Mogollon

The story

Mogollon sits at the bottom of a narrow canyon in the Mogollon Mountains, reached by a switchbacking mountain road that is half the reason people come. Sergeant James Cooney found gold in these hills in the 1870s, and by the late 1880s the camp of Mogollon had grown below the mines to work them, with the Little Fannie the most important employer in town.

In its boom the district was a serious producer — around 1914 it turned out roughly $1.5 million in gold and silver, close to 40 percent of New Mexico's precious metals for the year, and over its life the mountains gave up something like a quarter of the state's total silver. A transient population variously put at 3,000 to 6,000 filled the canyon in the 1890s, then thinned as the ore grade fell. When the Fannie mines and their mill shut in 1942, the town that milled its ore had nothing left to do.

A handful of residents and a few small businesses hold on today, including the Silver Creek Inn in an 1885 boarding house. Hollywood has used the false-front street more than once, which is part of why so much of it still stands.

What remains today

A one-street canyon town of false-front stores and cabins, the old theater and church, mine ruins on the slopes above, and the pioneer cemetery on the hill.