Anaconda: A Uranium Company Town on Route Sixty-Six
New Mexico
Most people associate the name Anaconda with copper and Montana, but there is an Anaconda in New Mexico too, and it tells a Cold War story. In the early nineteen fifties the Anaconda Copper Company of Butte, Montana opened a uranium ore processing mill about ten miles northwest of Grants along Route Sixty-Six. The raw ore came from the Jackpile Mine on Laguna Pueblo land to the east, then the largest open-pit uranium mine in the world.
To house the supervisors and managers who ran the operation, the company built a tidy company town of roughly one hundred homes and named it Anaconda. Workers extracted and processed uranium ore here through the nuclear buildup of the Cold War decades. When the uranium market collapsed in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, the mill closed and the company town was abandoned.
Today the site is part of a long federal remediation effort, a quiet reminder that the Grants Uranium Belt, running along this stretch of Route Sixty-Six and Interstate Forty, once powered the American nuclear arsenal.
