Morenci Copper Mine

The giant gash you can see from the highway is the Morenci open-pit copper mine, the largest copper producer in North America. Mining began here in eighteen seventy-two when the Detroit Copper Company staked claims over surface deposits that soldiers had noticed in the early eighteen sixties. Phelps Dodge bought into the district and eventually swallowed all of it.

For decades Morenci was a classic company town, with Phelps Dodge owning the houses, the store, and the streets. Underground mining ended by nineteen thirty-two. By nineteen thirty-seven the company began converting to an open pit, and the pit eventually consumed the historic town itself, swallowing neighborhoods whole as the excavation expanded. Freeport-McMoRan acquired the operation in two thousand seven. The mine now produces several hundred million pounds of copper a year, and the original town of Morenci exists only in photographs.