Editing Dudleyville, Arizona (section)

== History ==

During the 1870s ranchers moved cattle into the lands along the lower San Pedro River. At what would become Dudleyville, a stage station opened in the late 1870s along the Globe to Tucson stage road.  On May 8, 1881, William Dudley Harrington, operator of the stage station, was appointed first post master of the new post office of Dudleyville.  Harrington and his wife Amanda Jane Crowley were from Missouri and had moved to California before settling with their family on a farm along the San Pedro.  The small village of Dudleyville, with stage stop, mercantile and post office, farms, ranches, and prospectors, was a small regional center for two and a half decades.  The village was eclipsed by the new town site of Winkleman, a mile north near the mouth of the San Pedro River on the Gila River, with the opening of the [[Phoenix and Eastern Railroad|Phoenix & Eastern Railroad]] on September 28, 1904, to the new rail town.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Barnes|title=Arizona Place Names|url=https://archive.org/details/arizonaplacename00barn|url-access=registration|publisher=University of Arizona Press}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Theobald|title=Arizona Territory Post Offices and Post Masters|publisher=Arizona Historical Foundation}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|last1=Pinal County Enumeration Sheets|title=U S 1880 Census|url=http://Ancestry.com|access-date=August 7, 2014}}</ref>