The Legends of Superior Trails: Pinal to the Arizona Trail

The Town of Pinal
In 1876 the Silver King mine was discovered in the mountains north of present day Superior. As the mine was developed and its production grew, a mill town called Picketpost was developed on the site of an old short-lived Army road construction camp along Queen Creek at one of the few places in the area with a reliable water supply. In 1878 its name was changed to Pinal and it began to grow. By the mid 1880s it boasted one of the largest stamp mills in the state and had an official population of over 800 people with all the attendant businesses and services needed for a town expecting to become a city – hotels, newspapers, banks, restaurants, breweries, saloons, dry goods and drug stores, shoe stores, blacksmiths, and tinsmiths. However, the silver market crashed, production at the mine plummeted, and the town was abandoned; the Post Office was closed in 1891. Some people moved over to the smaller town of Hastings a few miles away, where a larger deposit of copper allowed it to continue to develop and and eventually become Superior.