D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July 2009
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Pieces of Copper Country
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If you live long enough, the saying goes, things come around again. At age 90, Grant County native Melvin Huff has seen plenty of comings — and just as many goings. For instance, like a dwindling number of other local residents, he has watched his birthplace thrive as a bustling community but eventually disappear from the face of the earth.
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Melvin Huff outside the home he built in the mid-1950s. (Photo by Richard Mahler) |
"I was born in Santa Rita," Huff recalls. "But not 'in space,' as some people like to say. I was born under the 'dump' [of mine tailings]. We lived down the creek, not in the town itself. Our place is now completely covered up."
Ill-fated Santa Rita is seemingly gone forever, lost to the expanding copper-mining pit of the same name. But talk to Melvin Huff awhile and one might argue that it actually does live on — if you simply look around.
"I see Santa Rita whenever I drive around Silver City," declares the nonagenarian, who lives alone in a house he built in the mid-1950s near Western New Mexico University. Huff's domicile is instantly recognizable by the three tall, thin Italian cypress trees that serve as an unmistakable beacon for visitors. His hillside lot affords a sweeping view of Silver City and the mining district beyond. It is within this viewscape that Huff has circulated for nearly a century. I've spent time with him recently to get an old-timer's perspective on how Grant County has changed — and stayed the same — since Woodrow Wilson was president and radio was new.
"Lots of buildings were moved into Silver City from Santa Rita over the years," begins Huff, a tall, handsome man with a full head of graying hair and a precise, rather formal manner of speaking. "They started moving the houses before World War II; some hauled intact and others were cut into sections. At one time it cost maybe $2,500 to buy a really nice Santa Rita house and between $1,200 and $1,500 to move it. If you could afford it, that was a pretty good deal."
Grant County pioneers such as Melvin Huff will be honored during this year's Independence Day festivities, whose theme is "Saluting Grant County Pioneers — Past, Present and Future." Events on Saturday, July 4, include a parade through historic downtown Silver City to Gough Park, beginning at 10 a.m.; music, arts and crafts booths, a cowboy breakfast and barbecue lunch at Gough Park; and an ice-cream social and antique tractor show at the Silver City Museum, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. For information, contact the chamber of commerce, 538-3785, www.silvercity.org, and the museum, 312 W. Broadway, 538-5921, www.silvercitymuseum.org |
According to Paul M. Jones, in his book Memories of Santa Rita, some homes were owned by the copper company, which leased them to employees for upwards of $15 a month during the 1930s. Others were owned by workers, yet built on company-owned lots. Around 1937 many employees "were required to move their houses off company property," wrote Jones, a former resident. "This presented a great hardship for many whose savings were depleted, but somehow most weathered the storm. Many houses were moved to Bayard, some to the town of Central [now Santa Clara], some to Silver City, and some appeared along the road to the Mimbres River. There was some real horse trading and creative financing going on to accomplish these moves."
During a driving tour of older neighborhoods, Huff seems to spot a dwelling spared from the Santa Rita wrecking ball on nearly every other block. "There's one with the original board-and-batten siding," he says, stabbing an index finger toward a miner's former home that enjoys new life as a commercial building. A few blocks away, Huff recognizes a Santa Rita house that's been modified to the point where only an expert's eye can detect the distinctive characteristics of its pitched roof, bedroom layout and window framing. The homes tend toward boxy, with a small footprint, and the entry door is often set front and center, within a small covered porch.
"Now that one there was moved from Vanadium," says Huff, referring to a house off Hwy. 90 that started life in the community near Santa Rita — now virtually abandoned — named after the mineral once mined there. "Downhill from us is the big Three-C [Civilian Conservation Corps] warehouse built along a railroad siding during the Great Depression."(The spur itself is gone, torn out when freight and passenger service to Silver City ended decades ago.) According to Huff, a Silver City office administered 21 separate CCC camps in the region, each created to put unemployed men to work building dams, clearing brush, repairing trails, creating campgrounds and the like.
"In the Depression," says Huff, "we did not suffer here like people did in other places. We didn't have soup lines or anything like that." He estimates about 2,500 laborers lost their jobs when the Santa Rita pit shut down completely in 1934, but says most found subsequent employment with either the CCC or the Works Progress Administration (WPA). "They weren't making as much money, but they were being fed."
Within minutes I realize this man is a living link to the region's colorful past. After all, he was there. Or else someone in his family was. Huff's father, who died in 1926, was a $2.50-a-visit company physician in the company town of Santa Rita before starting his own practice in Silver City. Melvin's mother, Alice, served as Silver City's postmistress for a number of years. Two of his brothers became doctors.
Huff's own resume is varied. " I worked for the mines for many years," he recalls. "I was in house construction a long time. I spent five years as a farmer." There was also a 1935-36 stint at Sears, then located on Bullard Street, and later employment delivering wholesale groceries to stores. Huff worked in Las Cruces for a while, too.
"I've done a lot of things," he understates.
Huff belongs to a generation of Silver City students who attended the "practice teaching" high school at Old Main, atop Normal Hill on the campus of what was then Western New Mexico State Teachers College. (The three-story structure, erected in 1896 as the first building on campus, was razed in the mid-1950s and replaced by Miller Library.) Huff finished a year of college classes at Western and another in Oklahoma before marrying fellow Grant County native Billie Beth Creel in 1939. Billie Beth, who has suffered a stroke and is confined to a health-care facility, holds the distinction of being born in the federally designated Gila Wilderness, where her family once grazed livestock.
After college, Huff worked for Kennecott until late 1943, when copper workers were taken off the military's "protected" list. He did a 15-month stateside hitch in the Army toward the end of World War II, returning in 1945 to become an apprentice boilermaker at Kennecott. By age 30, with two young children underfoot, he and Billie Beth were ready for a change.
"We farmed for five years [1950-55] along the Gila River," says Huff. "I did well with a cow-calf operation until the prices fell and we had to get out of it. We didn't have anything to amount to much, but we had a pleasant time."
One major shift since that era, Huff believes, is that it's becoming virtually impossible for a small-scale farmer or rancher to make it economically. "The family operation is a thing of the past," he declares. "You sometimes can make a living, but not raise a family on the income. The profit is just not there any more."
The family moved back to Silver City, where construction contractor Carl Hanson kept Huff busy until 1959. When construction jobs dried up, Huff returned to the copper operation in Hurley, retiring from Kennecott (later Phelps-Dodge) as a smelter mechanic in 1981 at age 62.
"I did quite a bit of work on our house after I retired," Huff recalls, "and took care of my mother and sister, who came to live with us. My two [now grown] kids were in Lordsburg and Deming at the time and I helped them with their places." (Huff's son, Jerry, is employed locally by Hamilton Construction; his daughter, Judy Ward, recently stepped down from the Silver City Town Council and now works in Smith Real Estate's commercial division.)