The San Rafael Ranch, formerly known as the Greene Ranch, is a historic cattle ranch located in the San Rafael Valley about a mile and a half north of Lochiel, Arizona, near the international border with Sonora, Mexico.HistoryThe land that is now the San Rafael Ranch was originally an old Mexican land grant called San Rafael de la Zanja, which was sold to the cattle baron Colin Cameron and a few of his partners in the 1880s. Cameron built a two-story house to live in soon after, but it burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances in 1899. A year later Cameron built a new two-story brick house, even larger and more luxurious than the original, although he lived in it for only a short time. After losing a legal battle to his neighbor over land rights in 1903, Cameron decided the ranch was not worth the trouble and moved on.The ranch was then sold to Colonel William Cornell Greene, who owned the large copper mines to the southeast, in Cananea, Sonora. Colonel Greene acquired many properties over the years, including some 600,000 acres of ranch land on both sides of the international border. The San Rafael Ranch House became the headquarters for the Greene Cattle Company, which raised tens-of-thousands of hereford cattle and horses to go with them. The Greene Cattle Company was so successful it even attracted the attention of Pancho Villa, who raided the San Rafael Ranch for horses on more than one occasion in the early 1910s.