“Welcome to Arizona’s Country Town. We are growing with new businesses in the area and our quad city areas are welcoming new residents from all over this great country. We have so much to offer for all ages with activities accommodating for those who prefer indoor or outdoor.
We take pride in our li’l town and keeping its history for all the travelers passing through.
Stop by and say hello.” – Mayor John Hughes
A Short History Lesson
Levi Bashford, a prominent Prescott store owner and businessman, built the first mill here in 1876. Iron King, DeSoto, McCabe and Blue Bell are a few of the mines old timers in Humboldt remember.
All this ore needed a smelter. The first one was called the Val Verde, giving the area its first name. Then Cecil Fennell acquired land and water rights for the smelter in the 1880s and Val Verde became a company-owned town.
After the smelter changed ownership in early 1904, it burned down in September that year. It would take until 1906 for a new owner to build a new, bigger and better smelter.
Since Val Verde Smelter no longer was involved, the name “Humboldt” was selected in 1905, the namesake of the German naturalist, explorer and traveler Baron Friedrich Heinrich von Humboldt. (However, it is quite unlikely he ever traveled to this part of Arizona).
Humboldt had the first dialing telephone system in the region.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality started prep work Jan. 3 on taking down the smelter at the Iron King Mine Humboldt Smelter Superfund site. Dismantling started Jan 18 and the project was expected to last six weeks.
The former smelter brick smokestack and attached brick structure have been naturally deteriorating through the years. ADEQ will encapsulate the materials on site and install additional fencing to limit access to the area.
The former Humboldt Smelter property is about 0.5 miles east of State Route 69, south of the intersection at Third and Main streets. The Environmental Protection Agency manages the federal Superfund site and will address the encapsulated material.
Contact deweysmelter@azdeq.gov with your project-related questions. For further information on the project scope go to https://static.azdeq.gov/wpd/dh-stack-2021dec.pdf.
