Harshaw

Harshaw is a ghost town in Santa Cruz County, in the south-eastern part of Arizona. It was settled in the 1870s, in what was then Arizona Territory, as a mining community, and is named after David Tecumseh Harshaw, a cattleman turned prospector who was the first to locate silver in the area successfully. At the town's peak, near the end of the 19th century, its mines were among the highest producers of ore in Arizona; the largest, the Hermosa, yielded approximately $365,455 in bullion over a four-month period in 1880. The town's population grew and declined with the price of silver as the mines and the mill opened, closed and changed hands. The mines shut for the final time by the 1960s, and the town, which had been made part of the Coronado National Forest in 1953, became a ghost town. A few houses, some building foundations, two small cemeteries and dilapidated mine shafts remain; most of the buildings were torn down by locals or by the Forest Service in the mid to late 1970s.

Where it is

Harshaw is a historic site near Patagonia, in Santa Cruz County. It is one of the historic sites in this database, and appears in the statewide ranking of Arizona attractions.

How this ranking was reached

No official visitor count is published for Harshaw, so its score rests on public interest and tourism significance, and is capped below the level a measured attraction can reach. That is why the medium confidence above is not higher. The weighting is explained in full on the methodology page, and every axis is broken out under Facts and sources at the foot of this page.

Note on the data: No official visitor count is published for this attraction.

Sources

• Public interest: Wikimedia pageviews (en.wikipedia, human traffic), 2024
• Coordinates and designations: Wikidata(opens in a new tab)
• County: U.S. Census geography via FCC Area API, resolved from coordinates

Record last verified 2026-08-12.