Jerome began not as a picturesque hillside town but as an industrial settlement built around extraordinarily rich copper deposits in Arizona's Black Hills. Indigenous peoples had long known and used the region before American prospectors arrived in the nineteenth century. Claims staked in the 1870s drew investors to a steep site above the Verde Valley. The United Verde Copper Company, organized in 1883, struggled at first with transport and finance, but the arrival of powerful capital and improved smelting methods turned the district into a major producer.

William A. Clark, a Montana mining magnate and later U.S. senator, acquired control in 1888. Rail connections, a large smelter, and expanding underground workings accelerated development. Jerome incorporated in 1899 and grew into a crowded company-dominated town terraced along unstable slopes. Workers arrived from Mexico, southern and eastern Europe, China, and across the United States. Ethnic neighborhoods, boarding houses, saloons, churches, stores, and labor organizations reflected both diversity and segregation. The wealth extracted below ground flowed unevenly to owners, managers, and wage earners.

Mining was dangerous. Fires, explosions, cave-ins, toxic fumes, and industrial disease shaped daily life. A disastrous 1894 fire and another in 1899 destroyed large portions of the commercial district, which was rebuilt with brick and stone. Labor conflict accompanied the hazards. During the First World War, company power and wartime nationalism culminated in the 1917 Jerome Deportation, when armed vigilantes forced suspected Industrial Workers of the World members and sympathizers onto trains and expelled them, violating civil liberties in the name of order and production.

The United Verde Extension mine, developed by James S. Douglas, added another productive operation and helped push Jerome's population toward perhaps 10,000–15,000 in the 1920s. Intensive excavation made the ground itself move. Faulting and subsidence cracked buildings and shifted streets; the town's famous “sliding jail” moved downhill from its foundation. Smoke and waste from mining damaged vegetation and water. During the Depression, Phelps Dodge took control of United Verde, modernized operations, and eventually shifted smelting activity, but declining ore grades narrowed the town's future.

The mines closed in 1953. Jerome's population collapsed, buildings emptied, and demolition or decay threatened the remaining town. Residents who stayed promoted the place as a historic “ghost town.” Artists, craftspeople, and tourism businesses arrived, reusing miners' cottages, hotels, and commercial blocks. Jerome State Historic Park opened at the Douglas Mansion, interpreting the mining industry and local community. National Historic Landmark designation in 1967 recognized the district's exceptional concentration of resources associated with copper extraction and company-town life.

Today Jerome's steep streets preserve industrial ruins, civic buildings, houses, and dramatic views, but preservation remains complicated by unstable geology, fire danger, visitor traffic, and limited housing. Popular stories of ghosts coexist with harder histories of labor, immigration, environmental damage, and corporate influence. The historic district is significant because an entire urban landscape records the copper cycle: discovery, investment, technological expansion, conflict, boom, collapse, and adaptive reuse. Its tilted buildings and layered neighborhoods make that history physically visible. The continuing community ensures that Jerome is a lived-in town, not a staged remnant of the mining boom.