Dreaming of a big cottonwood railroad town

It is sometimes said that those who dream without effort are wasting their time, and that those that design without dreams are wasting paper.

It takes more than ideals to build something that will last, and the founders of Alamogordo knew this full well. While William Hawkins and the Eddy brothers covered the legal and administrative side of building a new community in and amongst the New Mexico Territory, they needed someone to actually do the work of building a town, and they found that in William H. “Bud” Woods.

Born in Texas, Woods moved his family to Weed, New Mexico Territory, in 1887, with the hopes of raising cattle. The following year the Sacramento Mountains would be hit with a terrible snowstorm that would kill off most cattle herds. Without the prospects of ranching, Woods moved his family south to the upstart town of Eddy, where he would find work as a foreman for the town fathers. When the Eddy brothers turned their eyes towards planning a new settlement in the Tularosa Basin, Woods made for a natural ally.

The lynchpin of any desert community was then, as it is now, the access to water. After surveying the proposed route for the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad, C. B. Eddy centered his hopes on Alamo Spring, south of the hamlet of La Luz. Being familiar with the area, C. B. Eddy asked Woods to scout out the spring with him and hopefully layout the initial plans for a future railroad town. So, in 1895, the two men setout in a buckboard wagon, with Woods’ 6-year-old son riding along for good measure, to scout out the lands just south of La Luz and the Alamo Spring. What they found was quite promising; a large freshwater spring, with three large cottonwood trees around its banks.

As the trio setup camp for the night, sprawled out before them was a large basin covered in mesquite and greasewood, but more importantly they found a blank canvas for a new community, and the water to make it grow. Finding exactly what he needed, C. B. Eddy bought the spring and the surrounding 40 acres from a local rancher, Oliver M. Lee, for $5,000.

Now that the Eddy Brothers and William Hawkins had the necessities for a new town, it was up to Woods to see it through. He set to work, with his main aids James Blakely, John Walker, and John Dale. Wanting more than an arid frontier town, these men started not only laying out a proper city grid of north-south and east-west running streets, but they also ensured that there was a ditch running along every street that would provide fresh water to the community.

To accent these waterworks, Woods’ crew would plant 2,000 cottonwood trees along these ditches, providing both shade as well as an oasis-like-feel to the community.

With his family living in a wood framed canvas tent setup on the future home of the Plaza Café and the Tularosa Basin Museum of History, Woods supervised the creation of a city, built not for the unsure moments of frontier life, but with the hopes of creating a community that would endure future tumult, initially fed from a spring marked by three large cottonwood trees, or as its referred to in Spanish, Oyo de Alamo Gordo.

Jeffrey A. Weiler is a volunteer docent at the Tularosa Basin Historical Society Museum of History who has a very strong background in history.