Castle Dome Mine Museum & Ghost Town

August 30, 2018 tarannosaurus

Epic Travel → North America → Mountain States → Arizona → Castle Dome Mine Museum & Ghost Town

Location: Yuma, Southwest Arizona

Time Required: half a day or longer – it’s an hour detour from Yuma to get to the site, and we spent 2.5 hours exploring and could have spent longer

Red Tape/Notes: $15 entry fee for adults. From October 14 – April 30, open 7 days a week and hours are generally 10am – 5pm, but you may want to call or email to confirm. The rest of the year you can call or email to find out when they’re open. Phone: (928) 920-3062; Email castledomemuseum01@gmail.com. Find out more about the site and the museum here.

What’s Nearby?: Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park, Painted Rock Petroglyph Site

This is a great little ghost town and museum, despite the fact that the buildings have been moved from their original sites and many are recreations (albeit from materials salvaged from the original location). In 1878, Castle Dome Landing rivaled Yuma in size, and had all the classic “Wild West” buildings you can think of (a mill, machine shop, blacksmith, a mercantile, and multiple saloons, to name a few). It started as a mining camp, but its location on the banks of the Colorado River gave it an extended life as a steamboat stop for ships traveling north from Yuma with both supplies and travelers who came to enjoy festivities like Mexican Independence Day. The original town site is now underneath Martinez Lake, but seven of the original buildings were transported to the current site, and as many relics as possible were salvaged from the area and used to create the ghost town and museum. The museum is non-profit, and dedicated to the preservation of Castle Dome history and what life was really like in an old west mining town. Best of all, you can actually go in the buildings and use tools in the machine shop, play a few bars on the poorly tuned piano in a saloon, or climb the stairs to the balcony of the doctor’s office. Next to the main town area is a more broadly space area with mine shafts and a few dispersed buildings that are fun to explore.