Ghost towns of the Clovis Subdivision

When you leave Fort Sumner, N.M., on U.S. 60, there's a turnoff to an unnamed, unmarked, unsigned road that hugs BNSF Railway’s Transcon toward the west coast for 61 miles, to Vaughn, N.M. I am not recommending you take it, because it is a rough, unmaintained dirt trail that takes four hours to drive. Plus, AAA’s truck will never find you if you puncture a tire (as I did once). You are on your own out here.

But if you brave this road, about 10 miles from Fort Sumner you will come to a lonely building 100 yards north of the BNSF tracks. The crumbling remains of the Ricardo Hotel are all that is left of a pioneer community founded with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railway in the first years of the Twentieth Century. People left the civilized communities they inhabited to come to this lonely, forsaken corner of the planet, thinking (because there was no history to disprove them) that they could scratch out a living. Today you wonder, what were they thinking?

Four years ago, when I researched a profile of the Clovis Subdivision that appeared in Trains, I wondered about that lonely structure in the middle of nowhere, quite literally. A Google search led me to a web site maintained by Ray Thompson. His mother Zorene came there as a young girl, the daughter of a man who tried with others to dry farm the region. At one time Ricardo was a thriving community, with a stucco Santa Fe depot. Ray says his mom remembers those years growing up in Ricardo as golden ones.

But the lack of rainfall, always a problem, only got worse as years went by. Her dad lasted seven years. Gradually the settlers failed as farmers and ranchers. Santa Fe closed its Ricardo depot in the 1940s after centralized traffic control was put in place and train order stations became unnecessary. Finally, not a single soul was left in Ricardo, and when Zorene Thompson returned in old age to find the community cemetery, she and her family had to be guided to the plot by a rancher’s son. Today, there is that hotel and the railroad, and otherwise you may as well be on Mars.

I have been driving that unnamed, unmarked, and unsigned road for almost a decade, always marveling at the loneliness of the desert and feeling close to the trains that constantly go by. And as always, I paid homage today to the Ricardo Hotel, a two-story affair with (I am told) eight rooms that each year gets closer to crumbling into a pile of wood and brick. I’d want body armor from snakes to venture inside. It’s enough to stand there, reflect on a life that once was for people all long dead, and then move on. If you ever see Ricardo, please email me. For more, go to http://debaca.nmgenweb.us/Ricardo.htm.

If you stick to U.S. 60, instead of that nameless road beside the tracks, by and by you’ll get to Yeso, also once worthy of a Santa Fe station. Jack Barriger says that as a young Santa Fe trainmaster in Clovis in the early 1950s, he’d stop in Yeso to get liquor (I guess Clovis was dry then). Today the abandoned homes of Yeso outnumber the two still occupied five-to-one. Several years ago, Kevin Keefe, the former editor of Trains, sat down at the upright piano in the abandoned community center and hammered out a credible melody for me; the air is so dry that the piano was amazingly in tune. I saw today that someone now occupies the structure, tacking a “Keep Out” sign to the padlocked door, and I feel sorry for whoever it is. This is not a happy place to live.

Tom Hoback and I called it a day in Vaughn, N.M. In 2004, Trains editor Mark Hemphill and photographer Mel Patrick surveyed Vaughn when we were there and reported 17 abandoned gasoline stations in this town. What once was downtown is now utterly abandoned, an archeological ruins.  

Vaughn was a crew-change point on the Santa Fe. Those days are more than three decades gone, although the handsome stucco, two-story depot remains as headquarters for track and signal employees. Ironically, Union Pacific today uses Vaughn as an away-from-home resting place for crews from Dalhart and El Paso, Tex., on its Golden State Route. There’s an Oak Tree Inn and Penny’s Diner to keep the UP folks happy, and Tom and I as well. Vaughn is not a ghost town. But each time I come here, I see that day drawing nearer.

This part of New Mexico you can take two ways. On the interstate highways, it is a barren land you cannot cross fast enough. On the back and rutted roads (and yes, next to the railroads) it is fascinating country made more so by its bitterly sad human history.—Fred W. Frailey

Top photo: The Ricardo Hotel, circa 2012 (all photos by Fred W. Frailey).

Middle photo: The former museum and gun store in Yeso, seen from U.S. 60.

Bottom photo: Downtown Vaughn, going to the weeds.