Las Cruces: Crossroads of History

Mexican Rule

By the early 1800s, Spain’s control of the Americas weakened. Mexico revolted. In 1821, Mexico won independence and control over New Mexico. Unlike the Spanish, the new government allowed outside trade and opened the Camino Real to foreign merchants. William Becknell opened the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe. In Santa Fe, it connected to the northern part of the old Camino Real, which became known as the Chihuahuan Trail. This Santa Fe trade created a vast new market for American goods and expanded American influence.

US & Mexico

Mexican Settlement: Doña Ana

By 1839, the communities at Paso del Norte, Juárez and El Paso, had a combined population of 4,000. Mexico issued new land grants to spur settlement upriver from El Paso. In 1843, thirty-three settlers founded the Doña Ana Bend Colony. This new village was the first Mexican settlement in the Mesilla Valley. The colonists completed the acequia madre, or “mother” irrigation ditch, in time for spring planting.

Doña Ana

War with Mexico

Under the idea of Manifest Destiny, Americans viewed westward expansion to the Pacific as a right and a necessity. U.S. attempts to buy western lands from Mexico failed. The U.S. set into motion events that lead to a declaration of war on May 13, 1846. By December, U.S. Army Colonel Alexander Doniphan had moved his troops to Doña Ana. Outnumbered, he marched to meet the Mexican Army in the Battle of Brazito. Despite the odds, the U.S. won the battle in less than an hour.

Col. Doniphan

American Expansion

The U.S.-Mexican war ended in May 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It granted the United States lands from Texas to California. By then, Doña Ana was teeming with Americans claiming rights to undeeded lands. Fearing the loss of their traditional way of life, the villagers appealed to the U.S. government to lay out a separate town for these newcomers.

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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Founding of Las Cruces

The site for the new American town lay six miles south of Doña Ana near a stand of crosses marking the graves of travelers and soldiers. The landmark crosses gave the town its name – Las Cruces. In 1849, U.S. Army surveyors lead by Lieutenant Delos Bennett Sackett divided Las Cruces into 84 blocks. They used a rawhide rope as a measure and reserved one block each for a church and a cemetery. After the survey, family leaders drew lots to determine which property they would own.

Early Las Cruces

Building Begins

Due to the shortage of lumber, the primary building material was adobe, a mix of mud and straw dried in the sun. Logs from cottonwood trees were used for roof supports, called vigas. Jacales, primitive mud-plastered mesquite post and brush dwellings, were another building type. Outlying farms relied on acequias, or irrigation ditches, to carry water from the Rio Grande for their crops of grapes, chile, corn and beans.

Adobe Building & Jacal

Early Businesses

Located on a major trade route dating back to the Camino Real, Las Cruces supported an array of business. Prussian immigrant Henry Lesinsky prospered as a general mercantile. Other family members moved into the area as well. Julius Freudenthal, Lesinsky’s cousin, ran a freight company, store and hotel. Nestor Armijo’s involvement in the Santa Fe trade, mining and livestock made him a millionaire. With his new wealth, he built the fine home that still stands near downtown. Martin Amador started his business career working in his mother’s store. He later built a successful freight business and a landmark hotel. In the 1850s, German native John May opened the Rio Grande Hotel, a grocery, and a dry goods store. Others found fortune as military contractors, providing the area military forts with supplies and grain.

Rio Grande Hotel

La Mesilla

La Mesilla, founded March 1, 1850, was named “little table” for its tableland site near the Rio Grande. Its residents were Mexican loyalists from Dona Ana and Mexico. A center for trade and farming, Mesilla became the county seat when Dona Ana County formed in 1852. Mesilla served as a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail Company stage route from St. Louis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. By 1860, Mesilla had more than 2,000 residents, twice that of Las Cruces. Both the U.S. and Mexico claimed ownership of the growing village.

Early Mesilla

Gadsden Purchase

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo required Mexico and the U.S. to agree on a new international border. The U.S. wanted a portion of northern Mexico for a railroad to California. Mexico opposed this boundary line. The U.S. Minister to Mexico, James Gadsden, traveled to Mexico to settle the dispute. He negotiated the purchase of a strip of land that now forms the southern portions of New Mexico and Arizona for $10 million. This strip became the last piece of land added to the continental United States. The Gadsden Purchase, ratified on April 25, 1854, also secured the Mesilla Valley and the village of Mesilla within the U.S. border.

