Milan, New Mexico

Milan, just northwest of Grants in Cibola County, spent the nineteen forties growing carrots and was known briefly as the Carrot Capital of the United States. Then uranium changed everything. In the early nineteen fifties a Navajo shepherd, Paddy Martinez, found uranium ore near Haystack Mesa, and by the late nineteen fifties the boom was on.

The Homestake Mining Company opened a uranium mill north of town. Milan's population surged through the uranium era. When global uranium prices collapsed in the nineteen eighties, the mill closed and the Atomic Energy Commission left the community to sort through a significant contamination legacy.

Cleanup of the site stretched on for decades.