Kelly, New Mexico: The Town That Zinc Built

The ghost town of Kelly, a few miles from here, had two lives. The first began in eighteen sixty-six when lead and silver were discovered in the Magdalena Mountains. Miners came, a town grew, and then the high-grade ore played out.

The second life came from what miners had been throwing away. The waste rock piling up around Kelly turned out to be zinc carbonate, a key ingredient in paint manufacturing. In the early nineteen hundreds, when the industrial demand for zinc exploded, Kelly boomed again. Stores, banks, saloons, schools, and churches filled its streets. At its peak the mines employed hundreds and shipped ore by rail from nearby Magdalena. Then that ore ran out too, and the town slowly emptied until the last residents left in nineteen forty-seven. Its ruins remain in the hills, one of New Mexico's most photogenic ghost towns.