Logging in the Sacramento Mountains near the banks of the Penasco River

History relies on two main ingredients for its existence: the remaining and the remembered.

Simply put, if there is no physical proof of an event having occurred, or if no one remembers that an event occurred, then that moment has been lost to history.

When it comes to the industry that fueled the genesis of the town of Alamogordo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namely the railroad, there is much that remains in the town to mark this point in its history, be it the frequently passing trains that parallel White Sands Boulevard, or the rusting husks of the now closed sawmill that flanks Alameda Park.

These items speak for themselves as proof of a bygone age, but there is much that is missing from Alamogordo’s early historical landscape. Thankfully some of those things are remembered.

One of the first ways the newly constructed railway in the Tularosa Basin was put to turning a profit was to send a branch line into the Sacramento Mountains to harvest its wealth of timber, which would be shipped around the southwest for every practical use.

Lacking even the semblance of good roads, the Sacramento Mountains needed to be covered in a network of rail lines, which would carry out the freshly felled pine, spruce and fir trees. The trains that worked these lines were powered by steam, which required a large quantity of water, coal or wood, and above all, maintenance.

To meet this need, a series of small communities were built throughout the forest to see to the care of the locomotives, and the felling and loading of timber onto the train’s rail cars. One such community was the hamlet of Marcia, at the headwaters of the Penasco River.

First built in 1919 by the Alamogordo Lumber Company, the community became home to loggers, mechanics, merchants, and above all their families. When the workers took up their daily labors, their children walked along the railroad to a one-room schoolhouse, which doubled as a church whenever there happened to be a preacher in town.

Most workers were fed at the company cookhouse, and everyone from laborers to local farmers and sers shopped at the company store.

While most homes in Marcia were little more than small shacks, most homes were furnished with running water, piped in from the nearby springs. In 1923 Marcia gained a bit of prominence by the opening of its own post office, which was the hallmark of an up and coming community.

The average worker earned about $1.35 a day, paid partially in cash and the remainder in coupons that could be used at the company store. Except for the whistle of the trains, Marcia was a quiet community during the workweek, but on Saturday there were dances and drinking, both during and after Prohibition.

However bright Marcia’s future looked during its heyday, the community quickly became obsolete in the early 1940s, when better roads had been constructed in the forest, and the improvement of large trucks allowed for a faster and cheaper means of transporting timber.

Without a need for the stream trains, and the people that supported them, Marcia and similar communities in the Sacramento Mountains quickly became deserted. The land returned to its original use, as grazing land for cattle, sheep and horses.

A further tragedy, at least historically speaking, was that rancher tore down and burned most of Marcia’s structures since they posed a hazard to grazing livestock.

Only two visible features of Marcia remain to the present day: the first and easiest to see is the graveyard on what was the community’s eastern end, though the graveyard technically predates the building of Marcia, many of its former residents are buried there.

The second and nearly invisible remains of Marcia are a small number of the old style wooden utility poles that infrequently dot one side of the Penasco River, just shy of its headwaters, about a mile or so off of what is today Sunspot Highway.

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