Economic decline of Douglas, Arizona

Douglas, Arizona’s postindustrial decline is a story of environmental relief arriving alongside economic loss. The town’s copper-smelting prosperity depended on an industry that became notorious for its pollution; when the smelter closed, the clouds of exhaust stopped, but so did hundreds of jobs. Decades later, boarded storefronts, a closed hospital, and a shrinking population marked the continuing contraction. For Linda May, however, the low cost of land created an opening: Douglas’s decline was not simply a ruin to mourn, but a condition that might make a self-sufficient home affordable.

A smelting town and its environmental burden

Founded in 1901 as a center for processing ore from nearby copper mines, Douglas boomed around its smelter. The industry’s effects grew harder to ignore as public attention to air pollution increased. After federal research funding began in 1955, the Clean Air Act of 1963 and later extensions established new standards, but the local Douglas Reduction Works, owned by Phelps Dodge Corporation, avoided meeting them until the 1980s.

By then, the plant had become the largest sulfur-dioxide emitter in American manufacturing, releasing about 950 tons of the pollutant each day. The account makes the harm tangible through descriptions of the dense smoke and the physical distress it caused: a doctor stopped urging patients to exercise because heavy breathing might worsen its effects, while a Bisbee coffee-shop owner described the sensation of breathing when pollution was severe. The damage was not presented as a single dramatic incident, but as a prolonged condition of daily life in the valley.

Closure and the price of cleaner air

The Environmental Protection Agency ordered Phelps Dodge to install emissions controls at a cost of half a billion dollars. The company shut the smelter instead. In mid-January 1987, four workers poured its last batch of copper; exhaust ceased from the smokestacks, and the haze over the valley dissipated. The environmental improvement was immediate enough to be visible, but the economic consequences were concentrated in the same act of closure: 347 jobs disappeared, along with $10 million in payroll, an estimated quarter of the local economy.

The book records the anger this generated among Douglas residents, including people who still had employment. Their resentment reflects the competing stakes of the closure: cleaner air mattered, but so did the work and income on which the town depended. The end of smelting therefore did not resolve the community’s difficulties. It removed a source of pollution while also removing a central economic support, leaving residents to absorb the costs of an industrial transition they had not controlled.

A downtown registering decline

When the narrator visited G Avenue, the difference between Douglas’s earlier importance and its present condition was legible in the streetscape. Vacant buildings, peeling paint, faded façades, plywood-covered windows, and deserted sidewalks surrounded the historic Gadsden Hotel. The town had once been the largest in Arizona, but the main street offered little evidence of that former scale beyond the buildings left behind.

The Brophy Building, once a commercial center, retained its ornamental shields, egg-and-dart molding, and dentil cornice above boarded-up storefronts. Nearby, the Grand Theatre’s marquee had lost letters, leaving the message NOW SHO ING. Opened in 1919 as a 1,600-seat movie palace, the theater had been promoted as the finest between San Antonio and Los Angeles. It offered a pipe organ for silent films, a tearoom, and a candy shop, and hosted performers including Ginger Rogers and John Philip Sousa. The rise of television helped end the era of elaborate movie houses; the Grand closed in 1958, its roof later collapsed, and trees grew among the ruins.

The theater’s subsequent history shows how a vacant landmark could remain part of local life without being restored. Preservationists bought it for one dollar in the early 1980s, but restoration was estimated to cost $9.5 million. In the 2000s, volunteers used the dormant building as an annual Halloween haunted house, staging scenes that included an embalming lab built by a funeral home and a Pet Sematary setting performed by high-school students. The building thus survived as a site of community activity, though not as the functioning cultural institution it had once been.

Contraction beyond the smelter

Douglas’s decline continued after the smokestacks went cold. The town’s only hospital closed in the summer of 2015, eliminating another seventy jobs. The wider metropolitan area encompassing Douglas and Sierra Vista was identified as the fourth-fastest-shrinking city in America; between 2010 and 2015, Douglas lost population more steeply than the Flint and Youngstown metropolitan areas. These later losses extend the story beyond the smelter: the industrial closure was a major turning point, not the end of the community’s economic contraction.

The book places this local trajectory alongside a broader insecurity affecting older Americans. It describes downwardly mobile older workers whose financial cushions had vanished, a reversal in retirement security across generations, and rising numbers of people over sixty-five still working. Linda’s own circumstances make that wider context concrete without making her a product of Douglas’s decline: she relied on a small Social Security benefit, worried about remaining financially independent, and wanted to build a home that would provide food, electricity, climate control, and water. Her problem was how to make that long-term plan possible while living on limited resources.

Decline as an opening for homesteading

Douglas’s deteriorating economy also made property affordable enough to attract a small stream of newcomers. Robert Uribe, who had moved from Manhattan, opened a coffee shop and later became mayor. Berkeley filmmaker Harrod Blank was building Art Car World, a museum devoted to creatively modified vehicles. Its collection included Carthedral, a hearse with stained-glass windows and Gothic spires, and the Coltmobile, decorated with 1,045 plastic horses. The examples suggest that the town’s low-cost setting could support ventures unlikely to fit easily into a more expensive market, though they do not reverse the larger pattern of decline.

Linda was drawn to Douglas for a similarly practical reason. She was seeking an inexpensive place to pursue experimental homesteading, and cheap real estate made the town useful to that ambition. Her intended Earthship was meant to combine systems for food, electricity, climate control, and water, reducing dependence on fragile income and housing arrangements. The contrast is central to the book’s treatment of Douglas: the same economic decline that left vacant buildings and diminished services could make land accessible to someone trying to construct a more self-reliant life. The town’s past was not restored, and its losses were not erased; instead, its reduced cost of entry became part of the possibility Linda saw there.