Museum publication set to "unpack Silver City"

On the first day of 1869, four Pinos Altos miners: William Milby, John Bullard Andrew Hurlburt, and James McGee began improvements on a 320-acre ranch just above the Cienega springs. The things they saw on that land set the stage for the building of Silver City.

Early the following May several Grant County men rode through the Burro Mountains to examine a reported silver discovery at Ralston, near the Arizona line. That led them back to the former Hurlburt cabin, where those four miners knew there was silver to be found, and on May 30, 1870, they organized the Silver Flat mining district and selected a name for their future town.

They considered San Vicente, the traditional name of the region, but set it aside in favor of something a bit shinier. Silver Flat and Silver Cliff were proposed, but Silver City won out in the end.

This story and many more are included in Chapter 1 of the new book, “Unpacking Silver City: Revealing the Rich Tapestry of a Historic Town”, which comes out Nov. 15. The first comprehensive historical record of Silver City in three decades is edited by museum director Bart Roselli, and includes the in-depth research of 10 distinguished historians.

The introductory chapter is written by well-known local historian and former library director, Susan Berry. Subsequent chapters explore diverse topics including the town's architectural evolution, Chihuahua Hill, Chinese settlers, Indigenous peoples, cattle ranching, Billy the Kid’s legend, and the development of local business and healthcare.

Setting the Stage

Berry’s opening chapter is a collection of historical narratives that identify key points through a 150-year journey that helped shape the Silver City of today.

“I was looking for continuing themes and threads that were part of the town from the early days that are still present today,” Berry said. “It's just a unique place, unlike many New Mexico towns. It has always had a certain kind of spirit to it.”

Those themes include the residents’ volunteer spirit, a necessity in the early days, but infused into the character of today’s community.

“When there was the discovery of silver, that was enough of a motivation for establishing a community, but for that community to succeed, it took the efforts of every person who lived here,” Berry said. “The timing was somewhat auspicious as I note in my introductory passage, but before we have a local government people just did what they had to do, whether it was working together to start a silver mill or developing a town charter and school system.”

Finding Silver

Juan Nepomuceno Carrasco was the first experienced silver miner to arrive in camp, Berry shares in her opening chapter. He uncovered an enormous deposit of silver-bearing quartz just west of town in September 1870. His discovery, La Providencia Ledge, was the richest found in New Mexico up to that time.

The Chloride Mining District was immediately organized on what would henceforth be called Chloride Flat. A frenzy of mining followed, and in April 1871, eleven months after the original silver discovery, Silver City’s first silver bullion was turned out.

“I think in that time frame it was really a matter of establishing a community that would be around in a century,” Berry said. “There really was that kind of vision, and there were so many little communities and mining strikes that rose and fell, many of them only lasting a handful of years. I think that really part of why we are still here can be traced to that strong determination in those first years of settlement.”

The Health Era

Tuberculosis is a deadly and incurable plague, but the “climate cure” offered a modest ray of hope to consumptives with mild cases and the means to travel west. They began arriving long before Silver City’s first formal promotion of its health-giving climate in 1887, and their presence grew exponentially in the early 1900s.

The presence of health-seekers, often accompanied by family members, significantly boosted the post-silver economy. St. Joseph’s Sanatorium, Silver City’s first medical facility for treatment of tuberculosis, opened in 1902. The boom-era Timmer House became Hotel San Vicente, offering elegant lodgings and medical oversight.

The health era brought authors, composers, baseball magnates, politicians, captains of industry, heiresses, musicians, and everyday folk to Silver City. Former President Theodore Roosevelt and sons came to visit friends who were seeking the climate cure. The new arrivals worked as newspaper editors, ministers, photographers, and shopkeepers, and accounted for a surprising number of doctors.

It was a transformative time in the history of Silver City.

Berry then takes the reader through the post-war and Baby Boom eras and delivers her to Silver City as it stands today, with many of the traits that built it up carrying through to current residents.

