Cerrillos

Turquoise gets the panel's first line; galena made the town. Pueblo potters were mining the lead ore here by the early 1300s for the glaze paint on their pots, until the Spanish working the hills for silver and lead cut off their access after 1700. On January 15, 1879, Frank Dimmick and Robert Hart registered their Bonanza No. 3 claim, the railroad came the next year, and more than four thousand pits and shafts were dug in the hills by 1884. The panel's board reads Historical, not Historic.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historical Marker Cerrillos Elevation 5,688 ft. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the mineral rich area around Cerrillos produced turquoise, which was broadly traded across the American Southwest and into México. An early settlement of Los Cerrillos harbored Spanish refugees from the 1680 Revolt, but the present community was not founded until the lead strike of 1879.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palace of the Governors — 20 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Bandelier National Monument — 25 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Pecos National Historical Park — 26 mi
  The red walls of a 1717 mission church inside the foundations of a far larger one, beside the kiva Pecos people dug in front of the old church during the revolt of 1680.

More markers nearby

• Gold and Turquoise — 6.7 mi
• Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) — 6.7 mi
• Amelia Elizabeth White and Mary Cabot Wheelwright — 6.7 mi
• Three Wise Women — 6.7 mi