Gadsden Treaty Details

Organ Mining District

Organ credits its founding to tale of a lost gold mine. In 1849, Juan Garcia, a prospector searching for the Lost Padre Mine, established the first mine in the Organ Mountains. He soon sold the mine to Hugh Stephenson. In ten years, Stephenson mined it for $90,000 worth of silver and lead. By the 1880s, mines like the Modoc and the Torpedo were removing silver, lead, and copper from the Organ Mountains. On February 26, 1885, the town of Organ was established. It had a population of 200, two general stores, seven saloons, a Catholic church, a schoolhouse, and a baseball team. Organ’s glory days ended in the early 1900s when prices for lead and silver began to fall.

Organ Mining

Civil War

At the outbreak of the Civil War, a crucial supply route crossed southern New Mexico. It provided access to gold mines in California and Colorado, and Pacific Ocean seaports. On July 25, 1861, Confederate Colonel John R. Baylor and 250 Texas Volunteers marched into Mesilla. They received a warm welcome from Southern sympathizers. Baylor proclaimed New Mexico from Socorro south as part of the Confederate Territory of Arizona. He then named himself military governor. In March 1862, the Confederates were defeated at the Battle of Glorieta Pass. They retreated to Texas, ending Confederate control of the region.

Skirmish at Mesilla: 500 Union troops from Fort Fillmore fought Baylor in a skirmish near Mesilla on July 25, 1861. Defeated, the Union retreated to Fort Fillmore. That night Major Isaac Lynde ordered the fort’s supplies and equipment destroyed to keep them from enemy hands. At daybreak, Lynde’s troops along with 100 women and children began a retreat to Fort Stanton a hundred miles away. About noon, Baylor’s men caught up with them at San Augustin Springs. There they found the road “lined with fainting, famished soldiers, who threw down their arms as we passed and begged for water.”

Confederate Territories

Fort Fillmore

California Column

In the spring of 1862, Union General James H. Carleton and 2,300 soldiers of the California Column marched into Mesilla. They were welcomed with champagne, dinners, and balls. Wary of rebel supporters, Carleton refused to set up headquarters in Mesilla. Instead, he set up camp in Las Cruces. His troops used Saint Genevieve’s plaza as a parade ground. The soldiers spent most of their time responding to Indian depredations, establishing martial law, and constructing roads and ditches.

Many members of the California Column stayed in the area after their military service. Sergeant John D. Barncastle farmed, kept a store, and entered politics. He married the daughter of Pablo Melendres, founder of Dona Ana. Sergeant Albert J. Fountain married into the prominent Perez family of Mesilla. Lieutenant Colonel William L. Rynerson involved himself in law, mining, farming, the railroad and local politics.

Civil War Veterans

Fort Selden

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army turned to the “Indian problem.” In 1865, General James H. Carleton established Fort Selden, one in a network of forts used in an aggressive military campaign against the Apaches. The first troops assigned to Fort Selden were Black soldiers. Many had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. At war’s end, they served in the west. The Indians called them Buffalo Soldiers because they thought the men’s hair resembled a buffalo’s mane and because the soldiers’ shared the buffalo’s tenacity in battle. Soldiers at Fort Selden saw little action. The fort closed in 1878. The pursuit of Geronimo caused its reactivation in 1880. It permanently closed in 1891.

Fort Selden

Ranching

In the decades following the Civil War, the cattle industry dominated the region and fueled many of the legends of the west. In the late 1860s, Texas cattlemen moved into New Mexico. Their ranches supplied beef to army forts and Indian reservations. John Chisum, established a ranch near Roswell. In the 1870s, men drove thousands of cattle from Roswell past Las Cruces to the Indian agencies in Arizona. This path became known as the Western Chisum Trail.

Thomas J. Bull established San Augustin Ranch in the Organ Mountains. W.W. Cox bought the ranch in the late 1800s. Cox expanded the ranch to 150,000 acres. In 1945, the federal government used eminent domain to take over 90 percent of the Ranch, establishing the White Sands Missile Range.

Cowboys at Cox Ranch

Billy the Kid & Pat Garrett

The Lincoln County War, 1876 to 1879, was a complex struggle for economic and political power. The lawless New Mexico frontier set the stage for New Mexico’s most notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. In 1881, local newspapers regularly reported sightings of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. Bonney was arrested by Pat Garret and jailed in Mesilla. A Mesilla jury sentenced him to hang in Lincoln for the murder of Sheriff William Brady. Billy the Kid escaped from the Lincoln Jail on April 30, 1881, killing two deputies. He avoided capture until July 14. Sheriff Pat Garrett killed him at Pete Maxwell’s ranch. Billy the Kid is buried in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

After leaving law enforcement, Pat Garrett tried his hand at several enterprises. He finally settled into ranching near San Augustin Pass in 1905. On February 29, 1908, while on his way to Las Cruces, he was shot in the back of the head and killed. Wayne Brazel, a cowboy on W. W. Cox’s ranch, pleaded self-defense and was acquitted. Garrett’s burial in Las Cruces marked the end of the Wild West era in Doña Ana County.

