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Mexican farmers and ranchers started moving into the middle Gila Valley in the 1850s. The Lorona family moved from Altar, Sonora, to Yuma in the 1850s, and went on to the Florence area by 1860. In 1864, Andronico Lorona and Ygnacio Manjarres built houses at what would later be the Florence townsite. Sylvester Andrada, born in the Altar Valley about 1827, first came to the Gila Valley in 1863. He returned to the area in 1868 and opened a canal to irrigate two hundred acres.
In 1866, Charles S. Adams founded Adamsville and Levi Ruggles established the neighboring townsite of Florence in the midst of these Hispanic homesteads. These two agricultural communities produced wheat and barley, which was freighted to mining camps and military posts throughout central Arizona. By 1869, the Bichard brothers built a flour mill in Adamsville, and several Mexican teamsters settled in the Gila Valley, as it was the best place to find work in the lucrative freighting trade.
The 1870 federal census indicates that a vast majority of the people in the Gila Valley settlements were Hispanic. Florence had a population of 218, of which 54 were Anglo-Americans or European immigrants. In Adamsville, the Mexican character of the town was even more pronounced: of 400 residents, only 22 men had non-Hispanic surnames. There were also more wealthy Hispanic landowners, merchants, and freighters in Adamsville than Florence. In the spring of 1870, Catholic priests built the adobe Chapel of the Gila, the first church in central Arizona. Father Andres Eschallier became the first parish priest, offering services in Spanish.
In the early 1870s, many of the new residents in the Gila River settlements had come directly from Sonora. Some of these immigrants were wealthy and well-educated. Crisanto Celaya was a rancher from the village of Santa Ana, Sonora. He had been a supporter of Governor Gandara. When the French were defeated in 1867, he was forced to flee to the United States with his wife, Francisca, and their eight children. The Celaya family arrived in Florence in 1870 with all of their possessions in a covered wagon. Several of the children, including Antonio A. Celaya, later moved to new settlements in the Salt River Valley. Several immigrants from Hermosillo came to the Gila River at this time, including Vicente Andrade, Maria Arvizu, Francisco Romero, and freighter Jesus Garcia.
A 64,000-acre expansion of the Gila River Reservation was surveyed in 1870. Pimas had protested settlers' encroachment in the Gila Valley, particularly in the Adamsville area. More than 2,500 acres of disputed land had been claimed by 20 farmers. These included Sylvester Andrada and his partner, Jose Maria Barragan; Jesus Martinez, a farmer from New Mexico; Francisco and Plutarco Gandara; and Pedro Sotelo, who had been one of the last of the Mexican soldiers at the presidio of Tucson. After these farmers lost their lands, the population of Adamsville dwindled and Florence grew. Some of the displaced land owners, such as Martinez and Sotelo, moved to the Salt River Valley and filed new homestead claims.
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 Chapel of the Gila, built c. 1870 |
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