In Duncan, the Gila River runs right through town, and most of the town, downtown included, sits on its south bank. The Duncan Public Library, Duncan High School, The Duncan Theater, Centennial Park, Duncan Elementary and the Gila River are printed on this map. The Benjamin F. Billingsley House, believed to be the oldest house in town, has its own place on the sheet.
Duncan is a small town in Greenlee County, four miles west of the New Mexico line.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of the landscape comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. The Benjamin F. Billingsley House is on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked it against National Park Service records. The town covers 2.2 square miles of the Gila River valley, and 694 people lived here at the 2020 census.
A farming and ranching valley
Duncan was founded in the mid-19th century, on land that came to the United States through the Mexican Cession and the Gadsden Purchase. The families in town and on the farms around it are mostly farming, ranching and mining families, the miners working Freeport-McMoRan’s copper mines at Morenci and Safford in Arizona and Chino and Tyrone in New Mexico. Children from Franklin and York on the Arizona side, and from the village of Virden in New Mexico, all go to Duncan’s public schools. The valley along the Gila is known for arrowheads, pottery and other things left by the peoples who lived here long before, and for traces of the garrison camps of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition.
U.S. Route 70 runs through downtown, west 39 miles to Safford and southeast 35 miles to Lordsburg, New Mexico, and State Route 75 heads north 28 miles to Clifton. It’s semi-arid country with huge swings between day and night. In April the gap between the day’s high and the night’s low averages 43.7 degrees, and in a typical year well over a hundred nights fall below freezing. The heaviest snowfall on record came in the cold wave of January 1949, when 15.0 inches fell.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: Stevens Loop, Comanche Dr, Pawnee Ln, Mesquite Ave, Mesquite St, Yucca Ave, Diane Ave, Lackey Ave, N Cherokee Dr, McGrath Ave, Daniels Ave, Ocotillo Ave.
More street names, A to Z
Billingsley Ln, Carlisle Rd, CC Herrera Ln, Chaparrel St, Cottonwood Ln, Cowboy Way, Elmer Dr, Gould Dr, Harmony Dr, Main St, Old Clifton Hwy, Old Virden Rd, Parks Canyon Rd, Pecan St, S Cheyenne Ln, Shoshone Ln, Skyline Dr, Stagecoach Loop, Virden Hwy.
The Billingsley House
The Benjamin F. Billingsley House, at 202 Main Street, went up around 1900 with a few touches of the Queen Anne style. Billingsley sold farm supplies and dry goods in Duncan from 1895 to 1940. His house is described as architecturally significant, an example of the homes built during Arizona’s Territorial period, and it was listed on the National Register in 1983. It’s a brick house of 30 by 35 feet with a hipped roof, a corbelled brick chimney and ornamental cast iron cresting added after 1907, and the brick was covered in stucco around 1940. Floodwater reached it in 1940 and again in 1978, and both times it came through without much damage.
The Lazy B
Sandra Day O’Connor was born in El Paso, Texas, but she grew up near Duncan on the Lazy B, her family’s cattle ranch, which straddles the line between Arizona and New Mexico. The ranch covered 198,000 acres. The house was nine miles from the nearest paved road and had no running water or electricity until she was seven. She spent most of her early school years with her grandmother in El Paso, and for her eighth-grade year she lived at the ranch and rode a bus 32 miles to school. She went on to become the first woman to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, from 1981 to 2006. With her brother, H. Alan Day, she wrote Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest about their childhood there. The Day family ran the ranch for many years before selling it, and it’s still a working ranch.
Around town
Duncan High School is home of the Wildkats, in red, grey and white. The school plays eight-man football in the fall, volleyball and cross-country too, basketball in winter, and baseball, softball, tennis, golf and track in spring. Duncan Elementary, the Duncan Public Library, Centennial Park and The Duncan Theater are all part of the town on the sheet, and Greyhound serves Duncan on its route between Phoenix and El Paso by way of Globe.
This Duncan map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Duncan home, on either side of the Gila River, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Duncan map.
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