EDITOR'S NOTE: As of June 2024, Ruby is no longer open to the public. This story was published in an earlier issue of Arizona Highways.
TAWNY HILLSIDES covered in tall grasses and dusty green mesquite trees ring the town of Ruby near Arizona’s southernmost edge. Those hillsides run up to bare rock ridges the sun catches first in the morning and leaves last at dusk. In dry months, when vegetation has curled tight while waiting for rain, the view from those ridgelines takes in a landscape pitted with holes that miners dug on their hunt for precious metals.
Ruby was built to house those miners. The population boomed to 1,200 when nearby veins of lead and zinc were yielding some of the largest reserves in the country. Houses couldn’t be built fast enough, so miners and their families lived in tents terraced up the hillsides. The mill ran nonstop, belching smoke and bellowing noise over the valley every day but Christmas and the Fourth of July. After the mine closed in the 1940s, taking the mercantile and post office with it, the town emptied. The Eagle-Picher Lead Co. owned most of the houses, so it dismantled and removed the lumber structures and canvas tents.
That left a 362-acre pocket of private land surrounded by the Coronado National Forest, with about a dozen buildings made of adobe or cement, 700,000 tons of sand-like tailings and a trio of lakes. The lakes and the fish in them caught Richard Frailey’s eye, and in 1961, he and a group of families from Tucson purchased the town from the last in a series of overly optimistic prospectors. In Ruby, Frailey, an avid fisherman, and his friends saw a private resort.
To keep even more of the town from being disassembled for parts, the owners have hired a series of caretakers. As the book Ruby, Arizona: Mining, Mayhem, and Murder recounts, the job has drawn “all kinds of people, some more colorful than others.” There were “the hippies,” who were told two families could move in; Frailey then returned to find 20-some people living in town, tearing up walls and cabinetry for firewood. There were the “good ones,” such as the former mine mechanic and the oil painter who spent the quiet hours building a sailboat and then left for the sea. There were the wilder ones, such as one who weathered a rattlesnake bite for four days before finally letting himself be taken to the hospital just as his kidneys began to fail; he was asked to leave after poaching white-tailed deer and javelinas.
What seems clear to Patricia “Pat” Frederick, Frailey’s daughter and one of Ruby’s current owners, is that there will be no keeping Ruby without a caretaker — and no keeping a caretaker without giving that person a job that’s more distracting than walking loops along the quiet streets. So, from Thursday to Sunday — when people can hike through town, explore its emptied buildings, fish the lakes and camp — the caretaker’s job requires welcoming guests, preparing for and cleaning up after them, and enforcing a few rules.
“It’s tough,” says Howard Frederick, Pat’s husband. “In order to do this kind of work, you have to love to be alone — a lot — but you also have to be good with the public.”
Ruby is a place of contradictions. As a small town cut out of the wild Sonoran Desert, it’s a deeply altered landscape. But it’s also a recovering ecosystem that draws students and researchers who study its role as a wildlife refuge. As the latest caretaker, Leslie Cherry, has discovered, the place comes with deafening silence and long stretches of solitude, but she’s also found it comes with a deep sense of connection to the people with a history in Ruby, whether that’s family members born there or those with a habit of coming to town for the bass fishing.
When Cherry first traveled the road to Ruby, she caught it after two very dry years. Her time working with wildland fire crews meant she looked at every brittle scrub oak and mesquite leaning over the road and saw a landscape that one misspent match would send up in flames. Still, Cherry wanted a change from years working as an in-home nurse in Phoenix, and something more like the time she spent as a wilderness guide, so she took the job. In the first few weeks, the place seemed determined to scare her off. A bark scorpion stung her in bed, and kissing bugs fell from the century-old ceiling in the former courthouse converted to the living quarters that come with the job. Then, the monsoon brought heavy rain, and the roof leaked.
“I live in a house that was built” — she pauses and chuckles — “a long time ago. It’s adobe covered with stucco, so the more it rained, the more I worried. But it was so beautiful. … And then the Sonoran Desert did what the Sonoran Desert does — everything turned green and bloomed.”
July is typically a quiet month for Southern Arizona tourist spots, but Ruby busied with people curious to see the town’s lakes overtopping their banks into campsites, impromptu waterfalls in the washes and morning glory vines lacing one tree limb to the next.
WHILE GRAND NOTIONS for the town have been floated over the years — golf courses, movie sets, recreation centers — Pat reads those as an exercise in imagination. Instead, she says, “The future of Ruby is to support conservation.”
