Town of Enchantment

Not to mix metaphors, but Silver City is a diamond in the rough - which from a traveller's perspective makes it even better than one in a polished setting, right?

Silver City sits, more or less, at the very southern end of the Rocky Mountains, and a little higher than Denver.  A cloudy day here consists of more sun than clouds, and there don't seem to be a lot of those kind of days although today is one.  The downtown is charming, the scenery beautiful, and the people are very friendly.

So, where to begin?  How about Boston Hill, where Cousin Sherry (pictured - and yes, I know we look a lot alike - it's called "genetics") and I walked around a little bit Wednesday morning.  Silver City is a mining town - both historically, and depending on copper prices, currently - and Boston Hill is an area where prospectors could dig their own mines years ago.  The result is a very rocky hill with a great view and a bunch of paths for walkers and runners.  It's very pretty, if not entirely pristine.

Then it's a five-minute drive downtown.  (Cousin Sherry maintains that nowhere in Silver City is more than seven minutes from anywhere else.)  Downtown consists of several blocks of older buildings - most are fixed up and occupied, but there are enough unrenovated that it doesn't feel like a theme park.  Lots of fun art galleries (painters, sculptors, jewelers, fabric) and good restaurants, along with some other boutiques and a biker bar.  There's an interesting mix of artist-hippy types and miner-rancher types in Silver City, along with the campus of Western New Mexico University which apparently has a new president who is working to build the school.

It was downtown that we wandered into Wild West Weaving and met Hosana.  She had been in the back of the shop working and offered to show us what she was doing.

A native New Mexican, Hosana learned weaving from Irvin Trujillo, a seventh generation weaver in Chimayo (north of Santa Fe).  Trujillo has work in the Smithsonian, and Hosana showed us the book to prove it.

She uses a lot of natural dyes, and showed us examples of onion skin (golden yellow), logwood (purple), matter root (orange), black walnut (tan) and a beetle called cochineal (red).  Then Hosana showed us a block of indigo dye and explained how the dye itself looks yellow-green but when you pull the yarn out of the liquid the air turns it blue.  "It's magical," she said, and I remembered that New Mexico is called, correctly, the Land of Enchantment. 

I've always been fascinated by spinning and weaving.  Meeting Hosana made me decide that wherever I end up, I'll have to find somebody who can teach me the craft.  I want to learn how to do this:

One thing about Silver City is that store hours are generally more like guidelines.  A couple of places were temporarily closed for one reason or another, and a couple weren't open yet although a less laidback person might have pointed out that it was, in fact, after 10 a.m.  But that's part of the charm, really.

And speaking of Wild West, that history is not in the distant past.  Seems that there was a brothel openly operating into the late 1960's by a woman who moved to Silver City to take care of her sister who had tuberculosis.  The Grant County Chamber of Commerce features a story about Madam Millie on its website and there's a residential facility for senior citizens named Millie's Assisted Living Center in her honor.  Truly.  Toto, we're not in Indiana anymore.

Here's the biker bar, by the way:

The "no club colors" sign is on the front door but I couldn't get that with the rest of the signage in the picture.  Perhaps appropriately, it's next to the old town hall.

There are a couple of good museums here, and you know how I'm a sucker for museums.

The WNMU Museum has an impressive collection of Mimbres pottery.  Located in Fleming Hall, one of the older buildings on campus (in the basement they've restored an old lecture hall), they prohibit photography which is unfortunate.  So you'll have to settle for a picture of the building itself.

The Mimbres people, a branch of the Mogollons, lived in southwestern New Mexico from 200 - 1140 A.D.  Their pottery typically features images of people and nature (rather than simply geometric patterns).  In 1978 excavation began on a ranch in Grant County (where Silver City is located), and the museum houses a number of artifacts from that collection.  (Some of these pieces are part of the Ike Smalley Collection.  Remember him?)  Sorry that you'll have to look at the museum website to see any pictures.  I am pretty unschooled about ancient southwestern pottery but there was one thing that interested me a bit:  a very simple red clay pot, originally filled with 412 tiny amethyst quartz crystals which were displayed next to the pot.

The WNMU Museum also covers more modern Grant County history including mining and early 20th century area artifacts such as dictaphones from the early 1900's and a 1936 Zenith radio.  There were a couple of interesting things.  First was a small exhibit in honor of Rosina Patterson, an area woman who died just shy of her 100th birthday in 1992 and who left a trust for WNMU.  They have a transcript of Rosina's diaries from 1905-1907 which includes some short reports on topics ranging from Longfellow to bees, and daily entries.  A couple of the shorter entries are "Allie, May and I went for a long walk" (July 16, year unspecified) and "Nothing doing (forgot)" (July 14).  There is remarkably little biographical information about Mrs. Patterson, but it's fun to page through her diary.

