The Presidio Mine

In September 1880 John W. Spencer, a rancher and freighter supplying Fort Davis, picked up a surface rock that proved to carry silver. He showed it to Colonel William R. Shafter of the First Infantry, who had it assayed. By June 1882 the partners had leased ground to San Francisco mining speculators, and in late summer 1883 the Presidio Mining Company was organised. The town that grew at the mine took the colonel's name. Between 1885 and 1912 the mine worked four hundred and fifty thousand tons of ore, and over its life it produced more than thirty two million ounces of silver, better than ninety two per cent of all the silver Texas has ever reported.

Three to four hundred men worked it, and it paid the largest tax assessments in the county. The 1900 census found 1,463 Mexican immigrants, fifty three Black residents and twenty eight Britons living at the Presidio Mine. In 1913 air drills, an aerial tramway, and a cyanide mill in place of the old mercury one lifted processing by more than sixty per cent, but the ore was thinning as it went: twelve ounces to the ton after 1913, and 8.4 by 1942.

The silver price closed the mine in July 1930. Federal silver buying at sixty five and a half cents an ounce brought it back on the first day of 1934, and in September 1942 it stopped producing, beaten by thinning ore, flooding and a wartime shortage of miners. M. F. Drunzer leased it in 1946, stripped the supporting pillars and shipped more than two thousand tons carrying 41,300 ounces of silver, with thirteen carloads more the year after. Shafter emptied: about twenty people by 1949. The ground has changed hands repeatedly since, and the most recent owners have been drilling it again.