Buildings of Vidal

Set on Vidal's Main Street, the J. M. Heacock Building is the most substantial structure the crossroad ever raised — walls of desert fieldstone and mortar built to outlast the wood-frame stores around it. It is believed to date to the late 1800s or the first years of the 1900s, when Vidal served the ranchers and miners working the country between the Colorado River and the Whipple Mountains.

Under one roof the building carried the working life of the town. It held an assayer's office — essential in a district where men brought in gold and copper ore from the Whipples and needed its purity tested before it could be sold. Alongside the assayer ran a barbershop and a string of other retail ventures that came and went with the fortunes of the desert.

Its most-remembered feature was the least formal one: at the back of the property the building offered showers, where cowboys coming in off the range could rinse the dust of the desert before doing their business in town. Today the stone shell still stands beside the highway, weathered and boarded but unmistakable — the last real monument of Vidal's commercial heyday.

The trim white-and-blue cottage near the railroad tracks is the only permanent home the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine — known as Sadie — ever owned together in a marriage that lasted forty-seven years. For most of their life together the Earps moved constantly, renting hotel rooms and small houses while Wyatt gambled, prospected, and consulted on Hollywood's early Westerns.

The house itself had already survived one disaster. It stood in the nearby town of Calzona until a fire destroyed that settlement in 1922; the little cottage was spared, then moved to Vidal, where the Earps bought it in 1925. From then until 1928 they lived here through the fall, winter, and spring, retreating to Los Angeles only for the hottest months, while Wyatt worked his “Happy Days” mining claims in the Whipple Mountains a few miles north.

Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles on January 13, 1929, at the age of eighty. A plaque set in a stone-and-cement slab at the cottage records the couple's years here as their “dream-come-true.” The house survives as the single most-visited landmark in Vidal, a quiet desert counterpoint to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral that made its owner famous.

At the Vidal crossroad stood a small roadside cafe run by the Solar Lodge, whose Solar Ranch lay in the desert nearby. No detailed written history of the cafe survives — but by good fortune it was captured on film at the end of the 1960s, when Michelangelo Antonioni shot part of his 1970 film Zabriskie Point at Vidal.

In the film the heroine appears inside the cafe, beneath its “Frostie” and “Squirt” signs, speaking with a gray-haired local named Harold — described as the Solar Lodge motel's only full-time resident, who by the accounts kept with the film died about a year after the shoot. The camera then moves outside to the shaded storefront porch and the townsite strung along the highway.

Because so little of Vidal was ever photographed, this sequence is one of the clearest surviving records of the crossroad as a living place — a working cafe, its interior, and the street outside, caught incidentally by a major motion picture. The stills below are drawn from that footage.

Holly Cemetery is the resting place of old Vidal — a small, remote burial ground in the desert just across the railroad tracks from the townsite and the Earp Cottage. Like the town it served, it is a quiet, weathered remnant of the mining and ranching booms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is incredibly small and largely forgotten. Regional records indexed on Find a Grave document only about twenty-three memorials at the site. A simple rusted iron gate marks the entrance, and the graves hold the early desert homesteaders, ranchers, and miners who worked the nearby Whipple Mountains — the ordinary people whose labor built the crossroad that a famous lawman would later call home.

The society is actively gathering photographs and records of the cemetery and those buried there. If you hold images of Holly Cemetery or family records tied to it, we would be grateful to hear from you through the contact page.