When the Fredericks come to Ruby, they stay in a house that once belonged to the town doctor. By the time Pat and Howard inherited care of Ruby, the house’s timber beams and adobe walls had collapsed, but Howard could still trace the floor plan in the fallen pieces. He put them back in place, and now, the house looks approximately as it did when the doctor lived there, setting bones, delivering babies and picking bits of blasted rock out of miners’ backs and calves. When the Fredericks come, Howard cooks and Pat paints and writes, and they sit on the patio, drink wine and soak in the place. They spend holidays in Ruby with family. Their two sons, one of whom lives in Tanzania, and two granddaughters insist on regular visits.
A couple more houses may be cleaned up well enough to host guests, but overall, Howard says, “This is about as changed as Ruby’s going to be.” Pat adds: “My son says, ‘Don’t worry about it. If the buildings fall down, it’s still the most beautiful place on Earth and you can still come up here.’ ” She carries a notebook anyway, adding to the list of things to do — install gutters, mouse-proof cupboards — and jotting notes on Ruby’s history for a book she’s working on about the place and its notable caretakers.
Cattle have been fenced out, so the grass runs deep, and the lakes draw wildlife. Deer prints dot their mud banks, turtles nose around in the algae, and ducks paddle through the water, then pick up their wings, skipping over the surface. A great blue heron, moving from one side of the shore to the next, vanishes among dense willows and cottonwoods. Yellow and orange butterflies dangle from yucca spines like fidgeting blossoms.
Students and researchers come, some staying for months at a time and using the Morton House, once the home of the mine manager, as a base camp. Bird feathers, seedpods, rocks, bits of ore samples and bleached animal bones line bookshelves and windowsills. After researchers with Bat Conservation International came, Cherry began hiking each morning and evening to the benches overlooking the old mine shaft, which now hosts a colony of about 190,000 Mexican free-tailed bats. At dusk, she watched the flickering flow of bats emerge, then fly low toward Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge’s banquet of insects. Then, one September evening, they flew out and up higher than she’d ever seen and headed south for their wintering grounds in Mexico.
When Cherry was hired, she committed to staying for six months. By the time the bats took off, she had lengthened that to a year. Now, she’s thinking some good long while might stretch out in front of her. She’s settled in: wrapping the bed in mosquito netting, sanding the wood floors’ splinters, replastering the walls in a kitchen that comprises a propane-powered refrigerator and a camp cookstove. Rainwater supplies the kitchen sink and the shower, which is solar-heated. The bathroom is an outhouse. Solar panels run the computer, keep the lights on and charge her cellphone.
Cherry’s days start and end with stops at the town museum, in the former schoolhouse, to unlock and lock the door. She looks over the museum contents at the end of each day, scanning photos of Ruby’s residents and the town in the 1930s, lined up over a lake surface rippled with wind, and displays of fogged glass bottles, speckled core samples, rust-pocked axes and a map of the tangled mine shafts.
During work hours, she sits at a computer she’s positioned where she can check reservations and answer emailed questions while keeping an eye on the road into town. Most visitors follow the signs to check in at the caretaker’s house, but every now and then, she has to chase one down to sign a permit and pay the entrance fee. When she heads out, she hangs a “Be Back” sign on the door. Walking around town, she’ll pass Case’s Place, the old confectionery that served ice cream cones for a nickel; houses often named for the families who lived there and now in various states, some almost habitable, some with boards splitting and bare windows framing a view of the sky; the mercantile, site of four murders in the 1920s; and the town jail, built with cement walls and a locked steel door, mostly to serve as a holding tank for people who had too much to drink. (Before the jail was built, according to lore, the deputy sheriff tied the drunks to mesquite trees for a night.) The warehouse and assay office sit on a shelf carved into a hillside.
“I’ll pause in front of those areas,” Cherry says, “and think about what it must have been like.”
There’s no television, and although a classical radio station carries to her car outside, she can’t pick up the signal in the house. In the evenings, she plays her guitar, writes songs or sits on the porch, listening to the hum of insects and taking in dazzling stars. Other than the light from her own windows, nothing disturbs the night. Some nights are so quiet that she hears deer and skunks skittering by the house.
“When I know I have people camped in the tailings, I’ll take my guitar down and say, ‘Hey, can I play you a song?’ ” Cherry says. She knows cowboy poetry, stories and songs from time entertaining at Old West-style cookouts. “That’s what makes the difference — that you spend time alone, then people show up and you have this deep appreciation for having the company.”
When the monsoon rains started last summer, they bared rocks and pooled in washes on the already-rough road into Ruby. Cherry knew her silver sedan couldn’t make the drive out for supplies. For eight weeks between when the rain hit and when the road grader arrived, she was stranded. So, she posted on the nearby town of Arivaca’s community page, asking if anyone coming to Ruby could bring propane for her refrigerator (repeat visitors routinely call ahead, asking if she needs anything). In a matter of hours, a couple drove in a tank of propane and two bags of vegetables from their garden.
“It amazes me,” Cherry says. “It’s a community — but I’m the only person who lives here.”
For more information about Ruby, visit rubyaz.com.