Winkelman, Arizona

Winkelman was founded as a mining town in the late 1890's. Just up the hill from Winkelman is the town of Hayden, built by ASARCO to service their copper mine and smelter. Winkelman was named for a local rancher named Peter Winkelman. They needed a name for the community in 1903 when the first post office opened on the railroad line that had just arrived. The town was kind of a merger on the railroad line of 2 other local settlements named Dudleyville and Feldman. Winkelman was built along the Gila River and had problems over the years with the lower part of town flooding in rainy season. As Winkelman was not a company town, over time the town developed as the shopping center for the area but when most of the copper mines shut down (or cut back), most of the businesses in town left.