D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
The Million-Dollar Ghost Town
Designed to be the ultimate "company town," the original Tyrone has now mostly been consumed by the company that created it.
By Jim Kelly
Before the big pit mine, before there was a 1960s-era tract-house development, even before the First World War, there was a shining city nestled in the rolling hills along state highway 90, southwest of Silver City. That city was old Tyrone.
 |
Old Tyrone was built around a plaza,
perfect for community activities such as dances. (Photo courtesy Silver
City Museum) |
Looking at the area today, it's difficult to envision a community with a bustling train station, a state-of-the-art hospital, a city-block-square department store, marble fountains and a courthouse/jail complex to rival any in the Southwest. That community was old Tyrone.
These days, the only things left of old Tyrone are an old courthouse and the Catholic Church — both on Freeport-McMoRan property, inaccessible to the curious — and a few old magazine and newspaper photos and clippings about the place. Plus the name, of course, now attached to a town a few miles to the northeast.
By most accounts, old Tyrone has assumed an almost mythical status. "I hear there is just an old one-room schoolhouse down in the bottom of the pit," one 40-year Tyrone resident whispered. It has been referred to as "The Million Dollar Ghost Town," and as a "Deserted Utopia," and at least one popular New Mexico ghost town website speaks of it as if old Tyrone were still there. Volunteers and staff at the Silver City Museum report that every now and then a visitor to the area will ask how to get to "the old ghost town of Tyrone."
Fact is, the place deserves its legendary status, because the story of its short-lived boom- and-bust existence is truly the stuff of legend.
Conceived by a trio of Phelps-Dodge executives and their wives, the original Tyrone was planned from the start to be the very model of what a "company town" should be. Executive wives Mrs. Cleland Dodge and Mrs. James Douglas set about the task of creating an architecturally ideal mining town by first commissioning world-renowned New York architect Bertram G. Goodhue to design and draw up plans in 1914. The grand design was to be in the Spanish Mission style, and some say that this decision was strongly influenced be Goodhue's travels in Mexico earlier in that year.
Goodhue was a dynamic visionary. His work on the buildings at the West Point Military Academy, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, and San Diego's International Exhibition designs of 1911-1915 also influenced his idyllic design for Tyrone. Some of his work can still be seen today in San Diego's Balboa Park.
Before Goodhue came to the project, however, the Phelps-Dodge executives had already formed general ideas as to how the town should be laid out and about how the new town should be served by a new rail link to Southern Pacific's main track through southern New Mexico. With Goodhue's input, it was decided that the railroad station should be one of the primary buildings clustered around a large plaza, featuring an impressive fountain as well as fine bandstand.
The rolling hills and indigenous vegetation of the proposed building site offered an opportunity to design an axial layout, with all the spokes converging on a main plaza. According to a book Goodhue wrote on the project, the plaza would be constructed around a large pinon tree, set off by a large concrete slab, upon which a variety of dances and celebrations would take place. By providing a recreational and entertainment center for the new village, Phelps-Dodge management felt that both morale and the more civilized social behaviors of the miners would be encouraged.
Because the population of Tyrone's mine workers consisted of both Mexican and American citizens, the company decided it best to house them separately. Segregation, after all, was in the order of the day. Mexican workers were housed in a series of structures along a single street in a side canyon situated southwest of the plaza. American workers' housing was constructed on a plateau northeast of the plaza.
At this point, it is important to note that as with most "legendary" places, some accounts and numbers will vary, depending on the source. For example, various dimensions given for the plaza itself range from 250 by 140 feet, to 1,500 by 300 feet, according to some September 1917 issues of the El Paso Morning Times. When compared to Goodhue's own drawings, the town's department store measures 150 feet across the front; assuming the drawings are to scale — this isn't clear, either — the plaza would be more like 350 by 150 feet, but these numbers are open to debate, as well.
Similarly, construction costs and population figures for old Tyrone also vary, depending on the source. As Western New Mexico University student Connie Gustafson noted so completely in her research work, not only did Tyrone's "$100,000 train station" cost more like $41,011 — and that included the waiting room and the freight depot — but the actual "station" part of the project accounted for only $27,335 of the $41,011 figure.
In any case, the train station complex was a well-crafted and thoughtfully executed plan. In his book Gone Forever, Goodhue's Beaux-Arts Ghost Town, Robert Riley remarked that the station was designed so that the trains backed into the station, keeping the smoke away from the waiting passengers and the plaza. The building itself was T-shaped, according to Frank Hunter's 1962 New Mexico Magazine story, with the leg of the "T" forming an outdoor waiting room. This area formed a three-sided, cloistered portal extending out to front on the main street, running along the plaza. There were five rounded arches on each side and five along the front. The enclosed patio area featured trees surrounded by flower beds, and fountains lined with blue Mexican tiles.
In the waiting room there were hand-carved ceiling beams, polished mahogany woodwork, hand-made benches warmed by heat registers situated under them and an elegant chandelier accented by a variety of wrought-iron light fixtures. Drinking water for the waiting passengers came from yet another marble fountain.
On the west side of the plaza stood the Phelps-Dodge Mercantile. This 15,000-square-foot department store — dubbed "The Wanamaker's of the West," after the famous Philadelphia shopping emporium — was not only the largest retail building in New Mexico in 1915, but was a virtual "one-stop-shop." Like today's Wal-Mart Supercenters, the Phelps-Dodge store carried the largest and most modern lines of merchandise of the day, including groceries, clothing, furniture and home furnishings. While optical offices and sartorial facilities were not included among the store's many services, there was an undertaker on the premises. The bright, well-lit and -ventilated building's interior featured a large ornamental staircase connecting the ground floor to the second-floor mezzanine.