Book by Pat Garrett

Albert Fountain Mystery

In 1896, Oliver Lee was indicted for cattle rustling in a Lincoln district court. Albert Fountain attended the indictment. On his return to Las Cruces, Fountain and his eight-year-old son disappeared in the Chalk Hill area of the Tularosa Basin. His bloodstained wagon was found miles off the trail. Sheriff Pat Garret arrested murder suspects – Oliver Lee, Bill McNew and Jim Gilliland. Albert B. Fall represented the cowboys in the eighteen-day trial held in Hillsboro. It took the jury eight minutes to find the men not guilty.

Doña Ana County Court Officials

Coming of the Railroad

New Mexico’s first railcar steamed through Raton Pass on December 7, 1878. Mesilla Valley business leaders were eager for the railroad to reach the area. Troubled by political problems, floods and a weakening commercial base, Mesilla declined the railroad’s offer to buy a right-of-way. Las Cruces did not decline the offer. The New Mexico Town Company, a group of merchants and developers, donated land to the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad for both a depot and the right-of-way. The first train arrived in April 1881. Las Crucens celebrated with garlands and wagonloads of “native wine.” The railroad influenced nearly every aspect of life in Las Cruces. The first paved street in town, Depot Street (today’s Las Cruces Avenue), led from the railroad tracks to town.

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First Las Cruces Depot

Architecture

The railroad brought new building materials and styles to Las Cruces. When the county seat moved from Mesilla to Las Cruces, a new, two-story brick Italianate courthouse was built in 1883. (It was demolished in 1938.) New building materials arriving by train allowed for frame construction. Hip-roofed houses on broad lawns set the new neighborhood apart from the traditional one-story adobe and territorial style homes in the original town site. These new styles were most apparent in the varied architecture of the Alameda Depot Historic District. Architect Henry Trost designed some of the finer homes in the Alameda district in the early 1900s.

Las Cruces Courthouse

A Community Grows

Prosperity was evident in the 1890s as newcomers filled Las Cruces’ six hotels and eighteen saloons “to overflowing.” The newspaper credited the railroad with making Las Cruces “the best point in the country for retail merchants to purchase their goods.” Hispanic and Anglo merchants belonged to the same civic organizations. They socialized together at parties and balls. Many residents participated in the Community Band and in the Las Cruces Dramatic and Musical Club. Through the efforts of the Women’s Improvement Association, the town soon had a park, a library, a hearse, and a water-sprinkling wagon for the dusty streets.

Main Street

Churches

Although the Catholic Church continued its dominance, new settlers brought their religious beliefs to the community. By the turn of the century, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian congregations had established churches in town. Phillips Chapel, a CME Church established in 1911, was the first Black church in Las Cruces. Early Jewish settlers either held services in their homes or attended holy day services in El Paso. After meeting for many years at the original Branigan Library, the Jewish community built a synagogue in 1961.

Hendrix Church

Schools

Loretto Academy, founded in 1870 by the Sisters of Loretto, was the first school established in Southern New Mexico. Initially an all girl’s school, it occupied fifteen acres of land in the heart of Las Cruces. Tuition and board was $200 a year, with non-boarders paying $5 a month. Poor students were admitted free.

Public schools in Las Cruces had an erratic start in 1881. In 1882, the Las Cruces School Association raised enough money to open the two-room South Ward School. Different precincts sponsored public schools but none succeeded. Territorial law required the creation of public schools in all communities, but lawmakers failed to fund them until 1912.

In 1914, Central School was built as a high school. The name changed to Las Cruces Union High School in 1925 when it moved to a new building on Alameda Avenue. While Las Cruces schools were fully integrated from the beginning, students were prohibited from speaking Spanish on school grounds. In 1926, Black students attended school at Phillips Chapel. In 1935, Booker T. Washington School was completed for the Black students. Las Cruces schools remained segregated until 1954.

Loretto Academy

South Ward School

Las Cruces College

Las Cruces College opened in the fall of 1888 in a two-room adobe building. It combined elementary, college preparatory and business schools. Indiana educator Hiram Hadley was its first President.

In 1889, the New Mexico territorial legislature created a land grant college – the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. The new school merged with Las Cruces College and opened in January 1890. In June 1894, Hadley presented diplomas to four men and one woman in the college’s first graduating class. In 1960, the name was changed to New Mexico State University.

