The story
Cleator started as a placer gold camp called Turkey Creek in the 1860s and took shape as a settlement when Murphy's Impossible Railroad — the punishing line between Cordes and the mines at Crown King — reached it in 1902. Thomas Cleator ran the store and saloon, and in 1925 he renamed the post office and the whole town after himself.
The railroad was torn up in 1926 and the mines slowly gave out, and Cleator dwindled toward nothing. After James Cleator's death in 1959 his son held the town until 1996. What keeps the name on the map is the Cleator Bar and Yacht Club — a genuinely remote desert saloon (there is no lake) that draws weekend ATV riders off the Crown King road.
What remains today
The old general store, the still-open bar, scattered cabins and railroad grade, and the mine country toward Crown King.
Questions from the field
- Is the Cleator Bar still open?
- Yes — the Cleator Bar and Yacht Club still operates, mainly on weekends, as a stop for off-roaders and travelers on the dirt road up to Crown King. It's the main reason the town isn't fully abandoned.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Cleator — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Cleator's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 27704
- — Arizona Memory Project — Cleator
- — Prescott-area histories — Cleator / Turkey Creek district