April 1, 2000
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Site Highlights:
Off beaten track
Nearly deserted
Few visitors
Properties off-limit
View into past
Interesting cemetery
Unique saloon
Unpaved side streets
Few artisans
Walk around town
| Go to first part of day trip - Trinity Site
Go to second part of day trip - Valley of Fire |
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| White Oaks Mining Town The Greed |
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White Oaks might not be the somnolent ghost town it now is were it not for its former residents' own greed.
In the late 1890s, both the Santa Fe and the El Paso and Northeastern railroads were planning to extend tracks toward White Oaks.
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| Prominent businessmen in town were so certain of a bidding war for the privilege of a railroad's being allowed to enter their town that they asked outrageous prices for the right-of-way.
The El Paso and Northeastern took its collective tracks and went home, so to speak, and bypassed the town by ten miles. From that point on, White Oaks began to decline. |
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| The Liveliest Town |
| White Oaks once known as the liveliest town in the territory. The commotion began after a miner named Baxter found a gold deposit in the Jicarilla Mountains in 1879. Within a year, the town, named for the white oaks surrounding a nearby spring, was a tent community with a post office.
By 1885 the town was much more substantial, and a reporter from Denver remarked that the people there were of "intelligence and culture," and that their influence " . . . had an ennobling effect on pioneer life and aided in the molding of a frontier society into more refined, cultured and virtuous channels." |
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The late 1880s reflected White Oak's culture reflected in its buildings, the best of which still stand. On the main street into town, White Oaks Avenue, stands the Exchange Bank Building, also known as the Hewett Building.
It is, unfortunately, somewhat like a painting for which only a hand-carved frame remains. |
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The canvas long gone, for the building's owners stripped it of its stone facade for use in a private residence. North of the bank is the two-story brick schoolhouse, which, despite its considerable size, has only four classrooms - two upstairs and two down.
Beyond the school is the Gumm residence - a wooden Victorian lavishly furnished in rosewood and mahogany that was constructed by a family who owned sawmills and a woodworking factory in the area. (See site gallery below for structures just described.) |
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| The Hoyle Mansion |
 (on a snowy day in April) |
On a hill south of the main street stands the Hoyle mansion, a dramatic brick Victorian built in 1887 by Mr. Hoyle, who made his fortune as a one-twelfth owner of the Old Abe, the most profitable gold mine near White Oaks.
A story persists that Hoyle built the house for a bride who refused him and that, as a consequence, he never lived in the house. |
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Long-time resident Morris Parker, however, flatly debunked the tale and claimed that Hoyle lived in the house for years. The home cost between $40,000 and $70,000, while the town's impressive schoolhouse cost only $10,000.
Two classic Victorian homes remain in White Oaks, and even though one is of brick and the other of wood, the visitor notices striking similarities between the two, and it is no wonder: the Gumms used the plans of the Hoyle house, reversed, when they built their monument to success.
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| Footnote 1: An e-mail received September 2004 from Mary (Watson) Bower of Cotter, Arkansas added some interesting details to this story. Another partner in the Old Abe mine was William Watson. His son, Wayne Watson (Mary's father) was born in White Oaks in June of 1920. According to Ms. Bower, the workers of Old Abe presented to the three owners of the mine 'gold handled canes'. She was told that one was stolen, one was lost in a fire and her father had the other one. She was also told that one of the canes was used as "collateral" for building the Hoyle House. | ||
| Footnote 2: Another e-mail received October 2007 from Mary (Watson) Bower: I just found your web site again and noticed that the info I gave you several years ago is incorrect. I am Mary (Watson) Bower, the great grand-daughter of William Watson. His son, Roy Watson was my dad's father and the grandson of William Watson, not William's son. My dad was born at White Oaks, June 10th, 1920 to Roy's wife, Georgia Hall Watson. | ||
| Hogtown |
| If White Oaks had the "intelligence" and "culture" that the Denver reporter noted, how did it become known as the "liveliest town in the territory"?
There was another side to White Oaks, and it was a section called Hogtown - where bars (see site gallery), casinos, dance halls, and brothels flourished. The most famous faro dealer in the casinos of White Oaks was Madame Varnish, so called because she was a "slick" dealer - no doubt many a miner was shellacked. Billy the Kid was an occasional visitor to town, but Pat Garrett was the sheriff in the early 188os. Overall, however, Morris Parker recalled White Oaks as an essentially civilized place, with such refinements as an opera house, drama clubs, and literary societies. |
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| The Buried Past |
| On your way in to White Oaks, be sure to stop at the Cedarvale Cemetery, established in 1880 by the Knights of Pythias.
Citizens important to both White Oaks and New Mexico are buried there: W C. McDonald, once a White Oaks surveyor and later the first New Mexico governor after statehood; Susan McSween Barber (her name misspelled on her gravestone), a survivor of the Lincoln County War (see Lincoln entry, p. 69) and later known as the Cattle Queen of New Mexico; John Wilson, one of the original discoverers of the gold strike; and David "Jack" Jackson and his wife Mary, the only black residents of White Oaks. Jackson arrived in 1897 and witnessed the decline of the town from its late boom days. It was a virtual ghost town just after the turn of the century, but Jack Jackson stayed on, maintaining the graveyard voluntarily, carrying soup to sick community residents, and even oiling mining machinery in abandoned mines so that if the mines ever opened again the equipment would not be rusted. He died in 1963 and now rests in the cemetery he helped to preserve. |
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| Site Gallery - White Oaks |
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Yesterday's gold mining mines today's visitor. |
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| For More Information |
| Ghost Towns of New Mexico |
| Text source partially exrtracted from: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of New Mexico, James E. Sherman, 1975 New Mexico's Best Ghost Towns, Philip Varney, 1999 |