Ruidosa
Ruidosa is a place in Presidio County in the US state of Texas .
geography
Ruidosa is located in western Texas on the Rio Grande and Farm Road 170 about eighty kilometers southwest of Marfa in the western part of Presidio County. The place is on the Rio Grande 852 meters above sea level.
history
The place was first settled in 1824 when the Mexican government set up the Vado Piedra military post. A regiment composed of convicted criminals was stationed in this fort . The regiment had the task of protecting the livestock in the northern part of Chihuahua province against raids by the Comanches . After the "Regiment of the Damned," as it was called, was wiped out in the fighting against the Comanches, the military post was given up.
The first beginnings of settlement in this place did not occur again until 1872, when William Russell founded a farm, provided his farmland along the Rio Grande with irrigation ditches and built a flour mill. In May 1876 Ruidosa was added as the sixth place in the register of the Presidio County. In an attack by the Mescalero Apache on the farm in 1879, four workers were killed and others wounded. Despite the threat of Indian raids, more farmers settled in the Ruidosa area.
A school was founded in 1902, which had 287 students in 1911; 1,722 people lived in the Ruidosa district at that time. The place Ruidosa itself had about 100 inhabitants in 1914, several shops and a post office, it was the local supply center for the farms along the Rio Grande. Around 1914, the farmers on the Rio Grande began to convert their production to cotton , which led to increased income and modest growth in the place, which had around 300 inhabitants in 1929. The cotton processing plant built by the municipality in 1923 was abandoned in 1936. When the population began to emigrate from Ruidosa in the 1940s, the importance of the place as a local supply center decreased, in 1954 the post office was closed and in the early 1960s the last shop in the village was closed. The population of Ruidosa fell to 43 in 1968, and since then the population has stagnated around 40.
Most of the town's houses that were built from adobe are now ruins. The spacious church building is pretty dilapidated, has no windows and doors, but the outer walls and roof are still intact.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Smith, Julia Cauble: "Ruidosa, TX" . In: Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed February 18, 2014
- ↑ Page on the history of Ruidosa with numerous current photos
literature
- Baker, T. Lindsay: `` More Ghost Towns Of Texas ''. University of Oklahoma Press, 2003, pp. 146-149
Coordinates: 29 ° 59 ′ N , 104 ° 41 ′ W