Ada Etta Mine in Lordsburg New Mexico
By Rolf Luetcke


The story goes back to the early 1970’s, when I was driving to areas looking for minerals in some quantity to chop up into sample collections. I had heard that near Lordsburg New Mexico, were a number of mines that were hopeful places to get bulk material. This was before the mindat web site and in fact, before the internet so the only search tools were books I had accumulated.
On this particular trip I was only a few miles from Lordsburg where the freeway had been going fairly straight along the valley north of a small set of hills. Only a few miles from town I saw a mine dump to the south of the freeway, near the small set of hills. Since I really had no idea what was open to collecting and this small mine had no houses or any habitation anywhere near it I decided it may be a good mine to try and get to. Taking the first Lordsburg exit it was fairly easy to find dirt roads that went right toward where I saw the mine. The mine was easy to spot and get to. When I parked, I saw there was a cut along the small hill that went basically east west. Along this cut was the mine tunnel that went into the mountain. As soon as I got onto the mine dump I saw this was perfect for just what I had been hoping to find. The ground was full of multi colored chalcopyrite in all sizes. It didn’t take long for me to collect a few hundred pounds of the massive chalcopyrite to use in my collections.
On this trip I had also seen on the drive toward Lordsburg, just entering New Mexico, a mining area to the north of the freeway, not too far back into Arizona. So, after collecting the material by Lordsburg, not having a lot of room in my vehicle left, I headed back west and just before the Arizona border I took an exit and drove along the frontage road until I found the side road heading north. It was not too far along the road that I came to a work area by the side of the road that looked like a mining project. There were vehicles parked near the road and people working on some excavations not far from the road. So, stopping I went to say hello and ask if I might be able to do some rock hounding. They were not unfriendly but also said they were a working project but I could collect just a short way back toward where I had parked. I only found a small amount of interesting looking material with some metallics in it and some material with holes that may have crystals and took those along.
That is about where my Lordsburg collecting story ended in the part that goes back to the 1970’s. I used the material for the collection for many years. When I had looked at the material under my microscope I mostly saw solid chalcopyrite and a bit of nice calcite but didn’t give it a lot of thought. The few pieces I had picked up at the other small place I also looked at and ended up keeping one specimen that had a lot of minerals in it and most I didn’t recognize then. I boxed it up and it went into my collection. This was about the extent of it at that time.
My mineral collections didn’t need to have specific information on the specimens so Lordsburg New Mexico sufficed nicely. The bit of searching I did to figure out just what the mine was called I collected at only brought me to the Atwood Mine in Lordsburg that listed the main things I had found.
When I started working on mindat I wanted to add a few things from the Lordsburg location I had set aside and used my original locating of Atwood Mine. The minerals fit perfectly to that location but it was still something that bugged me in the back of my mind. By now I had found the Atwood Mine was much closer to Lordsburg and facing a much different direction than the much smaller mine I had collected.
Just in December of 2021 my wife Mary decided to have a bit of fun. We have a large open area in our yard where we have close to 40 piles of minerals from all the mines we have collected over the years. One pile was the chalcopyrite from Lordsburg. Now and then Mary likes to go out and get into something with the minerals in the yard. Sometimes it is boxing up some to put in our sales shed and this time she got a box of the chalcopyrite to break up to expose some of the fresh chalcopyrite. She broke up a box full and had planned to put it out in the sales shed also and I grabbed the box before she could put it away and took it to my mineral room. Since she had done the work to break it up, I decided to do a list of minerals I found in the material to put in the sales box. It didn’t take me long to figure out there were actually a lot of minerals besides the chalcopyrite in the material. As I began to make a list the thought came to me to see if I could figure out the exact mine I had been to.
There is one fortunate thing I have discovered, I seem to have nearly a photographic memory of mines and collecting places I have been to over the years. One example is a small prospect in the Chiricahua Mountains I wanted to revisit after about 35 years. I headed back with Mary and since she has asthma, she has to be careful with very steep climbs and walks. This small prospect was about half a mile or so down a very steep and barely there dirt track. I remembered going to this spot about 35 years before and as we kept descending, Mary finally said she would have to say and let me go on since the return climb would be a lot for her. I told her that the small mine was only a couple of hundred yards down and around the next corner. She gave me a look I knew and I told her if it was not around that corner we would go back up. We rounded the corner and there was the prospect, exactly where I had remembered it. I have been able to do this quite often over the years and with the Lordsburg Mine I put my memory to work.
In searching the Lordsburg area, at the first no mine showed up on the side of the hills I had remembered the location should be. The only way to pin down a mine was to look at every location and then zoom in on the map and see if it was in the right place. I finally found one I had never heard of called the Ada Etta Mine. When I went to the mine page and brought up the satellite map and zoomed in to the closest setting, there was the small mine with the east-west cut and small dump just to the north of this. The place was just as I had recalled the mine looking like and it was in the exact place that was visible from the freeway only a mile away. Doing a bit more work I found it was one mine in a group of claims of that area and no other mine was nearby. This sure showed me that if one has a good memory of a place once visited and the new technology of the internet one can determine a place visited close to 40 years before.
We have a friend who can’t find a mine no matter what he uses and has no sense of direction and I know others that have similar problems, I have been fortunate to have a very good memory in this regard.
In the material Mary broke up I set aside a few dozen pieces and just recently made a list of the minerals I found and took photos of them. Here is a list of the minerals found at the Ada Etta Mine that I have found so far, anglesite, baryte, calcite, chamosite, chalcopyrite, chrysocolla, covellite, galena, hematite, limonite, malachite, manganese oxides and dendrites, pyrite, quartz, siderite, sphalerite and tremolite. There are still 4 minerals on the list on mindat I was not able to find but then I have a good portion of the pile out in the yard still and may go back and break a few more things to see what I find.
I have found with the modern technology of sites like mindat and the satellite maps that show detail never before seen, it is often possible to find places one never was able to give a name to before. This one was a happy situation with Mary having an urge to work some minerals and my grabbing to the box to look at under the microscope. In the past my interest in the minerals from Lordsburg was quite different and now I look for as many different species under the microscope as I can find.
I also discovered in the search for the correct mine that much of the material one sees in photos from the various mines of the Lordsburg Mining District are very similar. This gives me the idea that the deposits of ores of the area were closely related and most likely came about in the same way. Even the one specimen I found a ways west into Arizona also had the same minerals and to me showed that this area may have been part of the same ore formation as in the Lordsburg area itself.
It is sometimes wonderful what one can find with a bit of research and today’s data bases available are a huge help. In looking at the Ada Etta mine information on mindat there is not much information at all about this small mine but with the assumption that the ores of the area are very similar, some of the smaller mines like the Ada Etta may have played out not far into the mountain. The mine may not be big but the number of minerals is very similar to the whole district and more may still be out in our pile.