First Freshman Class

Health

Health seekers migrated to Las Cruces at the turn of the century. They believed that New Mexico’s mountain air and “altitude therapy” would cure tuberculosis. In 1897, Eugene Van Patten’s Dripping Springs camp became the first sanatorium in southern New Mexico. High in the Organ Mountains, it featured a thirty-two room hotel.

Las Cruces benefited from the influx of physicians who came to treat tubercular patients. Dr. Robert E. McBride, who came to Las Cruces in 1904 for his wife’s health, opened a sanatorium in town and, in 1935. He also established the first community hospital. By World War II, new treatments, including drug therapy, eliminated the need for expensive altitude cures. Dripping Springs was abandoned. Today Dripping Springs is a recreation area jointly managed by the Nature Conservancy and the Bureau of Land Management.

Dripping Springs Camp

Elephant Butte Dam

Cycles of flood and drought around the turn of the century threatened the economic stability of agriculture in the Mesilla Valley. The newly formed Bureau of Reclamation conducted a feasibility study for a proposed dam at Elephant Butte, in 1903. The dam was completed in 1916. It was the largest of its kind in the world. The Elephant Butte Irrigation District manages water allotment.

The availability of water made possible by the dam affected both land ownership and cropping patterns. The dam attracted new families, from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. They worked hard clearing bosques and leveling sand dunes to create new farms. To pay their share of the construction and irrigation costs, Farmers switched from growing fruits and vegetables to more profitable crops such as cotton. Cotton, along with chile and pecans, are an important part of the county’s economy.

Elephant Butte Dam

Farmers

Fabian Garcia, a young orphan, came from Mexico with his grandmother in the 1880s. They found work with the Thomas Casad family. The Casads owned 5,000 acres south of Mesilla. Casad sent Garcia to college, where he was a member of New Mexico College A&M’s first graduating class. In 1914, he was named station horticulturalist and first director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the college. He was successful in producing new varieties of chile, onions, and pecans. He championed poor Hispanic students and bequeathed the money to build them a dormitory at the college.

Another early farmer, Francis Boyer walked from Georgia to New Mexico in 1899. Near Roswell, the college-educated Boyer founded Blackdom. It was a settlement where Blacks could raise families, own land, and live in peace. By 1920, irrigation had proved unsuccessful, and many of the residents followed Boyer to establish a new town at Vado. Boyer leased 250 acres of farmland where he profited from growing cotton. Gradually, he bought small tracts of land, eventually owning 500 acres. Within a decade, Vado had two Baptist churches, a Catholic mission, and a school with 175 black students. Boyer also established a small college where he and his wife taught classes. Francis Boyer died in 1949 and his dream of a Black community faded.

Fabian Garcia

Francis Boyer

In 1909 W.J. Stahmann, a buggy-maker, left Wisconsin for the southwest. Settling first near El Paso, Stahmann raised cotton and tomatoes, built a canning plant, and operated four cotton gins. In 1926, W.J. purchased 2,900 acres in the Mesilla Valley. It became Stahmann Farms. In 1932, Stahmann’s son, Deane, bought a shipment of pecan trees at cut-rate prices from a farmer unable to pay for them. Deane expanded the farm to 4,000 acres, replacing cotton fields with pecan orchards. The farm included a processing plant, housing for 150 families, a store, a health clinic, a school, and a church. Today, Stahmann Farms is one of the largest pecan producers in the world.

John Nakayama joined about a dozen Japanese farmers in the valley in 1919. He leased land on the old Shalam Colony farm. By the time he had saved enough to buy land, a 1918 New Mexico land law excluded “persons ineligible for citizenship” from owning property. Therefore, he bought it in the name of his American born son, Carl. By the 1930s, his family and as many as fifty workers from nearby Doña Ana were harvesting 300 acres of cantaloupe on one of his farms. During World War II, Japanese farmers in the valley had their business assets frozen and their homes searched. Fear of a Japanese takeover prompted valley landowners to pledge not to sell land to Japanese-Americans. Four of Nakayama’s sons served in the war, where the youngest, Roy, was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war. When Roy returned home to finish college, he was refused admission. His former college professors challenged the decision. He was soon admitted. Roy’s research in developing chile varieties contributed more than $10 million a year to New Mexico’s economy by 1988.

Produce Label

Nakayama Family

Pancho Villa’s Raid

The Mexican Revolution spilled over into the U.S. when Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916. Villistas torched and looted the town. They killed seventeen Americans. Soldiers stationed at Columbus quickly pursued the Villistas into Mexico. In the days after the raid, thirty New Mexico College A&M students were called to border duty. General “Black Jack” Pershing and 11,000 troops spent nearly a year in Mexico tracking Villa. Pancho Villa escaped capture and was assassinated in 1923. As a prelude to World War I, the Punitive Expedition marked the first time the army used trucks and airplanes under combat conditions.