The second interesting exhibit - and by "interesting" I mean "curious" - is a miniature model of the Margarita passenger ship which is in a large glass case - it's about six feet long.  The Margarita (full sized version) was built in 1900.  I have no idea why this is in a museum which is several hundred miles from the nearest port.  While the Mimbres exhibit is documented within an inch of its life, they probably could find a couple of history students to do a bit more work on the rest of their collection.  Still, a good museum, particularly if you want to learn about southwestern pottery.

Then I headed back downtown to the Silver City Museum, which is in a beautiful old home.

A couple of doors down is the Museum Annex, which is where their research documents are located.  It's a beautiful building as well.

(Hey, I just learned how to edit photos on Google Plus!  This is enormous progress.)

I really enjoyed the Silver City Museum (see how I underlined "really enjoyed" for emphasis - just wanted to make sure you understood how much I liked it.)  The museum features some art exhibits (one of panoramic photography of the Gila River Valley and one from a Works Progress Administration painter about adobe) but you will not be surprised to learn what I liked the most was the history.  Unfortunately, they have the same "no photography" rule so you'll just have to use your imagination or look at their website for a couple of pictures.

One room is a discussion of how New Mexico became a state.  (Their centennial was last year.)  Apparently statehood was somewhat controversial which is why it took from 1848 (when the Mexican-American War ended) to 1912 for it to happen.  On the one hand, it wasn't completely evident to the folks back east that there was anything to commend the region.  You had people like General William Sherman who said, a few years after the Civil War, "The United States ought to declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico."  (This is the same General Sherman who had turned his obvious tact and charm on the Confederate state of Georgia in 1864.)  On the other hand, within New Mexico there was disagreement as to the benefits of statehood.  At the time this discussion was occurring, the majority of New Mexicans were of Mexican and/or Spanish descent.  The Anglo minority generally favored being a territory, since that meant the U.S. government would appoint the territorial governor - who would presumably be a white guy.  The Hispanic majority generally supported statehood, since then there'd be democratically elected government and as a majority they would presumably be able to elect a native New Mexican.  (In the late 19th century, "native New Mexican" meant someone who was originally Mexican and most likely Hispanic.  The Indians weren't exactly a political force.)  The borders of the New Mexico Territory were established in the Compromise of 1850 (although the territory shrunk when the Colorado Territory was created in 1861); the State of New Mexico was authorized in 1910 and after a public election it became the 47th state on January 6, 1912.

The towns, as you know, predate all of this bickering.  An 1879 map shows Silver City at the end of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe rail line.

Not too far from Silver City, apparently, is a mine that used to be the town of Tyrone.  It was built in 1912 by Phelps Dodge as an elaborate company town.  When copper prices plunged a few years later, the city was abandoned and was later destroyed by Phelps Dodge when they decided it was more valuable as a strip mine than a ghost town.

In a room that is largely about the history of mining in the region, there's a mini-exhibit which is a strong argument for effective government safety regulation.  Seems that in the 1920's Albert and Frances Leach discovered torbernite southwest of Silver City.  Torbernite is an ore of radium, and the Leaches (the puns here are multiple but coincidental) developed a line of radioactive "health" products.  They sold beauty clay, toothpaste, and a product you could put in water for all sorts of medicinal purposes.  The business finally closed down during World War II.

Last but not least, they had an exhibit on a topic which made me feel right at home:  flooding. 

There used to be a Main Street in Silver City.  It is now called the Big Ditch and looks like this:

Yes, you're right:  there's more water in what used to be a street than there is in the Rio Grande.

Main Street was developed in the 1870's in an understandable if ill-fated desire to create a grid street pattern.  Unfortunately for a number of people, Main Street happened to be the natural drainage route for the area - a problem exacerbated by clearing natural vegetation and generally doing all sorts of things that increased erosion.  Although Silver City residents grew accustomed to terrible flooding in the 1870's and 1880's, they were not prepared for the massive floods of 1895 and 1902, during which time Mother Nature reclaimed her own and the street completely collapsed.  In places the ditch is 60 feet deep, and it is now shown as a waterway on Google Maps.

(Hey, now I've learned how to put an arrow on something!  This has been an incredibly enlightening afternoon.  Glad you could join me.)

Of course, there's a lot of nature around here and we'll be exploring that over the weekend.  As always, you can expect a full report but given my new skills you may also start to see cropped pictures with arrows.  I know:  it's exciting.  I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, put Silver City on your vacation "to go" list.  You won't be sorry.