Grants: The Town That Rode Three Booms and Two Busts
New Mexico
Grants began as a railroad camp in the eighteen eighties, named for three Canadian brothers who built the railroad grade through the high desert west of Albuquerque. It became a Route Sixty-Six town in the nineteen twenties, a service stop between Albuquerque and Gallup, and grew steadily through the carrot-farming boom of the nineteen forties. Then in nineteen fifty, a Navajo rancher named Paddy Martinez found a yellowish rock on a mesa near Haystack Mountain.
It was uranium ore. The discovery triggered a mining rush that turned Grants into the self-proclaimed Uranium Capital of the World by the early nineteen sixties. The population quadrupled.
The mines employed thousands of workers, many of them Navajo and Laguna Pueblo men who dug the ore, often with little protection from the radon and radiation that later sickened many of them. When uranium prices collapsed in the nineteen eighties, the mines closed and the town emptied almost as fast as it had filled. Grants is quiet today, trying to rebuild its identity around Route Sixty-Six tourism.
