Read Online Ghost Towns of Route 66 by Jim Hinckley - Free Book Online

place once visited by presidents and dignitaries or as a town worthy of its namesake, Don Trinidad Romero.
    In addition to operating a freight company that hauled all manner of goods from Kansas City to Santa Fe, Romero ranched vast land holdings and served as a probate judge as well as a member of the territorial House of Representatives. He also served as a U.S. Marshall and operated a number of mercantile stores.
    His home in Romeroville was a true showpiece that stood in stark contrast to the adobe and rough-cut lumber houses common on the Western frontier. According to Anna N. Clark, the interior consisted of a “dozen large, lofty, high ceiling rooms paneled in walnut. The downstairs rooms had sliding doors opening into the spacious ballroom. There was a low, wide, curving stairway.”
    Before its conversion into an asylum and its destruction by fire in the 1920s, the home of Don Romero was a focal point for high society in northeastern New Mexico. The guest list reads like a Who’s Who of the late nineteenth century and includes President Ulysses S. Grant, President Rutherford B. Hayes, and General Tecumseh Sherman.
    In Tecolote, Route 66 winds through a pleasant old plaza and past the ancient church to dead-end where a bridge over Tecolote Creek once stood. A marker in the plaza memorializes Tecolote as a former stop on the Santa Fe Trail. It was in this plaza that General Stephen Kearny, in August 1846 during the Mexican-American War, announced that he had replaced Governor Manuel Armijo and that the citizens were no longer under the rule of Mexican sovereignty.
    The scruffy little town barely warranted a notation in the journal of William Anderson Thornton, a participant in the military expedition to the New Mexico Territory in 1855: “The villages of Vegas and Tecolote made from unburnt clay and in appearances resemble unburnt brick kilns in the States. People poor and dirty. Flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle very numerous.

    Tecolote’s clay buildings still “resemble unburnt kilns,” as described by soldier William Anderson Thornton in 1855.

    The church in oft-overlooked San Jose predates the christening of Route 66 by a century, and the town’s origins can be traced back another fifty years.

    Now closed, the steel truss bridge spanning the Pecos River in San Jose dates to 1921, five years before Route 66 was built through the historic plaza.

    Route 66, and the traffic that flowed east and west, served as the catalyst for the Pigeon Ranch in Glorieta Pass to be transformed from historic site to tourist attraction.
Joe Sonderman collection
    â€œThe scenery as we advanced towards Tecolote becoming more grand and beautiful. Our camp is located on a beautiful spot overlooking the mud village.” The scenery along this portion of Route 66, now largely Interstate 25, rates among the most stunning anywhere along the highway’s path.
    San Jose, to the west on the banks of the Pecos River, is another unassuming village. Its founding is traced to a land grant issued by Governor Don Fernando Chacon in 1794. A post office, a scattering of homes of indeterminate age, and the plaza church built in 1826, as well as a now-truncated steel arch bridge built in 1921, present an oddly forlorn and timeless feel.
    Rowe and Ilfield were never more than wide spots in the road, and both are even less today. To the west is the Old Pigeon Ranch, a historic site that was never really a town, even though for a time it functioned as a small service stop for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail.
    Purportedly, ranch owner Alexander Valle, a Frenchman who spoke “pigeon” English, selected the site for his ranch because of its central location on the Santa Fe Trail and the property’s well that had been in continuous use for more than 150 years. The ranch took on a new importance in March 1862 when Union and Confederate forces clashed at nearby Glorieta Pass, the highest point on Route 66 before