What it is
The Cave Creek Museum is a small town museum on Skyline Drive, a few blocks above the saloon strip, that has been collecting the Desert Foothills since 1970. The Cave Creek Historical Society formed in 1968, opened the museum two years later, and still runs it largely with volunteers who keep winter hours, October through May, and close in the summer except for scheduled programs. Inside are the Hohokam collections from the creek, pottery, stone tools and metates; the mining and ranching rooms, with the assay equipment and tack of a district that produced gold from the 1870s; and a gallery of art donated over fifty years.
Outside, on the grounds, are the three things that justify the drive. The tubercular cabin is a one-room shack built in 1920 by the Desmount Sanitarium for a patient who came to the desert to breathe, and it is the only such cabin known to survive in Arizona; it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Golden Reef Stamp Mill is a ten-stamp ore crusher built in California in 1880, hauled to a Cave Creek mine and donated when the mine closed in 1993; the museum calls it the only fully functioning ten-stamp mill in the state and runs it on demonstration days, which you will hear from the parking lot. The First Church of Cave Creek, a small frame chapel from 1947, stands beside them, along with a 1900 arrastre, the mule-drawn stone mill that preceded the stamps, and the 1900 bandshell that once stood downtown.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s museums tell the city’s story and the Western Spirit tells the West’s, and neither tells this one: what the Desert Foothills were before the resorts, which is mines, cattle and sick people. The health-seeker chapter in particular is the missing piece of the whole north Valley, and the cabin here is the only place to stand inside it. Our health-seekers note tells the Scottsdale side; the museum has the building.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town, five minutes off Cave Creek Road up Skyline Drive. Open afternoons Wednesday to Sunday and from mid-morning Friday, October through May; closed in summer. Small admission, free parking, an hour to see everything. Pick a stamp-mill demonstration day if you can.
When to go
Any afternoon, October through May, within the museum’s season. It is never crowded. Fridays are the one day it opens in the morning, which makes a Friday the natural Cave Creek day: museum at ten, Frontier Town and lunch at Big Earl’s at noon, a hike at Spur Cross when the light softens, dinner on the strip.
Stamp-mill demonstration days are posted on the museum’s calendar a season at a time. The mill is run only a few times a year, and hearing ten iron stamps drop on ore is a sound almost nobody alive has heard; if your dates can bend, bend them.
Summer is closed, apart from scheduled tours and talks. Check before driving up.
What to see, in order
- The tubercular cabin, at the back of the grounds. Go first, while you have the patience to stand in a one-room shack and think about what it meant to live in one for a year.
- The Golden Reef Stamp Mill and the tramway car beside it, with the 1900 arrastre for comparison; the two together are a short course in how gold was got out of this rock.
- The church, 1947, which served the town until it outgrew it.
- Inside: the Hohokam room, then mining and ranching, then the art gallery if there is time.
With kids, and the neighborhood
An hour works for children over about six; the outdoor exhibits are the draw, and on a demonstration day the mill is unforgettable. Younger ones will prefer the gallows and gunfights at Frontier Town down the hill. Our Cave Creek guide puts the museum in the morning, between the hike and lunch, and that is the right order. For the Hohokam side of the story, the Salt River community’s Huhugam Ki Museum in Scottsdale is the companion visit.
The story
Cave Creek’s history is three overlapping ones, and the museum is arranged around them. The Hohokam farmed and built along the creek for most of a millennium, and their petroglyphs and ruins are still scattered through Spur Cross to the north; the museum’s archaeological collection comes from those sites. The miners arrived in the 1870s, after the Cave Creek Mining District was organized in 1873 and William Rowe found gold on Gold Hill in 1874, and for sixty years the hills produced modestly from mines with names like the Phoenix, the Maricopa and the Golden Reef. The stamp mill is the mining chapter’s great relic: built in California in 1880, shipped and hauled here, run until the Golden Reef closed in 1993, and then given to the museum, where volunteers restored it to working order.
The third story is the one Arizona likes least to tell. Before antibiotics, the only treatment for tuberculosis was dry air and rest, and tens of thousands of patients came to the Arizona desert for it. Phoenix and Scottsdale had sanitariums; the poorer and more desperate went farther out, to tent camps and cabins in places like Sunnyslope and Cave Creek. The Desmount Sanitarium built small cabins here around 1920, each housing a patient who hoped a winter in the dry would save a lung. Most of the cabins across the state rotted or were torn down. This one survived, was moved to the museum, and was listed on the National Register as the last of its kind. The historical society that saved it was founded in 1968, as Phoenix’s subdivisions began to climb toward the Carefree Highway, by residents who could see what was coming and wanted the old town recorded before it went. The museum opened in 1970. Cave Creek incorporated in 1986 for the same reason.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale was a health-seeker town too. Edward Graves turned a farmhouse at Scottsdale and Indian School roads into a tuberculosis retreat in 1910 and the town’s winter trade ran on sleeping cottages, and the 1918 flu note on this site follows what that meant. Scottsdale’s own tuberculosis buildings are gone; the Cave Creek cabin is the one place in the north Valley where you can stand inside that history, which is why it belongs on our museums list even though it is twenty miles past the city line.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, north into town, then right on Skyline Drive a few blocks past Frontier Town; the museum is on the left at Basin Road, with a small free lot. Forty minutes from Old Town, twenty from the Pinnacle Peak resorts. There is no transit; drive.