Any given day on eBay, you can see about 300 Jerome postcards. Over 99% of those postcard views are "all the usual suspects" such as wide angle views of the entire town, street scenes and dilapidated buildings. The postcard we discuss here is an uncommon view of the Jerome area. Comments are below each photo and graphic.
The above photo is not your typical Jerome postcard view. Not at all. In fact, it really doesn't even show the Jerome most people expect to see. It looks out over Jerome High School to the toxic smoke belching from the Clarkdale smelter stacks several miles away. Note the handwriting on the postcard.
Luckily, the eBay seller put up a high resolution scan of the postcard. We were able to enlarge it to show the Jerome High School and the twin smelter stacks beyond. The toxic smoke was blamed for mass destruction of native vegetation, pastures and crops. Extensive litigation about the smoke impacts spanned years and resulted in the smelter's purchase of "smoke easements." Those so-called easements were simply a license to kill the vegetation on the property of someone who sold an easement. The smelter smoke legacy is still a touchy issue with some in The Upper Verde Valley. Photographers of that era generally avoided showing the smoke plume.
In order for the Jerome High School to be in visual alignment with the Clarkdale smelter stacks, there is only one location from which the photo could have been captured--a point near Old US 89A's entrance to Jerome from the Mingus Mountain area. Note that the handwriting on this picture matches the handwriting on the above photo of the smelter stacks. It's 99% likely that it's the handwriting of famed,. prolific postcard photographer Burton Frasher. Frasher visited Jerome often in the 1930's and 1940's. Back then there wouldn't have been as much traffic as there is now so Frasher would have felt safe standing in the highway to record his photos.
We used Google Maps to create two views to show you where the photographer had to be positioned to get the smelter stacks photo. The low end of the line would be the photographer's POV and the upper end would be the stacks. The line goes right through the old high school.
Here's a closer view of the photographer's POV. He would have been standing near the left end of the line. The high school is at the right end of the line. Jerome proper is to the left of the photographer's POV and totally out of view in the photo.
This 1943 photo of Jerome is a more more typical run-of-the-mill postcard view. It's pretty much the stock-in-trade postcard view everyone expected to purchase and send. It also is a very common postcard on eBay. We added the red arrow to show you where the photographer had to be positioned to get the smelter stacks to line up over the high school.
In some ways, the smelter stack photo is a very creative Jerome view. In addition to the bleak perspective of a cloud of toxic smoke, it shows the tenement, slum-like housing conditions in the low rent area adjacent to Jerome itself.
Here are the sources for the three postcards used in this post:
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