Anaconda, New Mexico: Uranium Town on Route Sixty-Six

In the early nineteen fifties the Anaconda Copper Company of Butte, Montana built a uranium ore processing plant ten miles northwest of Grants along Route sixty-six, and around it grew a company town. Anaconda, New Mexico was purpose-built for management and supervisory workers processing ore from the Jackpile-Paguate Mine on Laguna Pueblo land, which was at the time the world's largest open-pit uranium mine. The town had about one hundred homes and included a swimming pool and a four-lane bowling alley.

It was the kind of tidy, self-contained company settlement common in the postwar resource economy. When the uranium market collapsed in the nineteen eighties, the plant closed, the workers left, and the town was dismantled. The legacy of that mining era lingers on Laguna land, where the mine later became a federal Superfund cleanup site.

Anaconda the town is gone, but the mine's footprint remains.