Tyrone, New Mexico: The Ghost Town That Was Never Meant to Die

The Mimbres Mogollon people lived in this valley for centuries, farming along the rivers. Their distinctive black-on-white pottery is some of the finest in North American prehistory. They were gone by the twelfth century, leaving no explanation behind.

Spanish and Mexican miners worked copper here before American prospectors arrived. When Phelps Dodge moved in around nineteen fifteen, they did something unusual: they hired the architect Bertram Goodhue, best known for grand Gothic churches, to design a complete town. Goodhue laid out a Mediterranean-style community around a grand central plaza, with white stucco walls and red tile roofs, for a population of several thousand.

In nineteen twenty-one, copper prices collapsed after World War One ended. Soon the town emptied. Forty-eight years later, Phelps Dodge returned with bulldozers to open an open-pit mine, erasing Goodhue's masterpiece entirely. The new town, built in nineteen fifteen, reportedly cost more than a million dollars. In May of nineteen eighteen, a field camp of the Sixty-Eighth Infantry Brigade, Thirty-Fourth Division, was set up in Tyrone. The open pit began operating in nineteen sixty-nine, and Phelps Dodge built a third town about five miles to the northeast, putting up three hundred twenty homes between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-two. The big homes on the ridge top were called Bosses Hill. The company sold the houses in the nineteen nineties, and about seven hundred people lived there at the twenty twenty census. A million-dollar city, built and buried by the price of copper.