In the midst of the rough and tumble activities of the mining camp at Pearce lived a young woman who would emerge as Arizona’s internationally known impressionist landscape painter. For over 55 years, Mrs. A. Y. Smith made her home in Cochise County and painted its desert and mountain vistas. The paintings she created of nearby Cochise Stronghold, the Chiricahua Mountains, Cave Creek, and even the Grand Canyon would eventually be seen in art shows from Phoenix to Philadelphia, and were sought after by American politicians and European nobility.
Known to family and friends as Effie Anderson Smith, she grew up near the city of Hope, Arkansas where her artistic abilities were discovered and encouraged. Effie was creating oil paintings by her 15th birthday in 1884, and she soon pursued formal art training in the East.
At age 22, Effie and her ailing mother made the journey west to New Mexico in an attempt to save Adelia's health, but in vain. After Adelia's passing, Effie stayed on as a teacher, and soon met a young Scottish immigrant, railroad clerk Andrew Young (A.Y.) Smith. In 1895 Effie and A.Y. came to Bisbee to be married, and so began their exciting life together in the rip-roaring mining camps of the Arizona Territory.
A.Y. Smith soon left his work for the railroad to take on duties as bookkeeper at the Common-Wealth Mine in Pearce. He was promoted to manager, and not long after bought controlling interest in the mine.
Andrew had many occasions to travel to El Paso and to California on mine business, and Effie went along. During the frequent California visits Effie befriended and was mentored by many of the founding artists of the California plein-air impressionist movement in art. Her studies in Oakland, San Francisco, Laguna Beach and Pasadena had a great influence on her approach to painting as she became a prolific desert painter of scenes around the Sulphur Springs Valley, Tucson, the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, and beyond.
Living in Pearce from 1896 to 1941, and after that primarily in Douglas until 1951, Effie’s special love for the mountains and desert vistas along today’s Ghost Town Trail was evident in every painting she created, and in her frequent speaking engagements about her art.
By the late 1940s Effie’s early life as a pioneer and her prolific output of paintings over half a century prompted the Douglas Daily Dispatch to refer to her as “the Dean of Arizona Women Artists”. "...It is the desert and the desert hills and mountains that this artist has glorified, not a land of sand and wasteland, but a country where color runs riot from its desert blossoms to its famous sunsets...."
In honor of her 80th birthday in 1949, the businessmen and citizens of Douglas gathered the paintings they had bought from Effie, or had been given by the artist out of her affection for them, and created a retrospective art show of her work at the Chamber of Commerce building. Effie declared she was as busy at age 80 as at any time in her active life, and had begun a series of paintings depicting scenes along the Coronado Trail. Whether that series was completed is not known.
By 1951 her son Lewis, by then a successful mining engineer like his father before him, helped Effie move into the Arizona Pioneers’ Home in Prescott. Separated from her beloved Cochise County for the first time in over 55 years, Effie spent her remaining years among fellow pioneers from Arizona’s Territorial days. No paintings from her sunset years in Prescott have emerged, if she painted there at all. The last works we know of are from the 1940s, when Effie was increasingly enamored of desert flora.
In April 1955, Effie Anderson Smith passed away at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home, and is buried at Yavapai County’s Mountain View Cemetery. While her husband, baby daughter, and mother are buried in Pearce, Effie is not alone at Mountain View, as other Anderson descendants are buried nearby.
In 1929 the poet Grace Dickinson Sperling from Chicago was a winter guest in the home of the Smiths in Pearce. During a conversation, Grace commented to her friend Effie, "You surely love this country, don't you?" And Mrs. Smith replied, "Yes. So much that I think I will come back here as my paradise when I die."
Effie’s spirit surely remains in Pearce. The house where the Smiths once lived is one of the few early homes still standing. It now serves as the mining company’s office.