The heart of the community is the plaza, built in 1917. The Spanish Colonial Revival style town square features a center park surrounded by retail shops, a post office and restaurants, along with a visitor center. The center park hosts festivals and celebrations. In 2008 the plaza was purchased by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance and is in the midst of a multi-year process of restoration and revitalization.On our way to the Visitor Centre...
We stopped at the visitors center and the post office...and then wandered around the rest of the area...
The town plaza is accented with two mission-style churches. The Catholic Church was built in 1924....and the Federated Church in 1926.
Curley School..."Easily visible from the town plaza, Ajo's Curley School is an architectural masterpiece of Spanish Colonial Revival style that harmonizes seamlessly with the rest of the historic downtown. The main building on the seven acre campus was built in 1919 with additional buildings added in 1926 and 1937. The Curley School has been renovated by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance into 30 affordable live/work rentals for artists and artisans with classrooms, workshops, and an indoor-outdoor stage peppered throughout the campus. As the final stage of renovation, an international retreat center and commercial kitchen are in the works."
We wandered along the road to the north of the plaza and found this small park with pictures and displays depicting the history of the area.
After we had finished wandering around the historic downtown area, we drove up to the New Cornelia Open Pit Mining Lookout. A display of the mining operations can be seen at the visitor center on-site. Mining operations shut down in 1984 and the smelter closed in 1985. At its peak about 3000 were employed. When the mine closed it was capable of producing 40,000 tons of copper annually.
A panorama view across nearly two miles of open pit mining. Each bench of the pit is forty feet deep. In all, it is 1 1/2 miles wide by 1 1/4 miles across and is 1100 feet deep. At one time the New Cornelia was the largest producer of copper in Arizona. In 1959 it was the third largest open-pit mine in the United States and the second largest copper producer in Arizona.We finished our trip to Ajo with a quick stop at the IGA grocery store and Dollar General and then headed back. On our way we turned off onto Darby Wells Road but the BLM camping area was well off the highway, so we decided not to venture down the gravel road. According to a review part of it was fenced off reducing the amount of sites and the remaining sites are more suitable to smaller rigs.
Once home, Steve off-loaded the quads while I went on-line to my TracFone account to figure out why the minutes I had purchased this morning hadn't been added to our phone. After some investigation, I discovered that it wasn't accepting our payment information...oh well, I guess we'll just have to wait until we get to Yuma to purchase an air-card from Walmart. In the meantime, we have a cell phone with .80 of a minute left on it....
We enjoyed the late afternoon sun as it went down and then retreated inside...and that was pretty much our day. Tomorrow we plan on getting our on the quads for a ride.
Thank you. We have not wandered around the plaza. You, again, answered a few questions for us.
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