Terlingua, Texas: The Quicksilver Town Beside Big Bend

Terlingua grew up in the first years of the 20th century around rich deposits of cinnabar — mercury sulfide ore — in the remote Chihuahuan Desert of far West Texas, near the Rio Grande and the rugged country that would later become Big Bend National Park. The dominant operator was the Chisos Mining Company, organized in 1903 by Chicago businessman Howard E. Perry — who had acquired the cinnabar-bearing land as payment of a debt — whose mines and reduction furnaces turned the district into the largest single mercury, or quicksilver, producer in the United States.

For roughly four decades the Terlingua Quicksilver District supplied a strategic but narrow commodity used in detonators, instruments, and industrial processes. Production peaked at about 7,200 flasks in 1917, and by 1922 the district accounted for roughly 40 percent of all quicksilver mined in the United States. Around the mines Perry built a classic company town: a store, a school, housing, offices, and his own hilltop mansion, sustaining a population variously estimated in the low thousands during the 1910s and 1920s in one of the most isolated inhabited corners of Texas.

The town’s fortunes, however, rose and fell with a single volatile metal. When mercury prices fell back from their wartime peaks and the most accessible high-grade ore was worked out, the Chisos Mining Company declared insolvency on October 1, 1942. The mines passed to the Esperado Mining Company, which shut them down by the end of World War II, and the population scattered. Terlingua became a genuine ghost town — stone ruins, a hillside cemetery, and abandoned mine workings baking in the desert.

Unlike many mercury camps, Terlingua found a second life. From the 1960s onward — anchored by the famous Terlingua chili cook-off first held in 1967 — the ghost town reinvented itself as a desert tourism, arts, and music outpost serving visitors to Big Bend. Today a small revived community of residents, restaurants, lodging, and outfitters occupies the same ground, so that Terlingua is at once a preserved set of mining ruins and a living, if eccentric, settlement.