Deming

Cook’s Springs and the Silver Spike

Deming, the seat of Luna County in southwest New Mexico, stands at 4,331 feet by the state marker’s figure and 4,342 by the 1940 Federal Writers’ Project guide’s.^1,2,4 In 1780 Governor Juan Bautista de Anza passed here while searching for a trade route between Santa Fe and the mines of Sonora, Mexico.² In July 1861 a party of Butterfield Overland Mail Co. employees out of El Paso was intercepted at Cook’s Springs, near Deming, by a large force of Indians under Chief Mangas Coloradas, and the men built a small fort of stone and held out until the night of the second day.⁵ Two weeks later their bodies were found with a note under a stone stating that on July 23rd all had been killed save two, and those two later fell as well.⁵

The state marker says Deming was founded in 1881 when the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroads were connected, giving New Mexico its first railway access to both the Atlantic and the Pacific.² Luna County dates the ceremonial silver spike joining the east-bound Southern Pacific with the west-bound Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe to March 9, 1881, while a marker in Deming gives March 8, 1881.^1,6 The town took the name of Mary Ann Deming, born in 1827, wife of Charles Crocker, one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad; one state marker spells her name Mary Anne.^2,3 According to a state marker, the new settlement was christened Deming in her honor for her generosity to charitable causes for the poor.³

Breaking from Grant County

Beginning in 1881 a bill to create a new county was introduced every year in the Territorial legislature, and it is said the impulse came from the intense rivalry between Deming and Silver City, both then in Grant County.¹ The local leaders of the effort secured the support of Don Solomon Luna, a Republican politician in the New Mexico Territory and a sheep rancher and banker from Valencia County, who took up their cause in Santa Fe.¹ The legislature created Luna County on March 16, 1901, from the eastern portion of Grant County and the western portion of Doña Ana County, and although Logan and Florida had been proposed as names, it was named for Solomon Luna.¹

The 1916 Armory and the Columbus Raid

A red-brick National Guard Armory was completed in Deming in 1916, and the Luna County Historical Society calls it the very first National Guard Armory in the newly established state of New Mexico.⁷ When Pancho Villa and his troops looted and burned the Village of Columbus on March 9, 1916, Susie Parks, who operated the telephone switchboard and with her husband published the Columbus Courier, used her switchboard to summon National Guard troops from Deming.^1,8 Parks and her infant daughter, Gwen, were wounded by glass and fragments of bullets, and both survived.⁸ General John J. Pershing led the Punitive Expedition into Mexico from Luna County to hunt for Villa.¹ In 1977 the Luna County Historical Society bought the armory from the State of New Mexico and began turning it into a museum.⁷

Mimbres Water, Fluorspar, and Yucca in 1940

In 1940 the Federal Writers’ Project guide counted 6,764 people in Deming and found it more like the growing towns of eastern New Mexico, with their Texas flavor, than a typical New Mexico town.⁴ The guide traced the Mimbres River from its source in Grant County to a point about 20 miles north of Deming, where it passes underground for the rest of its length and empties into a drainless lake in Chihuahua, Mexico.⁴ That underground water, which a U. S. Government test showed to be 99.9 per cent pure, was tapped to irrigate cotton, feed, and legumes, while cattle, horses, hogs, and goats grazed the uncultivated land.⁴ The guide found the valleys to the north and south dotted with mines, with lead and zinc in the Cook’s Peak district, gold, silver, copper, and onyx in the Tres Hermanas Mountains, and manganese in the Florida Mountains.⁴ Fluorspar was mined a few miles northeast of Deming and milled at the city limits, and the yucca fields west of town yielded fiber for cordage, binder twine, and mattress materials.⁴

Post Office, Telephone Building, and Customs House

Luna County now describes itself as a transportation hub with three railroads, an Interstate Highway, and an airport.¹ The state’s historic preservation reports have noted the restoration of the Commercial-style Deming Telephone Building and the efforts of the City of Deming and others to preserve Deming’s city hall.^9,10 The Deming Main U.S. Post Office, built about 1930, and its mural were Works Projects Administration projects, and the state lists the building as a Registered Cultural Property.¹¹ Across Silver Avenue from the armory stands a Customs House that the historical society dates to the 1800s, and the society keeps its archives behind it.⁷