A few ghost town locations around your state

[ghostdog]

First ,Highmountain, I enjoyed reading your posts. The locations I am postings might have new hiway numbers. These leads are from a older source book.Might be some good leads here.

1-Bingham,29 mi e.of san anotnio,hi.380,mineing town
2-Bonaza,15.5mi ,sw of santa fe,hiway 10,mineing,and outlaw hideout
3-Canoncito,6 mi sw of floreita , hiway 85/86,active dureing the civil war,major stage depot
4-Cerrillos,9 mi sw hiway 85, 14 mi s of hiway 10,had 21 sallons,cowboy wild town
5-Endee 5 mi w of texas state line,hiway 66,cowboytown,sallons
6-French, located at the junction of railroads, 3 mi below Maxwell,wild cowboy town
7-Levy,Located 5 mi wof Wagon Mound, hiway 85, few mi n are Coleman & Nolan
8-Wagon Mound,famous already for lots of found caches, may still be more to find
9-Quarai,hiway 10,old misson settlement, dates earlier than 1674

Anyone have leads in Candy kitchen, please post,Thanks.,HH

 

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[Highmountain]

First ,Highmountain, I enjoyed reading your posts. The locations I am postings might have new hiway numbers. These leads are from a older source book.Might be some good leads here.

1-Bingham,29 mi e.of san anotnio,hi.380,mineing town
2-Bonaza,15.5mi ,sw of santa fe,hiway 10,mineing,and outlaw hideout
3-Canoncito,6 mi sw of floreita , hiway 85/86,active dureing the civil war,major stage depot
4-Cerrillos,9 mi sw hiway 85, 14 mi s of hiway 10,had 21 sallons,cowboy wild town
5-Endee 5 mi w of texas state line,hiway 66,cowboytown,sallons
6-French, located at the junction of railroads, 3 mi below Maxwell,wild cowboy town
7-Levy,Located 5 mi wof Wagon Mound, hiway 85, few mi n are Coleman & Nolan
8-Wagon Mound,famous already for lots of found caches, may still be more to find
9-Quarai,hiway 10,old misson settlement, dates earlier than 1674

Anyone have leads in Candy kitchen, please post,Thanks.,HH

Nice thread HH. Thanks for posting it. I think it will provide a good place to post a lot of NM ghost town info.

Candy Kitchen's not precisely a ghost town. It's part of a private land divide located in the and surrounded by the Pine Hill/Ramah Navajo Reservation, a bit west of the road leading between Ramah and Pine Hill. Land is broken up into tracts of 15-140 acres, generally filled with a strange and interesting mix of folks. Candy Kitchen is located on a tract that was owned by the subdivider last time I was out that way, but there's been so much dirt work there's no way to tell anything much about what was there.

Quarai is located in the east mountains north of Mountainaire.... great ancient ruin site and campground, but the private land areas to the east are good places to be pretty careful about doing any nosing around on. East Mountain folk are often fairly volitile in their approaches to land issues.

Cerrillos isn't precisely a ghost town, lots of rich folk living and building in there. But there is a ghost town west of there a few miles, south of the road leading up to the Interstate. I'll try to recall the name of it.

That entire country east of Wagon Mound is good exploring country along the old Santa Fe Trail route and there are dozens, maybe hundreds of campsites, wagons-attacked sites, you name it. The people traveling the trail usually chose night stops away from previous ones so's to give their livestock new graze away from where others had already stomped and eaten it down.

Nice thread.
Thanks for beginning it. I hope you'll add some key words so's it can be found by the search engines.

I posted details about Atarque on another thread, but not a map. I'll include it below.

Gracias,
Jack

 

[Highmountain]

Salt Lake's also a really good one. It's a place where the ancients got their salt, later the wilder and more hostile-to-one-another tribes. The volcano lake was considered a peace-treaty area and they didn't fight one another when they were gathering salt there, though it was open season on the trails leading to it.

Later yet, late 19th Century a company built a town in there to evaporate the brine and sell the salt commerically. But when iodized salt became a must the company went broke after WWII and the town of 100-150 was abandoned and the land went to the State of NM. Sometime in the 1980s it was signed over to the Zuni, but it was never put into the National Trust [BIA], so it's private land belonging to the Zuni tribe, fenced, gate-locked, one mile square. It's not much used or visited by the Zuni tribal members, and the ones that go there have done a lot of vandalism and gradual burning down and tearing up the old town, so it's going away rapidly.

Access is a matter of personal judgement. Permission is more-or-less capricious depending on who's current tribal chairman at Zuni and his personal views about visitation. If he's a Cherokee or otherwise not-Zuni [they usually are] he'll stand a middling chance of giving you a key if he's having a good day.

If you do go there you'll see a lot of obvious ceremonial items on the lake shore. If you trek into the secondary cone you'll see a lot more. This is a sacred site, home of Salt Mother. I'm dead serious about this: Leave ceremonial objects alone and treat the place with respect and deference.

