By H. A. Lamb

“A land of perennial sunshine where the sweet magnolias bloom and the orange and lemon trees bear their golden fruit every year without fail.”

(1917) – The next time anybody tells you it’s cold in Douglas this winter, tell him to go to Nacozari. Of course it never gest really cold here, but already some folks are shivering around mornings as if it were forty below, and if a chance to thaw out is what they want, Nacozari’s the place.

It’s hard to believe, but only 75 miles south of Douglas is a land of perennial sunshine where the sweet magnolias bloom and the orange and lemon trees bear their golden fruit every year without fail.

Nice Weekend Trip

Why not try the trip for a weekend? Supposing that next Saturday the sleet and snow is falling here as it was a year ago. Four hours after you board the passenger coach of the Nacozari railroad at Agua Prieta, you are at dinner at the Nacozari Hotel, a beautiful bouquet of freshly picked roses gracing the table. And they’re real roses, too, not the roughnecks that survive the ordinary up-north garden through hardihood rather than beauty, but tender French varieties of aristocratic lineage and indescribably lovely tints of pink, cream and crimson.

A few years ago the path of the Nacozari hotel was paved with slag. It was neat but bare. Mrs. F. Schumacher, the manager, who loves flowers, removed the slag and began to plant things. A Rivedeore rambler five years old now monopolizes half the roof of a large porch. A year ago Mrs. Schumacher picked 500 roses off it for a wedding party. The stem is almost as large as a tree. This spring she stuck a slip from a fig tree in the ground. The slip has become a tree five feet high with some fair-sized fruit on it. The violets are just bursting into bloom. There are some lemon and orange trees just as there are in other yards in Nacozari. The oranges are seedlings, not the grafted nursery stock of southern California, and therefore more ornamental than useful as producers of fruit. There appears to be sufficient water available, however, to grow commercial oranges on a large scale. Mrs. Schumacher, by the way, is not German, as her name might imply. She says if people don’t stop asking about her Teutonic origin, she is going to have her name changed.

Nothing But Mining

Nacozari is not a winter resort. It is a mining camp-strictly. Still, it possesses more of real interest from a tourist standpoint than some points in southern California. The Moctezuma Copper Company is engaged in mining copper and shipping concentrates to the smelter here. It isn’t concerned about persons seeking the rest cure and beautiful flowers. Moreover, the hotel is filled as it is and not large enough to hold a large number of pleasure seekers. Still if one is willing to go to the bother of getting a passport from Mexican Consul Lelevier and an identification card from Immigration Inspector in Charge Heath ─Mr. Carson will make eight charming 4×4 likenesses of you for the purpose for $1─ it is possible to enjoy some of the novelty of foreign travel at small time and expense.

After getting on the train, one hears no language but Mexican and Chinese till he reaches the lobby of the Nacozari hotel. By the time he gets home the Anglo-Saxon language and all that goes with it seems mighty good again. Ask Evans, who went with me. He knows.

Plenty of Real Trees

Fifteen miles south of Agua Prieta the locomotive begins to nose into the foothills of the mountains beyond. Cabullona and then Fronteras, old-time penal colony, now the land of spuds, are passed, the next stop being Esqueda, where supplies are transferred by auto truck to the El Tigre mine, forty miles east. Soon the train is plunging into the headwaters of the Fronteras river. The defile becomes narrow and picturesque, and by late afternoon the engine is puffing for all it’s worth through jagged mountains. Dotting these slopes are live oaks and in the gorges cottonwoods, sycamores and other trees that please the eye of a fellow fresh from the desert.

Once over the divide, you soon catch a glimpse of the famous Churunibabi mine about 15 miles this side of Nacozari, with its odd thatched hats for the native workmen and their families. Next to arrest the eye is Cuesta Castillo, the castle house just across the gorge as one peeps out the window to the left, looking like the home of a Hohenzollern on a cliff along the Rhine. It was built 20 years ago by an American. Only a caretaker holds forth there now. At the rear there is said to be a wonderful garden. You are descending the Nacozari river now and the first thing you know, you are in Nacozari.

Published on Douglas Daily International
Douglas, Arizona, December 28, 1917
Vol. XV, No. 244

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