Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico

The Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans, successively, mined copper for more than 200 years in Santa Rita, New Mexico. Starting in 1799 after an Apache man led the Spanish to the native copper deposits, miners at the site followed industry developments in the nineteenth century to create a network of underground mines. In the early twentieth century these works became part of the Chino Copper Company's open-pit mining operations-operations that would overtake Santa Rita by 1970. In Santa Rita ...