Here’s a report on our Labor Day trip to NE New Mexico.

We started out with Bean Day in Wagon Mound. For years I’ve heard about this event and wanted to attend. After visiting Wagon Mound twice this year (one time to take a picture in their cemetery of the tombstone of the “First Ordained Mexican Protestant Preacher in the World” and a second time to retrieve my camera that I dropped after taking that picture – I had managed to find and phone the nice lady who takes care of the cemetery and she found my camera), I resolved to come back for Bean Day. Several thousand people from the area and former residents from far and wide come for three days of events. The highlight is a free beans and barbecue beef lunch on Labor Day. We got there in time for lunch. The parade was over. While waiting in line we struck up a conversation with a biker couple next to us. Turned out they were from Roy, 30 or so miles up the road, and Roy was hometown of Susie’s HS/college boyfriend, Virgil Reeder. So Susie caught up on all the comings and goings of people she knew in Roy.

After lunch it was on to Clayton, via Roy (which even I, who loves the high plains, would call bleak). Objective was the historic Eklund Hotel, est. 1892, which had been written up in the paper a few weeks ago. We had a room opening onto what the brochure calls the “historic balcony” seen here. Weather was actually too cool for much porchsitting, though. While riding around town, Susie mentioned that her Dad, when they lived in Raton (not too far away by NM standards), where he was HS band director, had had a good friend here in Clayton in the music business. Well, at breakfast, Susie started chatting with another couple and found out that the woman’s uncle had been mayor of Clayton about 50 years ago. KA-CHING!!. Same guy: Doug Cornwall – music storeowner, mayor, and friend of Rush Hughes. So, we got caught up on the Cornwall family. Then, to add to the amazing coincidences, it turned out that the Cornwall’s niece’s husband, in his Austin business, was using software that had been developed at Sandia by a member of my department about 10 years ago. Statistically speaking, this double coincidence is Amazing.

By now, I’m used to Susie all the time running into former students and teaching colleagues when we go out to eat or a movie, but I never expected her connections to extend to perfect strangers in Wagon Mound and Clayton. Incidentally, I didn’t happen to see Lily Pino, my camera lady, in the crowd at Wagon Mound, and I looked.

Clayton has an attractive courthouse and an economy based largely on large cattle feedlots nearby. The wind blows out there on the high plains, and it’s hard to get a favorable wind direction in Clayton. The advantage, though, is I think the steak we had Monday night was probably peacefully munching his feed that morning.

Tuesday, heading back toward home, we first stopped at the Capulin Volcano National Monument. This “near-perfect” cinder cone, rising 2200 ft. above the surrounding plains, was left by an eruption around 60,000 years ago. From the top you have great vistas – plains, volcanic cones and plugs, mesas formed by lava flows. The summer rains have been good this year and everything was nice and green, highlighted by lots of sunflowers and other mostly yellow wildflowers.

Continuing on to Folsom, we had one of those serendipitous experiences that spice up travel. We missed a turn I wanted to make in Folsom, so pulled onto the shoulder to check the map and turn around. We were parked in front of a closed former general store, now a closed museum. A TX couple in a pick-up pulled in about the same time we did; he came over and asked us if we’d like to see the museum. He had stopped at the Post Office to ask about the museum and been told, I’ll call the proprietor; maybe she’ll open up for you. She would and was on the way so we waited to see the museum. In chatting with this couple, it turned out that Susie ………... didn’t know anyone they knew.

Lots of interesting old stuff in the museum; one thing that got my attention was this picture of the Folsom Methodist Church established there in 1906. The building, minus steeple, is still there, but now it’s the back end of the Baptist Church. Hope there’s not a theological message there. I won’t show you that shameful picture.

Next we drove west on NM 72, first following a very scenic valley with attractive ranches, cattle, horses, etc., then climbing to the top of Johnson Mesa. More spectacular ranching country. I recommend this trip to you New Mexicans, particularly at this green time of the year and in a few weeks when the cottonwoods in the valleys turn golden. Main objective was the Johnson Mesa Church, built in 1897 as a Methodist Church, now a community church in the summer, and always open for travelers. Here’s a painting, by Barbara Williams of our church, and my photo. (If I’d been thinking I would have taken the picture from the same perspective as the painting and posed Susie and our car as shown.)

Norma Argo, of our church, tells the story that she visited this church several years ago as part of a (non-church-sponsored) study tour. Someone in the group sat down at the piano and soon the group was singing hymns – a heavenly experience. (Incidentally, not everyone reading this may be aware that I’ve been researching the early Methodist Church in NM, hoping to write an article for New Mexico magazine. Thus, the Methodist focus on this trip.)

Next on the agenda was the town of Cimarron. We had planned to stay at the historic St. James Hotel, scene of many wild west tales and said to be haunted. However, we also wanted to tour the Aztec Mill Museum in Cimarron, but it turned out to be closed, this being after Labor Day. This mill is important in Methodist-NM history because the Rev. Thomas Harwood, really the founder of NM Methodism, somewhat reluctantly performed a secret wedding in the mill between the daughter of the land grant baron, Lucien Maxwell, and an army captain who was boarding with the Maxwells. (Surprise, surprise!) Maxwell would not have allowed his daughter to wed a Protestant and was outraged when he found that she did. The couple safely eloped and Harwood was left to face Maxwell’s wrath. Some of the local toughs, trying to gain Maxwell’s favor, warned Harwood to stay out of Dodge, but he said to himself, “I have been a soldier under Grant and Sherman, … shall I now cringe like a cur before such fellows as these who are scraping and bowing to a rich man with the hope that they will, by so doing, get a few crumbs from his rich, two million dollar sale of the grant? … No, the Lord helping me, I will go up to Elizabethtown and fill my next Sunday appointment.” He was persuaded, though, to carry a gun and he continued to ride his circuit with some threatening moments, but no harm done to him. A later Methodist minister was not so fortunate. He sided with Indian tribes who claimed some of the Maxwell land grant and was ambushed and killed. His murder, which was never solved, started the Colfax County War and his broken tombstone is in the lobby of the St. James Hotel – no doubt one reason it is haunted.

Anyhow, with the museum closed and it still being mid-afternoon, we decided to drive on home and come back to Cimarron on a weekend when the mill is open.

Hope you enjoyed our trip.

Cheers.

Rob and Susie

HOME