Entertainment Magazine: Tucson: Iron Door Mine: Flint Carter

Saving history with a mission

The Santa Catalina Historic Preservation Project

An old battered adobe building, with a stone foundation, sitting at the mouth of the Cañada del Oro, has some historical significance.

The undated structure may have been a mission in the 1700’s called the “Mission of Santa Catalina.” As the site of a massacre only a dozen years earlier, and an Indian treaty two dozen years before, Tucson pioneer Mariano G. Samaniego found the canyon peaceful enough in the 1880s to build a home and stagecoach line through the mountains. It was a way station for miners crossing through the mountains during the 1800s, the main road north through the mountains, and the first guest ranch in the area – “Linda Vista Guest Ranch” - Rancho Linda Vista during the early 1900s. Also known as Rancho Solano, it is a home with a mission and needs to be preserved.

Flint Carter, a local miner and director of the Santa Catalina Historic Preservation Project (SCHPP), a project sponsored through SAI, Inc., a non-profit organization, is working to preserve and restore that history.

The possible "Mission of Santa Catalina," located at the mouth of the Cañada del Oro (Canyon del Oro) north of Tucson, Arizona.

The Santa Catalina Mountains and Tucson valley is one of the longest, continuously inhabited regions in the United States. Early human occupation in the area dates back about 10,000 years. The region has been inhabited by the Hohokam for thousands of years and the by Apaches. The Spanish Jesuits mined the Catalina Mountains for gold in the 1700s. Americans began mining the hills a hundred years later.

The first documented ownership of the property was Mariano Samaniego, Tucson pioneer. Samaniego arrived in Tucson in the mid-1860s and became a freighter, cattle rancher, merchant and a successful Hispanic public official.