Well, to set the record straight, for one thing. Many of the reference materials I've seen on ghost towns in New Mexico still list Madrid as having fewer than 20 occupants and standing mostly abandoned. Anyone who has visited there in the last decade knows otherwise. Pinos Altos and Golden have been similarly described. It's time we took another look at what twenty or thirty years ago was appropriately dubbed a ghost town, and determine if that term still applies.
But there's more than just the need to update old references. Anyone who has traveled the high- and by-ways of New Mexico has probably fought the momentary urge to turn at the signpost for Turn, to lumber towards Lumberton, to tip a little towards Tipton, or to go to Hell (Hell Canyon, that is.) I hope this page will be a "virtual" reflection of that urge. The focus, at least in this incarnation, is on ghost towns, since that's what I know. At some later point I hope to include more information on lesser-known communities (I can't, for example, get the image of that aging Sinclair gas station in Lake Arthur out of my mind, and I'd love to share it with others) and, while I'm over-extending myself, on historic forts in New Mexico as well.
I don't spent too much time giving the history of each place in these pages. The origin and life of each town has been chronicled with much more care in other sources. (See the references section for a bibliography.) Rather than restate this information, I'm more interested in conveying my own impressions of a place, including any unique or interesting things that happened while I was there. Was it really a ghost that tried to enter our car at Kelly mine? Why on earth would anybody lick rocks for a living (City of Rocks State Park)? Why is Yeso my favorte place in New Mexico? Etcetera.
The way of modern life has altered many features of rural New Mexico, making previously impassable roads easy to maneuver and bringing a satellite dish to many homes. Although folks may argue whether it's for the better or for the worse, nobody would disagree that New Mexico is changing. I'm not interested in fighting change, nor directing its course, but I am up for all of us taking a good look around at our surroundings. We may not recognize them twenty years from now. Hence this homepage.
Context and Understanding
I believe that context is critical for understanding. The World Wide Web, built around the idea of hyperlinking ideas and concepts, is a wonderful tool for establishing context. However, context - as with information in general - isn't very useful unless it's structured.
So to help put some of the information on this homepage into perspective, each date mentioned in the write-up of a site is a hyperlink to another document called the Table of Context. This Table will show what other events were happening in the world, the United States, and New Mexico around that same time. The Table of Context makes judicious use of hyperlinks to other WWW sites that provide additional information on that topic. This design also keeps the hyperlink references out of the main body of the write-up on each site, in case you already know about the topic or could care less.
A Word About the Sites
History is fragile. In deference to that fact, this homepage does not contain information on places that would be damaged if too many people knew about or visited them. It also does not contain information on sites that are on private property.
A Word About The Terminology
Whenever you refer to a place in the past tense, you're bound to upset someone. I can understand why. Sometimes we attribute undue significance to the buildings and structures of a place, as if those alone constitute a community. Of course, it's the people, and the more intangible things like the memories we hold and the relationships between events that occured in a place, that make up a community. Just because the buildings are reduced, doesn't mean the memories are. Each community behind a "ghost town" probably still exists somewhere, if even only in someone's fond remembrances - where, I should think, it is very much alive.
To me, the terms "ghost town" and "little known place" are compliments. Give me a back road over an interstate any day. I'd rather be exploring the cemetery at White Oaks than walking around the plaza in Santa Fe. But that's just me. I don't intend to imply through these write-ups that any one place is better or worse than any other; just that each one has something different to offer, and a different way of offering it.
A Word About The Photos
When my Mom painted our house blue, she asked me to take a photo of it when I was home for Christmas. A few days later I presented her with a picture of the shadows of the lawn furniture on the wall of house. That was the way I saw the...uh..."essence of the blueness." Mom smiled politely and put the photo in her drawer. She hasn't asked me to take a picture for her since.
Like the text, the pictures of each site here often represent more the way I feel about the place than a necessarily true image of the site itself. I hope you enjoy them regardless. (If you don't, it was the camera's fault, not mine.) If you enjoy them so much that you'd like to use them for something you're working on, please contact me. I can't imagine a scenario under which I would say no to such a request (unless you're writing a book on bad photography.)
A Final Word
Every place I've visited has taught me something, whether it's something about New Mexico history, like Elizabethtown; something about human nature, like White Oaks; or even, most rewardingly, something about myself, like Dawson. The blacktop, then, is a blackboard. (And I guess that makes me a Roads Scholar.)
I hope you enjoy this site. And if you have - even momentarily - considered "dropping it all" and moving to Loco Hills, this page is dedicated to you.
