Moments of Enchantment; Tyrone, New Mexico

Moments of Enchantment, number 161, Tyrone Mining Town. Moments of Enchantment brought to you by the New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs. It was the west's most luxurious and magnificent mining town, but for all its costly indulgence, a remarkable town of Tyrone, New Mexico, turned out to be just a brilliant flash in the pan, more in a moment. Back in the early 1900s, when copper was king, the queen of the western mining towns was Tyrone, built in the little burrow mountains of southwestern New Mexico. With the onset of World War I, the demand for copper soared and the Phelps Dodge Corporation decided to build an entire new community to accommodate its huge mining operation in Tyrone. But rather than constructively typically dismal, clapped-board company town, Phelps Dodge wanted something better, something much better.

Mrs. James Douglas, the wife of a Phelps Dodge official, had a dream. Why not build a well-planned, architecturally dazzling utopia in the burrow mountains? The challenge was accepted, and the mining company hired famed architect Bartram G. Goodhue, owner of the 1915 Panama, California International Exposition in San Diego. Completed in 1915, the new Tyrone was a million-dollar masterpiece of pink stucco and mission tile. The town had all the right buildings from a post office and a railroad station to a chapel and a courthouse jail. From graceful colonnades to bubbling fountains, Tyrone was a family town with indoor plumbing and no brothels or saloons. This was Mrs. Douglas's dream town. And by 1921, the price of copper had taken a slide, and the Tyrone mining operations were headed in the same direction. Workers and residents of Tyrone were so in love with their utopia that they offered Phelps Dodge an unheard of deal, a 25% pay cut to keep the mine and the town in business. But despite this attempt, Tyrone was shut down, a beautiful but empty town less than six

years after its birth. One remained empty until 1966 when Phelps Dodge announced that an open-pit copper mine would be developed near the town. The bad news, Tyrone would be leveled to make room for mine buildings. Copper built the queen and copper broker. To learn more about New Mexico's mining days, visit the Palace of the Governor's History Museum inside a bay. Moments of Enchantment brought to you by the new Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs. For Moments of Enchantment, I'm David Griffin.