1952 Map of Tombstone SE

About this map

San Rafael Del Valle and the rising foothills of the Mule Mountains define this Cochise County landscape in the early 1950s. The map illustrates a high-desert environment where water management and transportation routes dictate settlement patterns, centered around isolated homesteads such as Keller Ranch, Trappman Ranch, and Johnson Ranch. Notable infrastructure includes the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway cutting north to south, while the industrial history of the region is etched into the earth through the presence of the Southern Pacific railroad and a nearby Old Railroad Grade. This Army Map Service survey documents a specific moment in the mid-century Southwest, showing early telephone lines and various unidentified ruins that suggest earlier layers of habitation along the intermittent drainage of Government Draw.