The Open Pit Copper Mine, Santa Rita, NM, circa 1937

About this postcard

The view looks across the terraced walls of the Santa Rita open pit copper mine, with banded red, yellow, and green strata, a small blue pond at the base, and a curving road with utility poles in the foreground. A green mesa capped with red rock rises at the right under a pastel sky. The caption calls it the largest open pit mine in the world and repeats a local story that Indians knew the rich vein long before one pointed out the old workings to a Spanish Don in thanks for a kindness. Ore was loaded daily by steam and electric shovels and milled at the concentrator in Hurley, eight miles south. Santa Rita's copper deposits had been worked since the Spanish colonial period, and the open-pit operation became one of New Mexico's major copper producers.