Mexican Revolutionary Leaders

The Great Depression

In 1931, a threat of a run on the First National Bank of Las Cruces prompted its closing. They promised to reopen when the “hysteria subsides.” It remained closed fifty-five days. In the 1930s, New Mexico’s farmland prices dropped to $4.95 an acre, among the lowest in the United States. Mesilla Valley farmers, heavily dependent upon cotton, saw its price fall to four cents a pound. In hopes of raising prices, the government paid farmers not to plant cotton.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs put people to work. Young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built flood control projects at Elephant Butte Dam. Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers built three schools in Las Cruces, including Court Junior High. They also built numerous tourist and recreation facilities in the area.

Picacho Avenue earned the nickname “Little Oklahoma” when it became a thoroughfare for refugees bound for California. Stranded and destitute, travelers sold their belongings for gas money. This roadside trade was the precursor of Picacho Avenue’s antique and second-hand stores.

Griggs Street

Drought Refugees Crossing New Mexico

World War II

The year after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, enrollment at New Mexico College A&M fell from 935 to 209. With many of the students at war, the campus was utilized by the Army Specialized Training Program. By the end of the war, 124 of the college’s former students had died in military service.

Eighteen hundred men of the New Mexico National Guard were sent to the Philippines in 1941. The islands fell to the Japanese in April 1942. Taken prisoner, the American troops were forced to march more than sixty miles through intense heat with almost no water or food. Known as the Bataan Death March, less than half of the prisoners survived. There were thirty-one soldiers from the Las Cruces area on the March, only fourteen survived.

Resentment against the Japanese was so high that the Emergency Farm Labor Program could not use Japanese war prisoners to work on Mesilla Valley farms. Instead, Italian prisoners picked cotton. In July 1944, Germans prisoners replaced the Italians. They worked on local farms until 1946. Generally, the prisoners of war were valued as wartime laborers.

Wartime meant rationing everything from gasoline to sugar to tires. In 1942, Dona Ana County invested $93,894 in war bonds and stamps, more than twice its quota. Children brought dimes to school on Wednesdays to buy war bond stamps. College girls volunteered to pick cotton. Las Crucens also held drives to collect scrap metal, rubber, and tin foil for the war effort.

At 5:30 a.m., July 16, 1945, scientists from Los Alamos tested the atomic bomb on the Alamogordo Bombing Range. Shock waves from the explosion broke windows 120 miles away. Officials said the blast was an accidental munitions explosion. In August, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s surrender five days later ended World War II.

War Bonds Poster

Trinity Site Explosion

White Sands Missile Range

New Mexico became a testing ground in 1930 when Robert Goddard brought his rocket research program to Roswell. In 1944, the government took over the Alamogordo Bombing Range and nearby lands for the new White Sands Proving Ground. This area was approximately 100 miles long and forty miles wide.

In August 1945, German scientists, who had surrendered during the war, arrived at the testing ground. With them came confiscated V-2 rocket components. The scientists, including Wernher Von Braun, were cleared by security officials to work on the missile project. The Army’s Ballistic Missile Program was led by Von Braun. After the proving ground was selected as a missile testing range, it was renamed White Sands Missile Range. Covering 3,200 square miles, it is one of the largest military installations in the country.

White Sands Missile Range

Post War

Almost half of the students enrolled at the New Mexico College A&M were soldiers returning from the war. Housing was scarce. Some families camped along the riverbank. The housing shortage eased when builders began developing entire subdivisions. Most of the builders were local, including C. B. Smith and Jamie Stull.

Las Cruces celebrated its Centennial in 1949. Centennial Queen Teresa Viramontes led the Main Street parade. The weeklong celebration ended with “La Gran Fiesta,” an extravagant pageant at the college football stadium. Two hours before show time a windstorm knocked down the sets. Volunteers quickly rebuilt the set, and the show went on. The pageant included more than 1,000 participants.

Temporary Student Housing

Growth & Urban Renewal

From 1950 to 1960, the population of Las Cruces grew from 12,000 to more than 29,000. City leaders adopted an Urban Renewal Program for downtown. This program closed several blocks of Main Street and created a walking mall. The owners of historic Saint Genevieve’s Catholic Church and Loretto Academy tore down their buildings. Many houses were built when a thousand acres of land was developed on the east mesa.

Downtown Urban Renewal