Oldmesquite -- the Fake Real Ghost Town

In southern New Mexico, about twenty miles north of the Mexican border, if you are lucky you will find a ghost town called Oldmesquite, vintage 1890's, in an area of mountains with old abandoned mines and not much else but desert. The town consists of one street and about a dozen old buildings, some crumbling, most dilapidated or weather worn.

At it's high point, the town is said to have consisted of a cafe, three saloons, a laundry and bathhouse, a land office, livery stable, blacksmith shop, bank, jail and a bordello. Below, you see the land office and cafe.

The windmill and water tower stood at one end of the street.

You can still see tattered rags of the old curtains in these windows.

Here is the old pump and tub at the front of the laundry and bathhouse.

And inside the blacksmith shop.

Here's the bank, where, so the story goes, the safe was stolen and transported several miles out of town, where it was later found, blown apart and empty.

And the jail. The bank robber or robbers, incidentally, were never caught.

Behind the town lies the graveyard.

Here we are inside the bordello, apparently the "nicest" building in town, with an adobe brick fireplace and an incredible old Victrola -- which plays -- still in residence.

These adobe buildings are crumbling but were built with adobe clay found just a few hundred yards away.

Battered and rusted artifacts lie about. An old milk can,

an anvil outside the blacksmith shop,

traps for ... I'm not sure what kind of small animals would have been prey here.

This town reminded me of many old ghost towns, abandoned mining towns, that I visited with my family forty or more years ago in Montana. It always surprised me to see what things had been left behind when buildings were abandoned. There was evidence of that here at Oldmesquite too.

This ghost town of Oldmesquite however is one of a kind, and not the usual kind. It has a very unusual history. It was completely and totally constructed by one man, Randy McCowan, in the last decade.

Oldmesquite lies in the backyard of Randy's house.

Randy is the great-grandson of John and Ellen McCowan, pioneers who came to New Mexico in 1888.

Much of their history has been lost, but Randy had spent the last ten years building this town, carefully researched to be authentic to "its" day, to recreate for himself a connection to their lives, while learning as much about them as he could.

He scavenged old lumber and made his own adobe bricks to make his --their-- town "real."

What he couldn't discover about his great-grandparents, he gleefully created, and if you ever get to tour of Oldmesquite, Randy, with eyes sparkling, will regale you with stories of the golden days of John and Ellen McCowan and Oldmesquite, complete with bank robberies and shoot-outs.

And so the sun sets near Oldmesquite, New Mexico.

Today was a good day.