You'll find the place shown on the map with a windmill to be the well-preserved home, barns and outbuildings of the mine manager. It's interesting and non-sacred.

 

[Highmountain]

This one's an interesting and not-much visited site, though not precisely a ghost town. Local lore says it was first an ancient ruin site, then an army encampment, stagecoach stop/Inn, ranchhouse, etc. There's a stone wall surrounding about an acre that was obviously once intended as a large corral for a lot of livestock, possibly also for defense. There's also the ruins of a lot of outbuildings of various sorts.

The place is un-fenced last time I looked and has no POSTED signs anywhere near it. I believe it's private land. I've nosed it many occasions and never been approached nor challenged.

The place to the west on the north side of the road marked 7071 on the map once belongs to a rather famous lawman who liked to kill people instead of arresting them, burying them on his property. I think the body-count was in the neighborhood of thirteen when it was discovered. The place now belongs to heirs and nobody's allowed in there, but it's worth keeping an eye on in case it changes hands someday and the new owners are more open to having people wandering about.

Jack

 

[Highmountain]

Rosedale's a fairly nice little ghost town with the remains of a community, a still-open mine shaft, and a surrounding area of small gold operations. Dates from the late 1800s into the early 20th Century. USFS land, no access problems. No buildings left standing but parts of the mining/processing operation are intact.

 

[Highmountain]

Ojo Caliente Apache Stronghold, US Army post, Apache Agency

Victorio, Mangus, Nana and Cuchillo Negro were born here and each waded through the warm springs through the crack it flows through. James Chase had his Commissary Store here, ruins still above ground. Geronomo waded through the warm springs as an adult on many occasions. Here's where Nana told James Chase the famous story and Chase wrote the famous words in the back of his ledger.

It's private land. Last time I was out there it was ungated and had been for almost a decade. Nobody to ask permission from.

Jack

 

[Highmountain]

Stinking Springs, Grasshopper Canyon north to Fort Wingate southern boundary.

This is a griz-bear to get to but worth it for dozens of reasons. It's on the west face of the Zuni Mountains where the Continental Divide falls off from Oso Ridge. The two parallel canyons are ancient coral reefs from a time when the Divide was a seashore. Stinking Springs has been a farming community, logging community and probably a peripheral soldier establishment, though there's not much left of any of it. Grasshopper Canyon's full of strangeness any way you care to view it with a thousand places to nose around in until you reach the boundary fence to the south. The land from there west is checkerboard, Zuni, Navajo and private.

North is also worth the trouble, all manner of ancient and more recent sites, puzzling rock formations and wonderment, all the way north to where the Fort Wingate fence stops forward movement.

A person could spend a week in here exploring [I have] and never get bored.

Jack

 

[Highmountain]

Zuni Mountains - Post Office Flat and Copperton

1870s to 1940s - Logging, farming, ranching and mining community.

I found the best pick in my possession in here. Has case-hardened screw-on tips of a sort I've never seen before or since. Lots of rocks to turn over in this area and a plethora of surprises.

 

[ghostdog]

Highmountain, thanks for the a C.Kitchen imfo., I live in Calif., however I own some acerage in C.kitchen, that has a old cabin & well on it. I may visit their before the end of this year. Somewhere in my notes I have imformation on a confederate gold stash in N.M. When I have time ,to look,I will post the story on this board.
I have a page in front of me that shows some confederate money was found in a field near Ft.Davis Texas,late 50"sI think, by Ed bartholomew,a treasure hunter.....HH

 

[Highmountain]

Highmountain, thanks for the a C.Kitchen imfo., I live in Calif., however I own some acerage in C.kitchen, that has a old cabin & well on it. I may visit their before the end of this year. Somewhere in my notes I have imformation on a confederate gold stash in N.M. When I have time ,to look,I will post the story on this board.
I have a page in front of me that shows some confederate money was found in a field near Ft.Davis Texas,late 50"sI think, by Ed bartholomew,a treasure hunter.....HH

HH: That Candy Kitchen property puts you in striking range of some really good places for THing, rockhounding and just nosing around. The road that leads south through the Pine Hill Rez community center will take you straight down to Fence Lake, Santa Rita Mesa, Fort Atarque and Atarque Ghost town. Road north takes you up to Los Gigantes with a number of roads leading into the Zunis, Stinking Springs, Post Office Flat, Grasshopper Canyon, etc. A few miles west and north out of Ramah leads you into an area of National Forest with lots of old cabin ruins and whatnot, also, and gives you a west-face access to the Big Notch and Oso Ridge, spackled with more cabin ruins.

You're a fortunate man.

Here's hoping you have a great trip.

Jack

 

[Highmountain]

Riley - West of Ladron

 

[Highmountain]

Marquez Ghost Town - North of Laguna Rez

 

[Highmountain]

These are a few that come easily to mind that [I don't believe have] made their way into the Ghost Town mainstream and books. There are a lot of others that are more ambiguous in terms of catagorizing as ghost towns for various reasons, or not so good as to be worth going to the trouble of writing up unless someone's interested in a specific area. Still others are just not accessible enough to justify making any note of them

But maybe if this gets picked up by search engines someone will come across it sometime and get some enjoyment out of visiting one or two of them.

