Pete Kitchen Ranch

The Pete Kitchen Ranch was established on Potrero Creek near Nogales, in Arizona Territory, in about 1862, and is reputed to have been the first permanent American ranch in Arizona. The site had good access to water, had been inhabited in prehistory, and was visited in October 1774 by Juan Bautista de Anza, who called it Las Lagunas, a name Kitchen also used. By the 1870s the ranch was producing substantial crops and livestock, yielding an income of $10,000 a year, of which 'Pete Kitchen hams' were a major part. Kitchen sold the ranch in 1883, after the arrival of the railway cut into his market, and retired to Tucson, where he kept mining and cattle interests and lost his money to gambling and to loans made to friends. He died on 5 August 1895, at the age of 77.

Where it is

Pete Kitchen Ranch is a historic site near Nogales, in Santa Cruz County. It is one of the historic sites in this database, and appears in the statewide ranking of Arizona attractions.

How this ranking was reached

No official visitor count is published for Pete Kitchen Ranch, so its score rests on public interest and tourism significance, and is capped below the level a measured attraction can reach. That is why the medium confidence above is not higher. The weighting is explained in full on the methodology page, and every axis is broken out under Facts and sources at the foot of this page.

Note on the data: No official visitor count is published for this attraction.

Sources

• Public interest: Wikimedia pageviews (en.wikipedia, human traffic), 2024
• Coordinates and designations: Wikidata(opens in a new tab)
• County: U.S. Census geography via FCC Area API, resolved from coordinates

Record last verified 2026-08-12.