Grants: From Railroad Camp to Uranium Capital of the World

Grants started in the eighteen eighties as a supply camp for three Canadian brothers overseeing construction of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. Their camp became Grants Camp, then Grants Station, then just Grants in nineteen thirty-six.

For decades it was a quiet railroad and farming town on what became Route Sixty-Six. Then, in nineteen fifty, a Navajo shepherd named Paddy Martinez picked up a piece of yellow rock near the town and brought it to the attention of Anaconda Copper. The rock was carnotite, a uranium ore. Within months the Grants area had transformed into the center of the American uranium rush.

The population exploded from around twenty-two hundred to more than ten thousand in a decade, as mining companies opened operations across Cibola County. At its peak Grants and the surrounding mines produced about sixty-three percent of all the uranium mined in the United States, supplying the Cold War nuclear weapons program and the nation's growing reactor industry. The boom collapsed with the uranium market in the early nineteen eighties, and Grants has been contracting ever since. The New Mexico Mining Museum downtown still commemorates the shepherd who turned a ranching town into the uranium capital of the world.