Safford, Arizona

Safford grew from a farming experiment. A few settlers who had lost their canal work to high water at Gila Bend moved to the upper Gila Valley and laid out a townsite in eighteen seventy-four. The town was named for Anson Safford, the territorial governor who pushed hard for public schools in Arizona.

Safford became the county seat of Graham County and the commercial center of the Gila Valley's cotton and grain farms. Mount Graham, rising to ten thousand seven hundred feet just southwest of town, is one of the sky islands of the Madrean Archipelago and hosts the Mount Graham International Observatory near its summit, where astronomers from several nations operate telescopes above the desert haze. The Gila Valley between Safford and the New Mexico line is still some of the most productive farmland in southeastern Arizona.