Thanks again for starting the thread. Posting to it brought back a lot of memories I hadn't thought of in a long while.

Jack

 

[Highmountain]

I think it might be Florida. Can't say for certain because I just came across it and never chased down any info on it.

A few miles NE of Deming on the road to Hatch where the RR runs parallel to the highway if you keep an eye open you'll see a cutoff dirt road that runs under the tracks. I don't recall whether you can see the remains of houses over there from the highway, or not. If not, and if it isn't Florida, you'll just need to try the roads running under the tracks until you come across it. There aren't many.

Whatever town it was it sits next to the tracks, looks to be early to mid-20th Century, maybe a dozen or so one-time houses.

Not much there, but worth a couple of hours nosing around if you're in the vicinity and have the time.

 

[Springfield]

I think it might be Florida. Can't say for certain because I just came across it and never chased down any info on it.

A few miles NE of Deming on the road to Hatch where the RR runs parallel to the highway if you keep an eye open you'll see a cutoff dirt road that runs under the tracks. I don't recall whether you can see the remains of houses over there from the highway, or not. If not, and if it isn't Florida, you'll just need to try the roads running under the tracks until you come across it. There aren't many.

Whatever town it was it sits next to the tracks, looks to be early to mid-20th Century, maybe a dozen or so one-time houses.

Not much there, but worth a couple of hours nosing around if you're in the vicinity and have the time.

Florida was a water stop for the railroad. The big tank still sits next to the road on the SE. This is one of the primo entry points (dirt road to the NW) for such things as the ruins of Fort Cummings, the Butterfield Trail, Cookes Canyon (400 killed by the Apache - many graves alongside the road), several fortified Apache ambush sites, at least four dynamite petroglyph sites with 'treasure signs' and 'Aztec-style' carvings, a number of old mines, the location of a cryptozoology sighting of a 20-foot wingspan bird (by myself and my running buddy - both sober), mining ghost towns, remote caves, a hidden Shangri-la slot canyon and enough other goodies to keep a curious hiker busy for years. It's a winter venue as it's mighty warm in the summer. Oh, and lots of snakes too.

 

[Highmountain]

I think it might be Florida. Can't say for certain because I just came across it and never chased down any info on it.

A few miles NE of Deming on the road to Hatch where the RR runs parallel to the highway if you keep an eye open you'll see a cutoff dirt road that runs under the tracks. I don't recall whether you can see the remains of houses over there from the highway, or not. If not, and if it isn't Florida, you'll just need to try the roads running under the tracks until you come across it. There aren't many.

Whatever town it was it sits next to the tracks, looks to be early to mid-20th Century, maybe a dozen or so one-time houses.

Not much there, but worth a couple of hours nosing around if you're in the vicinity and have the time.

Florida was a water stop for the railroad. The big tank still sits next to the road on the SE. This is one of the primo entry points (dirt road to the NW) for such things as the ruins of Fort Cummings, the Butterfield Trail, Cookes Canyon (400 killed by the Apache - many graves alongside the road), several fortified Apache ambush sites, at least four dynamite petroglyph sites with 'treasure signs' and 'Aztec-style' carvings, a number of old mines, the location of a cryptozoology sighting of a 20-foot wingspan bird (by myself and my running buddy - both sober), mining ghost towns, remote caves, a hidden Shangri-la slot canyon and enough other goodies to keep a curious hiker busy for years. It's a winter venue as it's mighty warm in the summer. Oh, and lots of snakes too.

That's good information Springfield. I've never been on that road to the NW. Thanks a bunch.

Gracias,
Jack


Edit: Cross Reference to other New Mexico Ghost Town Thread

Obscure Ghost Towns in New Mexico
http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,159136.0.html
http://snipurl.com/2aep8 [forum_treasurenet_com]

 

[lastleg]

Hey Jack. I have a friend online who has done extensive research including field
searches for the Ben Sublett mine. Can you give us your take on this yarn?
Also I forgot to include the author of "Texas Trails of the Red River War" who was
Bob Izzard, a longtime Amarillo newspaperman. Muchas gracious, Cuz, yes it's me.

 

[Highmountain]

Hey Jack. I have a friend online who has done extensive research including field
searches for the Ben Sublett mine. Can you give us your take on this yarn?
Also I forgot to include the author of "Texas Trails of the Red River War" who was
Bob Izzard, a longtime Amarillo newspaperman. Muchas gracious, Cuz, yes it's me.

Lastleg: Sorry. I don't know anything to speak of about the Ben Sublett mine.

Your friend is probably the best source you could hope for.

Someone started a thread on it in the Legendary Treasure Forum and didn't get any response. Maybe if you reply you can spark something up in the thread among Arizonians or others who've done research on it.

Ben Sublett's Lost Gold Mine
http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,140195.0.html
http://snipurl.com/2aroo [forum_treasurenet_com]
Jack