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| On the beach |
A couple of the caches you drove close by, and a couple you walked quite a ways to find. We did pretty good, 4 out of 5.
This was our last day, so after lunch, Jan was looking over our New Mexico map and found a couple ghost towns, Winston and Chloride, about 35 miles from us. We said, "let's do it!" It was a winding up and down road with great scenery and topography that got rougher and rougher. We climbed up to about 6000'. First we came into Winston, and well, it looked pretty bad, tons of crap lying around, dilapidated houses and trailers, a very run down, what remained of a town. We were pretty disappointed, but Chloride was only 4 more miles, so we kept going. We sure were glad we did. We came into a small town that seemed inhabited, but restored, clean, and tidy. We studied the houses on each side of the road, went around a tree that was right in the middle of the main street, and found a lovely park area that had numerous displays, and a museum. We pulled over to the side to take a better look when we noticed a golf cart, later learned an urban electric vehicle, that looked like a miniature Hummer, being driven by an older woman pull up to the museum and get out and sit by the front door. Well, it certainly appeared she was waiting for us to make up our minds whether we wanted to go in or not, so we parked and walked over to meet a charming Donna Edmund, a lively young woman of about 80 or so. We asked if she lived in town and she said she did. I asked her how long she had lived there and she replied 35 years! Then we asked how many people lived in the town of Chloride to which she replied 13. Wow! She was fascinating.
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| The museum |
She opened the museum that she and her husband had put together and showed us all the items they had found and displayed from the general store of the times, the renovated and restored cabins and saloon, and the bank they were going to turn into a cafe. She also took us next door to what used to be a saloon, that is now a gift shop.
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| Gift shop and saloon |
They are showing and selling the items from a cooperative of artists and craftspeople in the area. Her husband came over and showed us the full service RV park they had behind the museum. The grounds and the town were pristine, and they knew all the stories and people that had lived there before they arrived 35 years previously. We could have talked with her all day, as it was, we were there several hours.
In 1879 Harry Pye and two other men staked a claim for mining silver in the area, a tent city sprung up, and the town that started as Pyetown, then Bromide, became known as Chloride after the type of high grade silver that was mined in the area. In the 1880's it was a thriving town of 100 homes, 3000 people, 9 saloons, 3 general stores, 2 hotels, restaurants, assay offices, a stage line and a Chinese laundry! It declined after the silver panic in 1893, but continued to produce copper, lead, and zinc until 1931. The Post Office closed in 1956.
Donna and Don Edmund take so much pride in their little town and the solemn duty of preserving it's heritage and history, you can't help but be totally mesmerized by their stories. It was a pleasure visiting.
Oh yeah, the tree in the middle of the road. It was left there as a hanging tree, but no one was ever hung from it. It had another use as it turned out. The nearest court and jail was 60 miles to the north, so when men got rowdy and drunk and out of control they were chained fast to the hanging tree til they sobered up in the morning!
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| The "Hanging Tree" |
But our last evening ended with this beautiful sunset.
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