Bingham

I asked Evelyn about Bingham:

“Well, Bingham, it was just a filling station on the highway between Carrizozo and San Antonio. The OLD highway (380), not where it is now. And Harold Dean had a filling station there, and a few little groceries. And they had a schoolhouse. Anyhow, they had – a few of those homesteaders were still there, and they had kids, so they had two teachers. And they had two or three little rooms that – well, Dean’s cousin taught school there, and two of her nephews went to school there, and she’d take ‘em up there, and they’d stay during the week and come home on weekends. The rest of ‘em came every day because they lived closer. That’s where we had our dances, at the schoolhouse. We’d fire up that gas lantern and get the food and the fiddle and the guitar, and away we’d go. Oh, about once every two or three months. But those dances, I had never been to a cowboy dance, so I had a fine time. The ladies would all pack lunches, bake cakes, you know, and make sandwiches. And then they’d go – they had a little place where they fed the kids, and we had coffee. And we’d break dancing around 12, one o’clock, and go eat cake and sandwiches, and everybody brought the kids too, you know. Some of ‘em stood out by the cars and drank and got in fights and things, oh yes. And – but then we’d dance ‘til daylight. Oh man. You’d be so pooped out it would take you three days to get over it.

“I guess Wrye, that boy, it’s the son, how old is he? They were homesteaders that came in there and bought some land and stayed. The ones that stayed, they got enough land together to have a ranch. They had one boy, and he was Willie Wrye, and I’ve forgotten what her name was. And that’s probably the boy, and he’d be, oh, in his late ‘60s …"

I told Evelyn that Bill Wrye had told me that Highway 380, the old highway, was built by the WPA. He had told me that it went from Old Bingham west to what’s Mark McKinley’s place now, and then it kind of tied into modern 380. It went east from Bingham through Hoot Owl Canyon and across Iron Mine Ridge.

“Yeah, it went a little different route. When you leave San Antonio, after about six miles, it left and then went up and went around through those hills. That’s where it was when I went to the ranch. You can see signs of it. There’s an old – where you turn in to the Fite Ranch, if you’ll look off to the left, up a little canyon there, there used to be a quarry there, they quarried up that stone. See, the CCC camp came in 1938."