Sahuarita: Little Saguaro Country

The name Sahuarita is Spanish for "little saguaro," a nod to the forest of giant cacti that covered these bajadas long before anyone platted a town here. The roots go back to eighteen seventy-nine, when rancher James Kilroy Brown carved out Sahuarita Ranch as a staging point on the trail between Tucson, Arivaca, and the Quijotoa mines to the west. A German map from eighteen seventy-five already labeled a settlement here as Sahuarito, suggesting the name predates Brown's ranch.

The town was formally established in nineteen eleven, and for most of the twentieth century its economy rested on farming, including pecan orchards, and later on copper. Two big open-pit copper operations, the ASARCO Mission Mine and the Sierrita mine, sit just to the west. Sahuarita incorporated in nineteen ninety-four and has since grown into one of the fastest-expanding communities in southern Arizona, its quiet desert name now attached to a place of thirty-thousand-plus residents spreading south from Tucson.