By Terry Munderloh

(This article was originally posted on February 3, 2001.)

Gold and silver were not the only mineral deposits which Arizona pioneers discovered.

In 1879 George Puntenney and his wife Lucy arrived in Arizona, located an abundance of limestone on the south rim of Hell Canyon (Highway 89 crosses Hell Canyon about 40 miles north of Prescott) and built the territory's first lime kiln. Lime was an important commodity in the developing West. It is not only used in making mortar and plaster but also in the manufacturing of glass and castings, the refining of sugar, and the tanning of leather. Lime water, a solution of slaked lime, was used in a myriad of medicinal applications.

Early thespians aspired to stand in the brilliant light created by the oxidation of lime used in theater spotlights, hence the phrase "standing in the limelight."

A small town quickly sprung up around the Puntenney Lime Company operation. A post office was established there on May 20, 1892, and George built a one-room school-house for the area's children. By 1912 it was reported that the Puntenney Lime Company was making shipments to California and other distant points and new lime kilns were under construction.

Three huge vertical lime kilns were erected beside the stone and block load out at Puntenney next to the railroad track. George operated the company until 1929 when he sold it to John Sheffield and Alfred Paul. The kilns are now long gone but a portion of the load out walls still stand, the only remaining testament to the existence of a once-thriving settlement.

On the other side of Hell Canyon beside the old wagon road to Ash Fork the little community of Cedar Glade also mushroomed in the late 1800s, home base for the quarries of the native sandstone mined in the surrounding areas.

The settlers of Cedar Glade apparently mistook the sea of juniper trees flowing across Wagon Tire Flat for cedars, but they did know their sandstone. The Journal Miner newspaper announced in 1895 that the red sandstone for the new passenger depot being built at Jackson Street and First Avenue in Phoenix had been quarried at Cedar Glade north of Prescott.

In 1899 the Santa Fe, Phoenix and Prescott Railroad put William A. Drake in charge of constructing a cutoff line on the railroad between Prescott and Ash Fork. This new alignment would go through Cedar Glade, thus eliminating the steep grade over Rock Butte and do away with the high wooden bridges (whose structural integrity were a source of apprehension for railroad freighters and passengers) along the line.

A heavy steel viaduct was built to span Hells Canyon between Puntenney and Cedar Glade. Concrete piers were laid in the bottom of the canyon rising from bedrock 10 feet below ground surface to a height of 12 feet above ground. The railroad bridge, completed in 1901, is 646 feet long and 186 feet high above the center of the canyon.

Cedar Glade flourished with the infusion of railroad workers stationed there to maintain the new rail line. Herman Schwanbeck built a hotel, general store, and restaurant beside the tracks. He also built a house for his widowed sister-in-law and her 9-year-old daughter Freda to live in and hired them to run the restaurant.

There was no school in Cedar Glade so the children of the community would walk across the railroad bridge to attend school in Puntenney. The teacher had a schedule of when the trains were supposed to come through and would not let the children cross if a train was scheduled.

Claudette Simpson interviewed Freda Schwanbeck Davis in 1981 and Freda told here the following story about the train the teacher missed. "One time, one (train) slipped up on us. I and two others were right in the middle of the bridge when we heard the train whistle. Mrs. Davis said she was a little older than her companions and felt responsible for their safety. She tried to keep her head as the train was bearing down on them. She made the other two hold her hands and they raced for one of the water barrels that were fastened at intervals along the trestle. They hung on to the water barrel as the train went by, it shook the whole bridge, she said. Later the families of the other two children thanked her for keeping her head."

In 1920 the name of Cedar Glade was changed to Drake in keeping with the railroad's custom of naming train stops after bigwigs in the company.

When Henry Ford's Model T sputtered into Arizona the demand grew for better roads. The Ash Fork-Prescott Highway was one of the first highways built by Yavapai County in 1924 and was acclaimed by The Yavapai Magazine to be the peer of Arizona highways. What was once an all day trip over the worse road in Arizona became a pleasant one and a half hour drive and Prescottonians thought nothing of motoring up to Ash Fork just to dine at Fred Harvey's elegant Escalante.

Starting in Prescott the scenic road passed through the boundary of the Veteran's Hospital, wound through Granite Dells around Watson Lake then took a straight beeline through Chino and Lonesome Valley to Puntenney. At Hell Canyon a concrete bridge was constructed between the railroad trestle and the old wagon road crossing of the canyon. The beautiful little bridge with its decorative cement balustrades was an engineering achievement of the time in its own right.

At the north end of the bridge the new road turned northwest to afford a gradual grade of ascension out of the canyon and bypassed Drake. Years later when Highway 89 was rerouted the bridge was abandoned.

On a knoll on the south rim of Hells Canyon a small forgotten cemetery rests in peace, lulled to by fluting breezes blowing through the juniper trees. On the topographic map it is identified as Cedar Glade Cemetery. Nearby still visible remains of the first trail built by hand between Puntenney and Cedar Glade. Today the trail lies mute of the groaning wagons scaling the canyon walls and the old concrete bridge stands forlorn in its fading beauty bereft of travelers. But the 99-year-old trestle still trembles and shakes when an occasional train rumbles over the canyon and whistles a mourning salute to the souls who once lived there.

(Terry Munderloh is an active member of the Historic Trails Committee, and a volunteer at Sharlot Hall Museum Archives.)