A former boomtown’s second life as storyteller in New Mexico

Blamed on a man named Mr. Abernathy, a fire started at William Cotton’s saloon and billiards hall near the intersection of Main Street and Railroad Avenue. Fortified by the strong winds, the fire emerged from the saloon, reaching 80 feet across Main Street. Flames entered doorways, bedrooms, halls and offices. The fire made short work of a general store, restaurants, drug stores, a hotel, a barber shop, and the post office.

As if drawn to a magnet, sparks and smoke rushed through the darkness. Firelight made flickering shadow art on the ground. Now two blocks wide, the fire continued southeast, jumping across Clark Street and beyond, until no more buildings were left to burn in that direction. Residents saved what they could, which was very little. Many pets—dogs, cats, and canaries—perished. From afar, the blaze must have looked like an ancient signal beacon.

BLM/Derrick Henry

BLM/Derrick Henry

Inside thirty minutes, the fire, like many Old West boomtowns, came and went in a blaze of glory.

“The rapidity with which the fire spread gave no opportunity to save anything,” reported The Black Range on June 7, 1895, a week after the fire. “C. M. Beals, bookkeeper for Keller, Miller & Co., on awakening got on pants and slippers and rushed to the office and grabbed an armful of books and after depositing them on the street started back for his trunk, but the fire was ahead of him.”

In July 1896, about a year after the fire, William Jennings Bryan gave his famous Cross of Gold speech, advocating for both silver and gold to back the U.S. dollar. Gold was at $20.67 per ounce. Silver had rebounded slightly to 69 cents per ounce.

But the damage was done at Lake Valley: No rebuilding after the fire. No more mining. More people leaving.

BLM/Derrick Henry

BLM/Derrick Henry

In 1901, a short revival came with mining for manganese shortly before World War I, continuing intermittently until the late 1950s.

“But it wasn’t a boom like it was in the 1800s by any stretch of the imagination,” said Goetz. Instead, the population continued to dwindle. An insurance map drafted by the Sanborn Map Company in August 1902 showed Lake Valley’s business district with zero buildings and the town’s population at 150. The last residents departed in 1994.

The ghost town is in a second act as an observatory to the past.

“When you look around, you’re constantly seeing stuff. You get the sense of discovery,” said Goetz. “You’re not looking through a case like in a museum. It’s on the ground.”

In the 1990s, BLM launched a program to stabilize existing buildings to slow their deterioration. Later, the agency worked with partners to restore the schoolhouse and chapel.

The interior of the restored schoolhouse at the BLM's Lake Valley Historic Townsite in New Mexico.

BLM/Derrick Henry

The schoolhouse contains photographs and other evidence of what life was like in Lake Valley, including after New Mexico became the 47th state admitted to the Union in 1912. Along the trails, visitors often encounter milk bottles, mining components, old cars, and toys. And while much of the site is public land, some buildings are marked private property and there is no artifact collection or metal detecting.

The site gets about 10,000 visitors per year, which is about a third of the visitors most BLM sites get in New Mexico. Far from crowded, you can experience Lake Valley at your own pace, as one group experienced during a recent visit.

BLM/Derrick Henry

BLM/Derrick Henry

The visitors, in a white van with Wisconsin license plates, drove up to the restored schoolhouse. After the on-site host gave an overview of the ghost town, they started the self-guided interpretive tour, walking along Keil Avenue, passing the former home of Dr. W. G Beals, a physician. Nearby, an abandoned 1935 Plymouth, missing its straight-six engine, pointed its empty headlights eastward. Advertisements in the 1930s would have promoted the model as capable of going 80 miles-per-hour. The group continued walking to a water tower and coal sorter near a notch in the hillside where a train once came through to the mines.

The group must have learned about Monument Peak, where one of Lake Valley’s last residents, Mrs. Blanche Nowlin, used to walk each morning from her home near the intersection of Keil and Railroad. She died in 1982. And that her next-door neighbors were Pedro and Savina Martinez, Lake Valley’s last residents, who lived in the Bella Hotel building until August 1994.

The group finished their walk and left. Their van passed an abandoned gas station and then turned right on Highway 27 toward Hillsboro, 16 miles north, which with the isolation and quiet at Lake Valley, seemed as far away as the moon.

The Saint Columba Episcopalian Chapel, built in 1920, at the BLM's Lake Valley Historic Townsite in New Mexico. The chapel was originally a home.

BLM/Derrick Henry