Kelly

The town is Kelly rather than Kelley because a clerk misspelled Patrick H. Kelley's claim when he registered it. The zinc boom began when someone sent a sample of the waste rock off for testing and it came back as smithsonite, a zinc carbonate then wanted for paint pigment; in 1904 the Graphic mine went to the Sherwin-Williams company. The headframe went up in 1906 over the Tri-Bullion shaft; the attribution to Eiffel, which the panel repeats, is widely told but rests on local tradition. The last residents left in 1947.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Kelly Kelly prospered in the 1880's after lead and silver discoveries around 1866. But it was the discarded zinc carbonate - vital in paint manufacturing-that made Kelly boom in the early 1900's. Stores, banks,saloons, schools,and churches lined its streets and the population reached 3,000.When the mines played out in the 1930's, Kelly became a ghost town, its homes hauled to Magdelena. A preserved church stands near ruined mine works, and the Kelly Mine headshaft-a 121- foot- high structure built from a design by Alexander G. Eiffel for Carnegie Steel Works -still towers over the site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Very Large Array — 22 mi
  Twenty-seven radio dishes, each 82 feet across and 230 tons, spread in a Y across an Ice Age lakebed on the Plains of San Agustin and moved on rails to change how sharply they see.
• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 29 mi
  A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.

More markers nearby

• Riley — 0.2 mi
• Magdalena — 0.8 mi
• Magdalena Fault — 9.3 mi
• Sabino y Lemitar — 19 mi