Terlingua: The Mine Town That Became a Ghost Town That Became a Legend
Near Terlingua, Texas
Terlingua sits on the edge of Big Bend country in far west Texas, a place so remote that its history has its own separate gravity. What is here today, an eccentric community of artists and desert drifters and outdoor enthusiasts gathered around a set of atmospheric ruins, came after two complete previous lives, and the evidence of both is still visible in the landscape. The first life was mercury mining.
Cinnabar, the ore from which mercury is extracted, was discovered in this area in the eighteen eighties, and by the turn of the twentieth century several mining operations were competing for the deposits. The dominant one was the Chisos Mining Company, controlled by a Chicago businessman named Howard E. Perry, who had acquired west Texas land through debt collection in the eighteen eighties and eventually built a company town from scratch in the desert.
Perry ran his operation from Chicago, rarely visiting in person, a style of management that his workers found maddening and that historians have studied with fascination ever since. At its peak around nineteen seventeen, the Chisos Mine employed one hundred twenty-five workers and produced seven thousand two hundred flasks of mercury in a single year. The company built not just the mine shafts and processing facilities, but a hotel, a company store, a theater, and a manager's mansion inspired by Moorish architecture.
Over its lifetime, the mine yielded one hundred thousand flasks of quicksilver before the ore ran thin, the price of mercury fell, and the economics of the operation collapsed. Perry filed for bankruptcy in nineteen forty-two and died in nineteen forty-four. The company that purchased the operation closed the mine after World War Two.
The workers left, the buildings began to fall, and Terlingua became a ghost town. Its population in the census of two thousand twenty was seventy-eight people. The second and third lives of the town are quieter than the first, and in their own way stranger.
