Clarence David

ANY RETELLING OF THE STORIES of the dead buried in Old Tonopah Cemetery must include Clarence David, the man in whose memory the “World Famous” Clown Motel was built in 1985.

Clarence David was forty years old, a native of Illinois, and had lived in Tonopah only a few years when he died in the Belmont Mine fire on February 23, 1911. He was one of seventeen miners who succumbed to asphyxiation in one of the town’s worst industrial disasters.

During the coroner’s inquest, G. Taylor, a topman on duty the morning of the fire, testified that at 7:15 a.m. he received a telephone request for water barrels, followed shortly by another request for drinking water. Taylor stated that he advised Clarence David not to make the trip underground. David was carrying a roll of canvas and was warned against going down. He went anyway.

He never came back up alive.

Clarence David’s body was recovered later by his fellow miners. He was identified the following day by Thomas Campbell.

In the weeks after the disaster, David’s widow, Elizabeth Campbell, received an undisclosed cash settlement from the Belmont Mine management. Left behind to mourn him were Elizabeth and their two young children: Leroy, five and a half years old, and Leona, age three. A third child, Genevieve, was born seven months after her father’s death, never knowing him except through stories.

Leroy David grew up in Tonopah and became a successful businessman. In 1985, he built the Clown Motel right next door to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, near his father’s grave. Clarence David had loved clowns.

Today, the Clown Motel draws visitors for its novelty and unease, its painted smiles photographed and shared without context. Few even know that it exists because a miner ignored a warning, went underground during a fire, and never returned. Clarence David lies next door in the Old Tonopah Cemetery, one of seventeen men who died quietly of smoke and heat—while the place built in his memory trades in laughter, spectacle, and forgetting.