Gila, NM

Gila is a census-designated place in Grant County, New Mexico, United States. The 2020 census counted 285 residents. Gila is 48 kilometres northwest of the county seat, Silver City. The community is located in the irrigated valley of the Gila River in the midst of hilly and mountainous semi-arid terrain. The short version is that Gila carries an earlier story into the places people know and use now. That is the local read on Gila: its past remains attached to the places people use now.

The townsite was sporadically populated by the Apache, Spanish and Mexican colonists, and American mountain men prior to the rise to prominence of the million-acre Lyons & Campbell Ranch. The Gila River valley was attractive for human settlement because the river was one of the few dependable water sources in the arid southwestern United States. About 1829 American mountain men built a "frontier hacienda " at Gila for trade with the Apache and fur trapping.