Hiking the Ghost Town of Fairbanks Arizona

I did a little road trip on August 14 to Fairbank, Arizona, a ghost town that sits along the San Pedro River, about ten miles west of Tombstone.

Fairbank wasn’t always called Fairbank. When the town first got started around 1881, it was known as Junction City, and later Kendall. By May of 1883, was renamed Fairbank, after Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbank, a Chicago investor who helped finance the New Mexico and Arizona Railroad and had a hand in the Grand Central Mining Company in Tombstone.

And that railroad was the reason Fairbank mattered.

Tombstone had plenty of silver, but not enough water to process all that ore. So the ore had to be hauled by wagon down toward the San Pedro River, where the mills were. Fairbank became the closest major rail stop, which turned this little settlement into a busy place for shipping, freight, stages, miners, and anybody else making a living off the silver boom.

For a while, Fairbank was a busy little town.

Then came February 15, 1900.

That was the day Burt Alvord’s gang tried to rob the train at the Fairbank depot. One of the men with him was the infamous outlaw known as Red Ervin. The robbery didn’t go quite the way they planned, and the gang failed to make off with the express money. Still, it gave Fairbank one more colorful chapter in the rough-and-tumble history of southern Arizona.

The town’s fortunes changed again in 1901 when the Boquillas Land and Cattle Company bought the Mexican land grant that Fairbank sat on. Many of the private residents were forced out, although Fairbank hung on for years through ranching and commercial leases.

Eventually, time did what time does.

The railroad moved on. The mines faded. Buildings weathered. Fairbank slowly became a ghost of the busy little town it had once been.

The post office and the last remaining businesses finally closed in 1973. By then, many of the old buildings had fallen into such poor condition that officials required the remaining residents to leave.

Today, Fairbank is quiet.

Really quiet.

But standing there, looking at the old buildings and the river country around them, it’s not hard to imagine the wagons coming through, the trains pulling into the depot, and people making their way through town with silver on their minds and Arizona dust on their boots.

That’s the thing about these old Arizona towns. They may be gone, but if you stand still long enough, you can almost hear them.

Click on pictures to enlarge.