Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The New Mexico Mill and Elevator Co. was born in 1916.
Reliable grocers all recommended it.
When you asked for the best, you received Golden West.
That's what the newspaper ads claimed anyway.
"The experienced housewife will ... use no other flour because she knows the best cooks are the cooks who refuse to be handicapped by anything inferior," one Clovis News-Journal ad read in 1929.
"The experienced housewife, the 'Master Craftsman' of the home, will demand Golden West Flour every time."
In Clovis, that flour came from New Mexico Mill & Elevator Co. at 213 E. First St.
And that mill and elevator was a big part of eastern New Mexico's economy for parts of five decades, helping provide literally thousands of jobs.
Though shuttered the past six-plus decades, the elevator made news for maybe the last time on Saturday afternoon when it burned to the ground.
Firefighters early this week didn't know the cause of the blaze, but its history will long be remembered.
Clovis MainStreet tells us the Clovis Mill and Elevator Co. began construction in 1916, about nine years after the railroad created Clovis from land covered in prairie grass belly-high to a horse.
The elevator's story began in the spring of 1916 when the Clovis Mill and Elevator Co. consolidated with J.A. Latta Wholesale Grocery.
"The combined capital of these large concerns will enable them to do business on a large scale, buying and shipping in large quantities and affording a better market for all classes of grain and produce," the Clovis News reported on May 19, 1916.
"They will erect another elevator soon and if this year's wheat crop is satisfactory and the outlook for the future good they will also erect a flouring mill here."
And they did.
While Latta and grain man Lester Stone started the business, historian Don McAlavy gave credit to Clovis bankers Joe E. Wilkinson and Cash Ramey for making it "work for the good of the farming and ranching enterprises in Curry County."
McAlavy reported the state's only flour mill in 1917 soon began also manufacturing a large variety of feed products.
"Wilkinson and Ramey believed in Clovis and its potentials," McAlavy wrote in a 2008 newspaper article.
"Wilkinson and Ramey and other stockholders also started feed lots and mulled over in their minds the idea of Clovis as a cattle center."
By the late 1930s, according to cattleman W.D. Mack:
"All cattlemen in western Texas liked to do business in Clovis. Clovis and west Texas was a productive livestock belt, running from Amarillo to Fort Sumner and on to Wichita Falls, Texas, and all pivoted on Clovis."
Since Clovis was also situated in New Mexico's only grain belt of any size, it became a natural as a shipping center, McAlavy reported.
Clovis' annual cattle transactions were totaling more than $100 million by 1951.
"And that ain't hay," McAlavy wrote.
Wilkinson and Ramey sold their elevator about 1950, but its role in Clovis' history was well established.
"That old mill and elevator company should be listed as one of the jewels of Clovis, and treated gently, as you would an old, gray-haired gentleman," McAlavy wrote.
David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
