Facts about Sopori Ranch
● Sopori could have been named after the Sobaipuri, a Pima Indian group named by Father Eusebio Kino in 1700s. Or it could have come from the Spanish word sopor, meaning peaceful or drowsy.
● Before European settlement, it was a historic Pima village, occupied as a Pima Rancheria into the 1740s.
● In the 1760s, it was a 142,000-acre Spanish land grant, supplying food to the Spanish military's Tubac garrison.
● American mining interests bought the land after the Gadsden purchase of 1854, and Col. James W. Douglas began mining at Sopori in 1855.
● Later, it was a ranch, then a gold mine, farmland and a site of an 1861 attack by Apaches who killed the ranch foreman and drove off the livestock.
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● It was ranched under numerous ownerships until the family of film mogul Jack Warner bought it in 1950. The Croll family bought it in 1993.
● It currently has about 900 cows, bulls and horses, contains two farms totaling 692 acres and is marked by sandy washes, flat farmland, rolling ridges and steep mountains.
● The ranch contains eight irrigation wells, four domestic wells, 24 livestock wells with windmills or submersible pumps, 24 dirt stock tanks, numerous springs and several dams and reservoirs.
Sources: Tucson Realty and Trust Co. and Pima County's Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan
