Westward ho!
The Grants and Milan area is rich in mining history and echoes of old Route 66
Grants and Milan may seem like little blips on Interstate
40, but there is plenty going on. First stop has to be the New Mexico Mining Museum (facebook.com/newmexicominingmuseum), which is the world’s only simulated underground uranium mining museum, said Tammy Legler, executive director of the museum and the Grants/Cibola County Chamber of Commerce.
The museum provides a peek into Grants’ heyday, because the town’s mid20th century mining boom came far later than those for the rest of the towns tied to gold, silver or copper.
It was the spring of 1950 when Navajo sheepherder Paddy Martinez discovered a uranium-bearing outcropping in the Todilto limestone formation at the foot of Haystack Butte.
The museum traces how, with the Cold War in full swing, uranium demand skyrocketed and Grants prospered along the way.
For a particularly informative excursion, call ahead and ask for a personal tour from former miner Jack Farley, who spent 28 years in the area’s uranium’s mines.
“We tell them how we used the different pieces of equipment and what each thing was for,” he said. “The mines were all real wet and hot. The deepest was 3,300 feet, and the temperature was 130 degrees.”
If planning a trip for the fall, keep in mind Oct. 12-14 for the annual Grants Fall Fiesta at the Fire and Ice Park, next to the museum.
The fiesta, a celebration of historic Route 66, features a battle of the bands, a themed cake-decorating contest and the highlight: an amateur green chile stew eating competition. Kids activities, vendors for food and merchandise and information booths from various local organizations are part of the festivities, Legler said.
Pre-World War II, Grants was an important hub in the burgeoning aviation industry as one of the cross-country routes crossed the area traced at the Western New Mexico Aviation Heritage Museum (cibolahistory.org/airway-heritagemuseum.html) at the Grants-Milan Airport.
The museum features a restored 51-foot beacon tower and power shed built in the late 1920s by Transcontinental Air Transport, which later became Trans World Airlines, that helped pilots navigate cross-country. A giant metal arrow literally points toward the next way station ––at least it did until one unfortunate pilot flew into Mount Taylor, forcing Continental to detour around the area, said Steve Owen, chairman of the Grants Historical Society which operates the museum at the airport on Saturday.
The beacons sat at 10-mile intervals across the country, he said, and were in operation until 1965.
Route 66 dissected Grants, and it is the center to the longest continuous stretch of the Mother Road in New Mexico, going 80 miles from the Continental Divide in the west to Mesita in the east. So it’s only appropriate that the Route 66 Museum at the Double Six Gallery is a staple of the genre.
The museum took the unusual tack of highlighting Route 66’s history by collecting postcards depicting the many sights along the local stretch, enlarged and mounted.
“When we started, we decided that we would concentrate on this stretch and do it by getting vintage postcards for all the communities from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” director Robert Gallegos said. “We’d scan both the front and back and set them up as if driving along that stretch. We started with the Continental Divide, it goes on through Bluewater, Milan, Rio de Cubero, Laguna Pueblo. It’s still a work in progress.”
Virtually everything along that stretch is represented by the 43-card collection.
“We haven’t found anything yet for San Fidel, Preuitt and Thoreau,” Gallegos said. But what we have is really nice. You can see what Route 66 looked like. You can see a lot of the buildings that aren’t there anymore. The entrepreneurs back then did a lot with reptiles and the trading post. At Bluewater, there was the Rattlesnake Trading Post, and in Milan we had the Cobra Gardens.”
The collection also includes oil cans, vintage maps and license plates from each of the decades back to the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.