Lying five miles from the border of New Mexico, Duncan is in the southeastern corner of Greenlee County. Farm fields stretch in every direction, thickets of cottonwood trees shelter old farmhouses, and cattle and horses seem to outnumber people.

Photo courtesy of the Spoon Family

      Duncan belongs to the Gila, the storied river of the west, the ageless natural highway whose passage through the mountain and desert southwest has served people since prehistoric times. In the mid-19th century, the communities along the Gila grew up around stage and freight stations and military posts as settlers arrived and battled hostile natives.

    Originally named Purdy, Duncan was founded by Messrs. Purdy and Bachelor as a way station that linked the mining center of Clifton with Silver City, New Mexico.        Photo courtesy of the Spoon Family

At that time, the town was located on the north bank of the Gila. Around 1881, when the Arizona Copper Company was formed, an influx of Scottish capital financed the building of a narrow-gauge railway from Clifton to Lordsburg, New Mexico.

To accommodate the new railroad, the town was moved to the south bank of the river and renamed Duncan, after Duncan Smith, the director of the Arizona Copper Company. 

    With the rail, settlement of the fertile, easily irrigated valley boomed. Soon Duncan was shipping far beyond the Southwest, to markets north and east. It prospered into the 1950's, when the new Interstate 10 to the south diverted commercial traffic, contributing to a rising trucking industry. Duncan quietly receded then into a farming and ranching community.
    The small highways of south-eastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico are marked by stone pillars bearing the tales of the last stands of the Apache against an enemy they would never defeat.

    One of the greatest of those warriors, the legendary Geronimo, is said to have been born somewhere along the Upper Gila River.

Photo courtesy of the Spoon Family