Mountainair (New Mexico)
Mountainair is a US town in Torrance County , New Mexico . According to the 2000 census , Mountainair had 1,116 inhabitants.
The village lies at an altitude of 1,987 meters east of the subscription Pass, a mountain pass in the south of the Manzano Mountains that the dischargeless Estancia Basin in the northeast of Rio Grande separating the West. It is accessed by US Highway US-60 and several state and county roads. The railway line of the BNSF Railway is now only used for freight traffic. A small urban airport for regional traffic is in the northeast of the town.
history
Originally the Estancia basin was sparsely populated by Indians of the Pueblo culture . The oldest traces of human activity go back to 6000 BC. Chr., Permanent settlements can be proven from around the year 700. In 1581/82, Capitano Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and Brother Agustín Rodriguez were the first white men to come to the area from the north and visit the pueblos below the Manzano Mountains. In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate built the first permanent Spanish settlement in Nuevo Mexico. He built his capital in what is now Española and visited all the pueblos in the region. With Don Oñate came monks from the Franciscan order and set up Spanish missions throughout the region. In 1610 they also reached the Estancia basin. By 1626 five missions were established there, the other four pueblos were covered by a regular visiting service of the padres. At the end of the 17th century, after a period of drought, all state structures and the Spanish settlements of Nuevo Mexico collapsed, and the decimated Indian population fell back into subsistence farming.
Mountainair itself was founded in 1905 when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway planned a branch line over the Abo Pass. The Estancia Basin had only been repopulated by settlers under the Homestead Act in the last few years of the 18th century and Mountainair was the region's first organized settlement. The economic basis of the place was agriculture, especially the cultivation of pinto beans and the ATSF railway depot . A ten-year drought in the 1950s and the cessation of passenger traffic on the railway line in the 1960s hit the settlement hard. In addition, the opening of Interstate Highway 40, which runs approximately 50 km to the north, pulled through traffic from the US-60 and Mountainair. The population fell from over 5000 to under 1000. Since the 1980s, the population has been slowly increasing again.
Mountainair is now the main visitor center for the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument . It preserves three ruins of pueblos and the associated Spanish missions that are spread across the Estancia basin.
Web links
- Website of the municipality (English)
Coordinates: 34 ° 31 '13 " N , 106 ° 14' 28" W.