Friday, May 13, 2011

40 miles west and 100 years ago.

Yesterday's adventure, thanks to my tour guide Loren, took me to the town of Chloride, NM. Click on Chloride for more history of the town. The drive there was along the old stagecoach route and some of the views were absolutely spectacular.



The first stop was the town of Winston New Mexico, another almost ghost town about 2 miles from Chloride. This is the general store in Winston and I do mean general. This building houses a restaurant, gas station, grocery store, public showers, a mercantile, feed store and laundromat. This is a least what I remember, I might have missed something.




After a quick stop here it was on to Chloride and the museum there. This town is a labor of love by a couple of retired folks and their daughter who began acquiring property in town and have slowly been restoring the town to it's original glory during the silver mine days. First stop was the museum.





The museum is housed in the old Pioneer store and it was here we met Linda, the daughter of the owners, who was very well informed about the history of the town and the articles on display. The museum itself was a story of itself. The store opened in 1880 to serve the mining community and operated until 1923. When mining declined and the miners left the area the store was simply boarded up and abandoned intact. It sat like that for 68 years until it was acquired by the Edmund family and restoration began. The building is now on the New Mexico register of cultural places. Can you imagine walking into a store that, as Linda said, had only been occupied for 68 years by bats and rats. All the merchandise from 1923 was sitting on the shelves was just as it was left. I will have more about the trip to post tomorrow.


I don't know if you are aware, but the reason for no post yesterday was that the blogger site has been in a 'read only' mode for the last 36 hours while they did an hours worth of maintenance and no one was able to post anything. I guess they had bigger problems than they thought.


Today will be a day off to review all I saw yesterday. Checking out old ghost towns with Loren was a good way to enjoy the good life.

1 comment:

  1. I met mom and pop when I toured Chloride in 2007. They were really neat folks. Before the wind blew me back to the Texas coast this year, I intended to revisit Chloride again. It was a great place to see. The last I knew they had five rv spots behind the store and artists gallery.

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