Terlingua Historic District
a.k.a. Big Bend;Chisos Mining Camp;Quicksilver Mining District
7 mi. W of jct. of TX 118 and TX 170, Terlingua, TXThe Terlingua Historic District is today a largely deserted village comprised primarily of ruins of small stone and adobe houses scattered across a barren landscape. More substantial buildings, some in various stages of use, include the Store and Theater, Church, School, and "Mansion" sited prominently on a hill. This former mining camp and associated abandoned mercury mineshafts are in southern Brewster County approximately 90 miles south of Alpine, five miles west of Big Bend National Park, and 11 miles east of Lajitas, a small community on the Rio Grande. Founded in the early 1900s by Chicago industrialist Howard Everett Perry (1858-1944), Terlingua developed around the Chisos Mining Company, which operated between 1903 when the first recovery of mercury occurred, and 1942 following bankruptcy During that 39-year span, the mines at Terlingua produced more flasks of mercury than any others in the Terlingua "District," (a classification for the geographic expanse yielding cinnabar ore) and in 1921 the Chisos was the largest producer of mercury in the United States.
Mercury--or quicksilver, the sine qua non in the development of Terlingua--along with the Chisos Mining Company and this entire mining District have a long and well-recorded history. The mineral was first mentioned in documents by Aristotle, and later by Theophrastus who credited the Athenian Callias with the invention of methods to process cinnabar, the raw ore form of mercury, in 415 B.C. Pliny recorded 450 years later the transportation of some 10,000 pounds of cinnabar to Rome from the Almaden Mine in present Spain (Ragsdale, 303). At that point, the purpose of mining cinnabar seems to have been threefold: for grinding to create cosmetic rouge, the extraction of mercury for the recovery of other metals, and the production of medicine.
After the 16th century special properties of quicksilver received increasing attention and the mineral was put to a variety of scientific uses, including the invention of the barometer and the mercury thermometer. In 19th and 20th century North America, gold and silver mining industries depended upon mercury for extraction of these "noble" metals from their ore. During the same period on a global basis, mercury contributed to the invention and manufacture of explosive fulminate, a crucial component of advanced weaponry and a technical foundation of modern warfare.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.