Courtland, Arizona

Courtland
Ghost town
Country	United States
State	Arizona
County	Cochise
Time zone	MST (no DST)
Post Office Opened:	March 13, 1909
Post Office Closed:	September 30, 1942

Courtland is a ghost town in Cochise County, Arizona, that was founded in 1909 due to a copper boom. The town is located at the foot of the Dragoon Mountains, about fifteen miles northeast of Tombstone, and was named after Courtland Young, one of the owners of the Great Western Mining Company.

Between 1908 and 1909, four large mining companies, the Great Western, the Calumet & Arizona, the Copper Queen and the Leadville, began mining copper ore in the Dragoon Mountains. Hundreds of settlers arrived and established a tent city almost overnight. In a short time, the Mexico & Colorado Railroad (owned by the El Paso & Southwestern, and the Arizona & Colorado Railroad, owned by Southern Pacific), built lines to the town to accommodate settlers.

A post office was established on March 13, 1909, and during that year the Courtland Arizonian printed its first newspaper. At its height, Courtland had a population of 2,000. By the time it became a ghost town there was a car dealership, an ice cream parlor, a movie theater, a baseball field and a horse racing track, and more necessary buildings, such as houses, hotels and county branch jail. The Chamber of Commerce was formed in 1911 and the first item on the agenda was to supply the town with water. Within a matter of months, five miles of water mains were installed by the newly formed Courtland Water and Ice Company.

The boom did not last long. Within ten years the profits from the mines began to shrink, and in 1921 a "mass exodus" occurred. At first the Dragoons seemed to be rich in copper. Beginning in 1917, one mine shaft after another tapped into a layer of limestone 300 feet down. This eventually led to abandonment of the mines, although a post office remained open until September 30, 1942.

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Wikipedia