Empire Ranch | |
 Empire Ranch around 1900. | |
| Location | Near Sonoita, Arizona, United States |
|---|---|
| Built | c. 1865 |
| NRHP reference No. | 75000354 |
| Added to NRHP | 1976 |
Empire Ranch is a working cattle ranch in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. It was originally the headguarters for the Empire Land & Cattle Company. Empire Ranch is located in Coronado National Forest, six miles (10 km) east of Greaterville, Arizona and ten miles (16 km) north of Sonoita.[1]
Empire Ranch was established by homesteader Edward Nye Fish in the 1860s. It was originally 160 acres (0.65 km2) with a four room adobe building and an adjoining corral. Fish was a wealthy businessman in Tucson and in 1870 he constructed the Empire Ranch House, a twenty-two room adobe and wood framed structure. However, in 1876, the businessman Walter L. Vail, a native of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and Herbert Hislop, an Englishman, acquired the ranch and established the Empire Land & Cattle Company.[2] Throughout the Old West period, Empire Ranch expanded to over a million acres (4,000 km²) of land. New buildings were also constructed and concrete floors added just after the turn of the century. The ranch remained in the Vail family until 1928 when the Boyce, Gates and Johnston company, the successor to the Chiricahua Cattle Company, purchased the land in order to move cattle there from the San Carlos Indian Reservation.[3]
By 1951, Frank Boyce and his family assumed full control of the property. Around the same time, the ranch was featured in several Western films starring many actors such as John Wayne, Gregory Peck and Steve McQueen. In 1969, Empire was sold to the Gulf American Corporation for a proposed real estate development and later resold to the Anamax Mining Company for mining and water potential. None of these developments materialized though and the ranch continues to work with cattle. In the 1980s, the owners began to restore the buildings to their original state and, in 1988, the ranch became public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The Empire Ranch Foundation was established as a private non-profit organization in 1997 to work with the Bureau of Land Management to develop private support to preserve the buildings and enhance the educational and recreational opportunities it offers to the public. In 2000, Congress officially designated Empire Ranch as being part of the 42,000-acre (170 km2) Las Cienegas National Conservation Area[3]