How Phelps Dodge Ran a Spanish Colonial Town — Then Shut the Mine and Sold It: Ajo, Arizona

In 1917 a copper company finished a palm-lined Spanish Colonial plaza in the Sonoran Desert town of Ajo, Arizona. For more than half a century the company that ran the town was Phelps Dodge. In 1984 the mine stopped producing copper, the smelter closed the next year, and Phelps Dodge sold most of its houses and commercial property, the plaza included, and kept the mineral rights. Phelps Dodge did not build Ajo. John Campbell Greenway, a Rough Rider sent by the Calumet & Arizona Mining Company in 1911, made the low-grade ore pay by leaching it, opened Arizona's first large open-pit copper mine in 1917, and built a City Beautiful company town to a 1914 plan by the Minneapolis architects William Kenyon and Maurice Maine. It was built as three towns: the American townsite around the plaza, and further south, nearer the pit, Mexican Town and the Indian Village. Phelps Dodge took the whole of it over in the 1931 merger. Under Phelps Dodge the New Cornelia pit became Arizona's top copper producer, a smelter went up in 1950, and Ajo reached 7,049 people in 1960. Then copper fell. In the summer of 1983 about 2,400 Phelps Dodge workers struck; the company kept the mines running with replacements, a strikebreaker's small daughter was shot in her bed in Ajo, and the unions were decertified. The 1990 census counted 2,919 people. Mexican Town and the Indian Village are gone now, largely lost to the mine's expansion; concrete slabs remain at the pit's edge. The International Sonoran Desert Alliance, founded in 1993 by Anglo, Mexican and O'odham partners, restored the Curley School as artists' homes and bought the plaza in 2008. Phelps Dodge became part of Freeport-McMoRan in 2007. The pit is still there. 0:00 The plaza 1:15 Red ore 3:21 The Rough Rider 5:39 City Beautiful 8:12 Three towns 10:02 The merger 11:58 The peak 14:59 The layoffs 16:32 Seventy-seven cents 19:08 The picket line 21:55 The twelfth of August 23:59 For sale 25:51 The slabs 27:22 The school 31:10 The pit WHAT THIS VIDEO DOES NOT CLAIM It does not say Phelps Dodge built Ajo. Calumet & Arizona and the New Cornelia company built it between 1914 and 1917; Phelps Dodge acquired it in the 1931 merger. It does not give a date or price for the sale of the houses. Phelps Dodge sold most of them, and most of its commercial property, after the closure. It does not say when the last houses of Mexican Town and the Indian Village came down. Accounts differ; what is not disputed is that the ground was largely lost to the mine. It does not name the child who was shot in 1983 or the person who fired the shot, who was never identified. It does not say the National Guard was sent to Ajo; the Guard was sent to Morenci. It does not say Phelps Dodge died. It was acquired by Freeport-McMoRan, whose mines still run, and which still owns the pit at Ajo. SOURCES SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians), Ajo town plan and plaza; Arizona Daily Star, "Mine Tales" (2013, 2017) and "Then & Now" (2005); Western Mining History; Ajo Copper News; Ajo District Chamber of Commerce; National Endowment for the Arts (2011, 2012, 2020); KJZZ "Untold Arizona" (2019); Our Towns / Deborah Fallows (2015); On the Road Arizona; Madrean Archipelago Films (2024); Wikipedia (Ajo, New Cornelia mine, John Campbell Greenway, Isabella Greenway, 1983 Arizona copper mine strike); US Census. Every figure spoken in this video traces to one of them.