Back in the outback 1: Hillside

Hillside is a tiny hamlet in southwestern Yavpai county located on the Date Creek road which starts at the Bagdad Road near Yava. The road continues on to Congress, although it is dirt. Don't let the county warning sign deter you. They have those waivers on all the county dirt roads. As you travel, remember that 80 years ago this was the best north/south road across our state, according to William Peck, who has contributed a number of articles on this area of the county to the Sharlot Hall Museum archives. (This must mean that it is the same road taken by my Phoenix grandparents when they drove to their new warm-weather home from the Dakotas in 19-aught-16.)

Hillside has been around a while, as the 1885 date on the old store indicates. But... the highway sign on the Yava-Bagdad road said "Hillside store now open." No, it was not the Saturday that dotter and I showed up. As I recall, another Prescott blogger passed that way recently and also found the store closed. Not that Hillside and environs add up to a real market, but a general store is always an important meeting place out in the far countryside. (I wonder if any reader might know whether the store is ever open these days.)

In addition to the store, there is a church...

...and a school/school district with 28 students when last counted.

It's a two-bus school district serving ranches, miners, and locals in a not too ancient set of buildings built in Hillside sometime in the 1940s after the old schoolhouse in Yava, 4 miles up the pike, burned down. With 21 qualified voters in Yava and an equal number in Hillside, where to locate the school, then serving 11 students, was a contentious issue, according to one of Peck's articles. (That, by the way, was why this blog was not written last night -- I was quite caught up in his memoirs and my writing time ran out!)

Population? Data for Arizona from the 2000 census, though listing places with as few as 150 people, didn't bother to include Hillside. Be that as it may, Hillside has been around for a good many years. After all, it is located on an important branch of the Santa Fe, now the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, that runs between Phoenix and the mainline across northern Arizona.

About the Santa Fe, Peck wrote in 2002, watch for a train along the east side of the road. This is a working railroad and a dozen mile long trains a day wind through our mountains. As recently as three years ago, our sleepy little burg was the origin of a trainload of ore a day. Thousands of cattle have taken their last trip to the slaughterhouse from our former stockyard.

It was hard to figure out just what of the railroad siding structures were still in business and which abandoned. If we had been lucky, a train might have passed our way while my camera was out, but it wasn't to be.

I think I can hazard a guess that this was the conveyor belt that moved copper ore from trucks onto railroad cars, whence it was shipped to a refinery in the eastern part of the state. When we first moved into Arizona in the aught-80s, a drive on the many-curved Bagdad road on any weekday meant competing for the right of way with the speeding Dickey trucks that hustled ore between the big mine and the Hillside loading docks.

Abandoned or not? Hard to tell.

This building (above) appeared to still be in use; don't know about the lower.

One missing Hillside picture is the bigger mobile park; the one shot that didn't work is the house high up on the hilltop. Fortunately, The Prescott Chronicle has a good image in a recent post. If you want to follow up on any of the Hillside articles at the archives, pop the word "hillside" into the search window and take it from there.

Streets of Confusion

How come street names are always changing in Prescott, huh? Like our most famous chameleon street, Grove-Miller Valley- Willow Creek. My presumption is that the city grew by accretion and that each of these streets was already so well established in its home turf that change would have been impossible. So we have street signs like the one above, at the corner of Gurley and Grove/Miller Valley.

OK, here's the spot where it changes -- the street bends toward the northwest right (sorry, left) at the Lincoln Street crossing (above.) The next change occurs up at Formerly Five Points, where Iron Springs Road takes off northwest and Miller Valley segues into Willow Creek. Too much dangerous traffic to try to document that switch!

Here's the other favorite point of changing streets. Right at the Fry's corner on Miller Valley where Fair turns into Hillside and vice-versa. A street map certainly helps when you're trying to navigate our fair city!

Vintage RR Stations

In case you were wondering, those two splendid old red buildings on the left side of Iron Springs Road as you head out of town are the real thing. The building above was the Santa Fe passenger station at Hillside; the other came from Drake, as I recall.

Today Hillside station is an excellent restaurant and Drake station houses Western relics and antiques. A third member of this set remains in Skull Valley, where it serves the local historical society.

I don't know if there is a station remaining at the Iron Springs community -- it certainly was a busy location in the summer many years ago. My Mom tells of the "weekend warriors" in the 20s and 30s who took the train every weekend from Phoenix and back to join the wife and children who were in the mountains for a cool summer at Iron Springs.

I had the good fortune to ride the Santa Fe from the Valley up to Williams in ought-46. The passenger train consisted of a combination freight/Railway Express car and a combo mail/observation car. Most readers are probably too young to remember what an observation car was -- a lounge car with unassigned seats. But most important was a little open air "porch" at the back -- that's where the politicians stood to wave to the crowds on their whistlestop tours.

The run up to the main line left Phoenix at four in the afternoon -- so you could see the Hassayampa River down near Wickenburg and, later, the small canyon of Kirkland Creek. It was dark well before we reached Prescott, unfortunately, because I was looking forward to seeing the Dells from the train.

I don't recall the train stopping at either Hillside or Drake.