Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Bouse Bouse, AZ

Bouse, pronounced BOWSS, rhyming with house, is a census-designated place (CDP) in La Paz County, Arizona, that is also classified among the state's semi-abandoned ghost towns.

Bouse was founded in 1908 as a mining camp and was originally named Brayton, after store owner John Brayton Martin.

Bouse first appeared on the 1920 U.S. Census as an unincorporated village, then in Yuma County, and it returned in 2000 as a census-designated place in present-day La Paz County.

The population was 707 at the 2020 census, down 29.0 percent from 996 in 2010.

The 2010 census counted 547 households in the CDP.

The Bouse CDP covers about 136.2 square miles, making it one of Arizona's largest census-designated places by land area, with a density of only about 5 people per square mile and an elevation of 981 feet.

Arizona State Route 72 passes through Bouse, leading northwest 26 miles to Parker, the La Paz County seat, and southeast 23 miles to Hope.

Camp Bouse, a secret World War II U.S. Army tank training camp, stood about 20 miles east of town in Butler Valley; its building foundations and tank tracks remain, and a Camp Bouse memorial monument stands in Bouse.

The 21-mile Arizona and Swansea Railroad, built in 1909, once ran from Bouse to the copper and gold mines at Swansea before it was abandoned in 1937, leaving Swansea a ghost town.

Bouse's economy today is based on tourism, agriculture, and retirees, and Rose Acre Farms' Lone Cactus Farm egg facility near town, which opened in 2016, was described by the La Paz Economic Development Corporation as the largest economic development project in the county's history.