John Stanley

Special for The Republic

Poston built a Temple to the Sun on Primrose Hill near Florence

He lobbied Washington to create the Arizona Territory.

He wrote a really bad poem called "Apache-land."

Charles Poston, the "Father of Arizona," is often described as a sun worshiper.

It's easy to see how the story got started. Poston — explorer, writer and businessman — became fascinated with Zoroastrianism during a trip to India in 1868 and apparently became an adherent.

He built a Temple to the Sun on top of Primrose Hill (now Poston Butte) near Florence in 1878. Although it was festooned with a giant blue-and-white flag featuring a huge red sun, the temple was very much a makeshift affair, fashioned from the ruins of a prehistoric Native American tower.

When he ran short on funds, Poston wrote to the shah of Persia, the ancient homeland of Zoroastrianism, for financial support. But the shah never answered and the "eternal" flame in the crudely built temple soon went out.

Before long, the enterprise became known as Poston's Folly.

But was he actually a sun worshiper?

No. Although Zoroastrianism's supreme god, Ahura Mazda, is strongly associated with the sun and fire, the religion is not, by any stretch of the imagination, sun worship.

Myths aside, Poston is one of the most accomplished — and eccentric — characters in Arizona history. And that's saying something.

Born in Kentucky in 1825, Charles Debrille Poston moved to Nashville and read law while clerking for the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Like many a young man of the era, he was drawn to California and, by 1851, was working in a Customs House in San Francisco. There he signed up for an expedition to explore the Southwestern land that would become part of the Gadsden Purchase, the details of which were still being negotiated.

After surviving a shipwreck near Guaymas, Mexico, Poston collected mineral samples across southwestern Arizona. At Fort Yuma he met and impressed commander Samuel Heintzelman. A few years later the men formed the Sonora Exploring and Mining Co.

By 1858, more than 1,000 miners were working the Heintzelman Mine (later renamed the Silver Queen Mine) in the Cerro Colorado Mountains northwest of Tubac.

The mining camp essentially was an independent city, over which Poston served as both mayor and priest, performing any civil or religious rite needed, including marriages and baptisms.

In his memoirs, he recalled it as an idyllic time: "We had no law but love and no occupation but labor. No government, no taxes, no public debt, no politics. It was a community in a perfect state of nature."

It's not known what the workers thought of the arrangement.

Like many frontier operations, the mine closed after federal troops went back East to fight in the Civil War. So Poston headed to Washington, D.C., where he argued tirelessly that a separate Arizona Territory should be carved from the sprawling Territory of New Mexico.

His efforts paid off Feb. 24, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Arizona Organic Act. A few weeks later Poston was appointed the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the new territory. He was elected the territory's first delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1864.

In 1868 Poston went on an extended trip abroad, visiting China, India, Egypt and Europe. He lived in London for six years, working as a newspaper editor and foreign correspondent. And he wrote several books, including "The Sun Worshippers of Asia" and a long, astoundingly bad poem called "Apache-land."

Upon his return to the U.S., Poston was appointed head of the General Land Office in Florence, where he worked from 1877 to 1879. That's when he built the Zoroastrian temple — generally regarded as the first in the country.

Afterward, Poston worked a number of jobs in Tucson and Phoenix. In his later years he could often be found in the lobby of the old Adams Hotel in Phoenix, regaling all who would listen with tales from Arizona's past.

He died in 1902 and was laid in a pauper's grave.

But in recognition of Poston's efforts to create and promote the Territory of Arizona, his remains were exhumed in 1925 — the centennial of his birth — and interred within a stone pyramid at the site of his Temple to the Sun.