlooked by vandals. Since most of the miners called a tent home, little remains of the bustling southern Arizona metropolis that once boasted a population that peaked at 300.

Helvetia is found on the northwest corner of Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson. The easiest, most dust free way to reach the cemetery is to take the Interstate from Tucson, south toward Green Valley. Turn east on Sahuarita road, then south on Santa Rita Road. Once off Sahuarita road you'll soon be on dirt, though the road is easily passable in virtually any vehicle. (From Sierra Vista you can save some time by taking State Route 83 north from Sonoita, and turning west on Sahuarita. Then turn south on Santa Rita Road, and follow the signs.)

The cemetery is just off the road, on the left as you're heading toward the ghost town of Helvetia. It's hard to miss, though luckily civilization and its insatiable thirst for souvenirs has yet to discover it.

There's no other word for it. The cemetery has the kind of character common in southern Arizona, though altogether too often overlooked. The last time I was there, on cue, a band of 20 or 30 coyotes screeched approval less than 1/4 mile away as dusk fell. As the light disappeared, they grew closer and closer, until finally one or two spotted us from the hillside above.

The alarm was signaled. The howling stopped, and silence again swept over the cemetery--as it has for the past hundred years, when that nameless soul beneath a tilted wooden cross came to his final resting place.

Maybe it's time you pay a visit to this as yet, relatively undiscovered sight in southern Arizona. Better yet, discover a few of your own. You'll be glad you did.