In the early days of Silver City, things that could be done easily in another part of the country turned out to be physically hard to accomplish here. It developed character, and it revealed another side of humanity.

“It was a very exciting time, and it was a time filled colorful characters, Berry said. “It did involve outlaws and things that people associate with the old West and also in many ways had a more orderly presence than a lot of the old west communities.”

The Role of Women

During the Great Depression, people came together in organizations that allowed them to help each other. The Chamber of Commerce was formed during that time. A women’s auxiliary got to work improving things in the town. “The women's role throughout that time frame is really unusual,” Berry said. “There were already funds being raised to establish a school within just a couple of years after the town was founded but it was really something that the women in the community made happen.

“The hospital society is especially remarkable because the women, first of all, recognize the need for a hospital. They harnessed the power of government to help bring that into being. They obtained a building and then they organized the hospital, and they ran it. It was an all-woman hospital board. They hired the doctors, they hired and fired the nurses, and this continued until the 1940s.

Women also played a major role in the creation of a university in Silver City. It took years of efforts and lobbying by lots of citizens, but many of them were women, leading toward an educated populace, creating new generations of teachers. That has been a continuous thread through today.

“When people talk about why they've moved here in more recent years, there's certain key things they tend to have in common,” Berry said. “People had a wish list with certain things on it, and we checked all the boxes.”

Berry notes that, in the compilation of a history that covers 150 years, it can’t possibly be all-inclusive. Her chapter focuses on the high points, the turning points, and then she leaves some of the specifics to the other nine contributing historians.

The Arts

Creativity was another of those threads running through the years in Silver City.

“There were always artists, there were always writers, but I would say that the seeds of today's arts community were planted in the early 1960s by the faculty at Western in their art department,” Berry said. “From that group and the graduates that came out of the program, it has just been kind of grown organically. Other artists found their way to Silver City and were welcomed by the group that was here.”

Those stories and so much more are covered within the pages of “Unpacking Silver City.” The project began as a lecture series during the COVID pandemic, when the New Mexico Humanities Council underwrote a seven-part lecture series that was titled Unpacking Silver City. That series included seven histories making presentations on a different aspect of the history of Silver City. Its popularity encouraged Bart Roselli to move forward with this book project.

“There were a few groups that weren't represented (in the lecture series), like Native Americans or the Chinese,” Roselli said.

Roselli took a look at these histories and noted the gaps in the presentations, then brought in historians to round out the book.

“I take my lead from one of my museum heroes,” Roselli said. “There's a guy named John Cotton Dana who ran the Newark Museum in New Jersey in the 1920s, and he wrote a lot about museums. He was a museum philosopher, and he said, ‘You know, if you want a great museum, not just a good museum where you show Aunt Millie's wedding dresses every couple of years, but a great museum, learn what the community needs and fit the museum to serve those needs.’”

Building on the Past

Through this collection of history, Roselli hopes to fulfill that mission, to foster an informed perspective on the present.

“It’s all about helping people deal with what they're dealing with right now,” Roselli said. “It’s not nostalgia, it's not the wild west. We’re not trying to recreate Billy the Kid's life. We reflect that, we help people understand that. We want to help people think about what we know about the past and how it could help us deal with stuff going on today.

At the same time they were providing the lecture series, the museum was involved with the Chihuahua Hill History Project. Chihuahua Hill is a neighborhood right across the street from the museum and was literally the first Silver City neighborhood settled.

“Our Chihuahua Hill project celebrates the wonderful cultural traditions, but it also lays out the fact that people were persecuted, people were discriminated against. Is that a lesson for us today? Well, I guess so.”

The book launch for “Unpacking Silver City” is set for Saturday, Nov. 15, from 3-6 p.m. at the Silver City Museum.

This is the first of a 10-part Desert Exposure series on “Unpacking Silver City.” We’ll explore the history as the book does, covering the events that led to the creation of each of its chapters, one history-making topic at a time.