The store was supplied by an equally large, two-story warehouse, located directly behind. The warehouse featured its own rail stub for delivering merchandise directly to the site, and an enclosed walkway over the tracks, connecting the second stories.
Each of these primary structures was softly colored in hues dictated by an equally well-planned color scheme. Muted pinks and yellows were accented by traditional white stucco.
On the third side of the plaza stood the Phelps-Dodge offices, an unornamented structure with its sole distinction being that it was the only building on the plaza with some form of signage. Above the front door, a relief stated, "Burro Mountain Mining Company."
Other buildings lined three sides of the plaza, but none so extravagant as these.
There was a Justice Court Building, also in an ornamented Spanish style, which included a court facility, a jail and administrative offices. The jail had a steady flow of regular customers who kept the local constabulary busy.
Former Tyrone Peace Justice D.W. Smith related in a Silver City Independent article of June 1931, "Many's the time when I used to get up at midnight and bail out drunks who'd sobered up, so a new bunch of prisoners could be locked up."
The bank building also housed more general store spaces that could be leased by private merchants, offering a deliberate shopping alternative for folks who didn't want to shop at the Phelps-Dodge Mercantile.
In addition to the typical banking services offered in the building, the structure contained a substantial library housing some 3,500-5,000 volumes, again depending on the source.
On a hill above the town was constructed a state-of-the-art hospital, with capabilities most medical treatment facilities of the day could only dream of. According to the Silver City Enterprise of Sept. 15, 1916:
"The latest equipment known to medical science was installed. There is even an X-Ray machine which will take a moving picture of your stomach while your food digests.
"The hospital has a children's ward named in memory of Mary Francis Campbell. The staff consists of Dr. Miner, his assistant and three nurses.
"A steam heating plant and steam sterilizing machine have been included. Without steam for sterilization and electricity the modern hospital would be in a bad way.
"These are the two most noticeable features of the hospital. Pipes, pipes and more pipes — enough to drive a plumber bug-house, while the electrical wiring must have demanded the genius of Thomas Edison in planning and execution."
The fourth side of the plaza was reserved for construction of a classic domed, buttressed, steepled Spanish-Colonial Catholic Church. There were also plans for a big hotel, more shops and a clubhouse.
While the plaza was never completed as planned due to the boom-and-bust nature of the copper business, some institutions were established in this "Model Mining Community." A school with a capacity for somewhere between 300 and 1,000 students was completed, and various celebrations did take place in the plaza area.
Newspaper accounts of the day told of the many dances, prize fights, ice cream socials, barbecues and races conducted in Tyrone. The town belonged to "The Copper League," and baseball games were a regular event in the town.
A Jan. 17, 1917, Enterprise article mentioned a moving-picture show in the town, a rather advanced entertainment venue for the day. Phelps-Dodge even purchased a set of brass musical instruments to encourage Saturday-night dances.
But where did all the money for this elaborate enterprise come from, and where did all the buildings and people go? What happened to the dream? The answers all have to do with electricity.
At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, America — indeed, the world — had just begun to use electricity in common everyday life. The wiring of America's cities and towns demanded copper, copper and more copper, and Phelps-Dodge was there with the goods. By 1914, the year the Tyrone master plan was launched, the Silver City Enterprise reported that 200 men were on the payroll in Tyrone, and that was just in the mine. By 1915, with the importation of Mexican laborers, that number had jumped to over 300, and some were making as much as $2.50 per day.
The population of Tyrone grew, and with the outbreak of World War I, the world's demand for copper grew even more. By the end of the war, Tyrone's population stood at somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000, making it the seventh-largest city in New Mexico, and the largest in Grant County, according to the 1920 census.
Then in 1921, with the bottom falling out of the copper market, it was decided the dream of Tyrone had run its course. The mine was shut down, although the shafts and facilities were maintained until 1928. Then the shafts were allowed to flood, and the rest of those beautiful buildings were abandoned.
Many of the buildings became part of Ranchos Los Pinos, a guest ranch resort with tennis courts, a swimming pool and croquet grounds. In the early 1930s, famed New Mexico freelance writer Clee Woods made the abandoned Tyrone city jail his office. From his "writer's study," Woods cranked out hundreds of Wild West stories and more than 50 New Mexico Magazine articles. Woods' wife, Betty, did New Mexico Magazine's "Trip of the Month" column for many years. Clee and Betty made their home in "The Pines," as the resort community came to be called until the end.
The resort thrived until World War II. Then, with the establishment of gas rationing and the overall war effort, things like vacations and dude ranches took a back seat to more vital priorities.
In 1967 Phelps-Dodge announced it was returning to Tyrone, and the old buildings that had stood empty for some 45 years would fall to the bulldozers. The Pines, still owned by the mining company, would be evacuated and the cottages would soon find themselves buried under tailings. The Tyrone plaza and its buildings, so carefully planned and executed, would be swallowed up by the new pit mine.
It's nearly all gone now. Only the two old buildings remain, and according to one source close to them, remain in "pretty good shape." There are no plans to destroy them.
The Miller Library at WNMU has many of the old articles about Tyrone in bound copies of New Mexico Magazine, as well as a commemorative display in a glass case on show now. The Silver City Museum houses a thick folder of reference materials about old Tyrone.
But for the few really old "old timers," the "Million Dollar Ghost Town" is still back there in those hills south of Silver City. The whistle still sounds as the train backs into the station, and the brass band can still be faintly heard on Saturday nights.
Jim Kelly is a retired journalist who lives in Silver City.
Thanks to Tom Hester,
researcher at the Silver City Museum, for suggesting the topic.