By Brenda Wilkinson Socorro Field Office Archeologist George McJunkin was born a slave near Midway, Texas in 1851. George was freed at the age of 14 after the Civil War ended. He was already fluent in Spanish, experienced with horses, and used to helping his father in his blacksmith…
1916 By Michael Ann Sullivan Jack M. Campbell, served two terms as governor of New Mexico from 1963–1966. Campbell worked to increase money for education at all levels—often exhorting that education was the cornerstone for future progress in New Mexico. Campbell also stressed long-term economic development with an emphasis…
By Michael Ann Sullivan Sandia National Laboratory was originally the engineering division (called Z-division) of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the central laboratory of the top-secret Manhattan Project during WWII. The Manhattan Project scientists developed an atomic bomb which was deployed against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on…
By Michael Ann Sullivan On 16 July 1945 the U.S. Army and civilian scientists attached to the Manhattan Engineering District detonated the first atomic device in the New Mexico desert at Trinity Site, a remote location sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. At 5:30 am in the morning a brilliant…
4 22 1904 By Michael Ann Sullivan Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born 22 April 1904 to Julius and Ella Oppenhiemer. Julius, a German-Jewish immigrant, came to America from Germany in 1888. His father started with nothing and worked hard to become a successful cloth importer. His mother Ella came…
By Linda Aldrich In 1942, when the WWII Manhattan Project took over the Los Alamos Ranch School and adjoining ranches and homesteads on the Pajarito Plateau, the Corps of Engineers was responsible for setting up and operating the town of Los Alamos and the Project facilities. The University of…
La Vara By Michael Miller On December 27, 1888 the Surveyor General for the Territory of New Mexico, George Julian, publicly proclaimed that, “ninety per cent of the land entries in the territory were fraudulent.” A land title study conducted by the New Mexico State Planning Office in 1971 uncovered evidence…
By Aleta J. Lawrence The area surrounding Bear Spring that includes the Sheep Lab Historic District became a major area for Navajo settlement in the eighteenth century. The spring was one of a few dependable water sources in the region. Historical records date use of the Bear Spring area…
Wine Production in El Paso and the Grapevine Inventory of 1755 by Rick Hendricks Wine production in colonial El Paso had its roots farther north in New Mexico. Before he came to El Paso to found the mission Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe to serve the Manso Indians, fray García…
