Pearce ghost town store
— an adobe storefront the desert never quite took back.
Not only on a wall.
Pearce ghost town store, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“An old adobe store on the dirt main street of Pearce, Arizona. Jimmie Pearce found gold on this hill in 1894 and a town came up around him almost overnight. The Commonwealth Mine kept the lights on for forty years, then the mine closed and most of the town went with it. The general store stayed. It still stands on the corner with the same long porch and the same long view east. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Pearce sits in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Cochise County, about thirty miles east of Tombstone and fifteen miles north of Sunsites, at roughly 4,491 feet of elevation. James "Jimmie" Pearce, a former Tombstone miner, found gold on the hill above the present town site in 1894. The Commonwealth Mine he opened there produced silver and gold for the next four decades and built a town of around fifteen hundred people. The post office opened in 1896 and has stayed open, with one short closure, ever since.
The Pearce General Store is the building most visitors come to see. The adobe walls went up in 1894, and the long shaded porch and pressed-tin storefront were added in the years that followed. The Commonwealth Mine closed in 1942 after the federal War Production Board's Order L-208 shut nearly every gold operation in the country, and most of Pearce emptied out with it. The store stayed. Today the building houses a pottery and gallery and a handful of the original wood-and-glass shelving sits where it always did.
Pearce is reached from Interstate 10 via the Dragoon exit or from US 191 through Sunsites, about an hour and forty minutes from Tucson. The old store keeps short and seasonal hours, and most of the rest of the town is private residences and quiet outbuildings, so visitors are asked to stay on the public street and shoot porches rather than peer through windows. The Chiricahua National Monument turnoff is twenty-five miles further east, which makes Pearce a natural stop on the longer ghost-town and sky-island loop through Cochise County.
