Douglas: The Company Town That Smelted an Empire

Douglas, Arizona, was not discovered. It was designed. In nineteen oh one, the Phelps Dodge Corporation needed a new place to smelt copper, and its engineers spread a survey across the flat grassland of the Sulphur Springs Valley, right on the United States-Mexico border, and laid out a city from scratch.

For two decades, Phelps Dodge had processed ore from its Copper Queen mine at Bisbee, twenty miles to the northwest. But Bisbee sat in a narrow canyon where smelter smoke had nowhere to go and expansion was impossible. The corporation needed open land, railroad access, and proximity to the Mexican rail network, which could deliver ore from Phelps Dodge's mines on the other side of the border as well. The flat borderland south of the Mule Mountains was ideal.

Private developers laid out city streets in nineteen oh one, selling lots to smelter workers and businesses before the furnaces had even been lit. The new town was named for James Douglas, the president of Phelps Dodge himself, a tribute that told you everything about who was really in charge. The company invested two and a half million dollars in its first smelting plant: more than three hundred acres, five blast furnaces, foundry, machine shops, powerhouses, twelve miles of standard-gauge railroad track inside the facility alone, designed to process more than one hundred million pounds of copper per year.

At its height the Douglas smelter was one of the largest copper-processing operations in North America, and the town around it grew into a prosperous, architecturally confident city. The Gadsden Hotel, built in nineteen oh seven just blocks from the border fence, served the copper executives and cattle ranchers who moved through the valley. Mexican citizens crossed freely to shop and work.

The smelters closed in nineteen eighty-seven, leaving Douglas to remake itself slowly as a border crossing point and agricultural service town. The smokestack is gone but the street grid, the early-twentieth-century downtown brick, and the Gadsden's marble lobby remain: a preserved outline of the city that copper built.