In 1908 three men from Cedarvale, Kansas laid out a small farming community in New Mexico. Seeing no reason to come up with a new name, they stuck with what they knew and called the new settlement Cedarvale.

     I went to San Acacia because I found it in a book about New Mexico's ghost towns. What the author failed to mention is that San Acacia not a ghost town at all.     

     It's funny how things turn out.     

     Budville, New Mexico was the site of a notorious double murder that remains unsolved to this day and the Budville Trading Co. was the scene of the crime. 
     The town of Budville is named after Howard Neal "Bud" Rice. In 1928 he and his wife, Flossie, opened the general store (Budville Trading Post). Together they also operated a gas station, garage, grocery store, post office and wrecker service. While this might seem like enough for a normal person, it wasn't enough for Bud so, in additional to all that, he also sold bus tickets, owned the local State Motor Vehicle Concession and got himself elected Justice Of The Peace. As such, Bud proclaimed himself the "Law West of the Rio Puerco" and did not hesitate to push his weight around whenever it suited him to do so.

     I visited Fierro, New Mexico in the fall of 2006. These images went missing for about ten years and then I found them again.
     "Fierro" means "iron" in Spanish and the town of Fierro is located a few miles north east of Silver City.  Fierro was founded in 1841 by a German immigrant. It was a mining town that went belly up during the great depression.
​     Those who were not killed in mining accidents moved away when the economy tanked, creating a ghost town and leaving behind a church with a lonely caretaker.

     Included in my recently discovered treasure trove of lost images was this trip to Cuervo, New Mexico in September of 2005. The photos were unedited so, to match the look of my more recent ghost town work, I transferred the images to my phone and edited them with Snapseed. I'm pretty sure I shot these with a first generation Canon Digital Rebel and the 18-55mm kit lens that came with it.