Digging through Newspapers.com this week, I found a newspaper from a town I had never heard of before in southern New Mexico. The town, now considered a ghost town with nothing much to show for it, was called Robinson.
Its site is located north of the remote Sierra County town of Winston and is also near a more famous New Mexico ghost town, Chloride. This region was an active mining area in the 1880s but most of the mines collapsed after the “Silver Panic of 1893” when the metal’s prices plummeted.
The newspaper in Robinson, known as the Range (after the Black Range mountains), was eventually moved to Chloride, but apparently failed during the silver mining collapse.
The website Ghosttowns.com says the town was founded in 1882 as a proposed terminal for the Santa Fe Railroad. Unfortunately, the railroad veered much further east and bypassed the Black Range area entirely and by 1888, all of the buildings were town down. The town’s name may have come from the chief railroad engineer who failed to deliver the promised rail route though the area.
Reading through the newspapers of this era often produce interesting stories that are written in a folksy and often heavily opinionated style.
One article in the Oct. 26, 1888, edition of the Range reported the death of a pig owned by a local butcher.
“J.M. Smith took a shot in (sic) one of the butcher’s pigs, the other day, not to kill it but just to scare it out of his yard. The gun was loaded with shot and the range was long, so of course the wounds would hurt nothing even if the shot hit, so Smith supposed, but he was evidently mistaken, for no sooner was his gun off than the hog’s life vanished. Smith is a dead shot.”
Another article reported that there were now “thirty-one ladies resident(s) in Chloride which is more than has ever lived here before, at the same time.”
And finally, the editor chimed in on the recent surge of territorial newspapers clamoring for New Mexico statehood.
“…the Range would like to know what good would be accomplished by having this a state. Nobody could be benefitted except the politicians and their pleasure would be the public’s pain.”
“The chief recommendation of the territory of New Mexico today is its lack of politics,” the editor concluded.
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