Terlingua Ghost Town

The Chisos Mining Company belonged to Howard E. Perry, a Chicago industrialist who founded it in 1903 and seldom came to see it. He hired well instead: the metallurgist William Battle Phillips and the geologist Johan August Udden helped guide the work. At first the cinnabar ore was simply baked in retorts until the liquid metal ran out. In 1908 Perry installed a twenty-ton Scott furnace, and in 1914 the company struck one of the richest veins in the district just as World War I drove up the price of quicksilver. A thirty-ton rotary furnace followed in 1915. In ten days of September 1916 the company shipped two carloads of quicksilver from Alpine worth more than $50,000, and state geologists later valued its output at $12 million.

Mule-drawn wagon trains hauled the flasks to the railroad at Alpine and Marathon and brought supplies back until trucks took over in the early 1930s. In 1930 the company built the permanent Perry School to replace the tent where classes had begun in 1907. After the company failed, a successor worked the mine without success until the end of World War II, when most of the works were torn down and sold for scrap. Perry died in a Boston hotel in December 1944.

Stone and adobe ruins survive on the slope above FM 170, and the old movie theater is a restaurant. Some ruins are private property, so stay on public ground and out of the buildings.