Hoping any ghosts are still enjoying historic sites

I suppose it was inevitable.

As I made the drive from Portales to Clovis last week on US 70, I noticed the cleanup was complete of the fire-ravaged building that once housed the Blackwater Draw Museum.

That part I had expected.

It was the removal of the remains of two nearby structures that tugged at my heart: the adobe “caretaker’s cottage” and the “bathhouse,” the last relics of the old Eastern New Mexico State Park.

I might never have even heard of Eastern New Mexico State Park, except for a summer job I had 40 years ago at the Portales News-Tribune.

Gordon Greaves was still editor that summer, although he was working reduced hours by then, and Scot Stinnett was the managing editor. Between them, I learned more in three months than I had in the previous three years of journalism classes.

My most memorable project was working on what became a full page feature about a place I had driven past a thousand times and never knew existed.

I wish I could remember who had the idea, but it was almost certainly Gordon.

For starters, he knew I shared his interest in local history. In hindsight, I can see it was also the perfect project for keeping a young reporter occupied for several days.

There was also a strong family tie, I was to learn. It was Gordon’s father, J.G. “Spud” Greaves, who was credited with the idea for the park.

A little background might be in order here for those who are newer to this community, or who may have driven by in blissful ignorance as I had up to that point.

The land most of us know as the site of the old Greyhound Stadium was quite the focus of activity for a time in the 1930s. The country was coming out of the Great Depression, and that location was chosen for one of the Civilian Conservation Camps that sprang up across the country as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

It’s hard to picture it now, but 200 young men were housed in a dozen canvas barracks at the CCC camp that was erected between Portales and Clovis in 1934.

Spud Greaves had jumped wholeheartedly on another Roosevelt plan of the era, one that called for a great forest belt to be planted, spanning the nation from north to south to help control erosion and change the climate of the Plains states.

“This draw contains much land which is very poor grazing land and of a sand hill nature,” Spud wrote in an editorial on Jan. 11, 1934, “but once planted to trees, it would become a national resource which would pay a handsome dividend each year after it had been given time for the trees to make suitable growth.”

In that same editorial, Spud promoted an adjoining state park to be shared by Portales and Clovis, “a project of unusual merit.”

While the reforestation plan failed to take off, the concept for the state park won the approval of the New Mexico State Legislature a few months later.

By June of 1935, the CCC boys had completed digging a 10-acre lake for the site, and eventually added a 12-shower bathhouse (“a modified pueblo,” according to newspaper accounts), a stone dock and diving board, and the caretaker’s cottage.

The hard-working CCC crews also planted 12,000 trees in the immediate area, historical accounts tell us, a mix of elms, locusts, cedars, pines, junipers, and pinons, and managed to scratch out a golf course on nearby ground.

For a time, it was the social center of our community, a place of picnics and reunions, fishing expeditions and swimming races.

I’m sure my mischievous cousin Adele (born in 1928) was not the only local teenager who sneaked out after dark with friends for illicit moonlight dips in the lake.

The park’s official life was brief, riddled with funding challenges from the get-go, along with the struggles of keeping water in an ever-leaking basin.

By World War II, much of the adjoining land was converted to runways for training pilots, and by 1951, the land (once owned by the state) was signed over to Eastern New Mexico Normal School. The infrastructure gradually eroded, as infrastructure — especially when made of adobe — often does.

By the time I drove out with my camera and notebook in the summer of 1982, the bathhouse was in bad shape, and lake had been dry for a few decades, but still visible as a weed-filled depression. The adobe caretaker’s house by the highway fared the best — it hadn’t been long since it had been rented out.

Over the ensuing years, I’ve never driven past without looking out to see what was left of the bathhouse, and thinking about all of the people who were on that land at one time or another during its heyday: the CCC boys who came from multiple states, the former residents of Clovis and Portales who spent happy hours enjoying this special spot, my laughing cousin Adele diving in for a late-night swim.

It’s all gone now, the last crumbled bricks cleaned up and hauled away. It caught me by surprise, even when — of course — it was inevitable.

I’ve never had an encounter with a ghost, but as I drive past that site, I’ll be hoping they are out there enjoying a cold drink on the veranda of the bathhouse I can’t see before they slip into the lake for a cool summer swim.

Betty Williamson believes in progress but has a nostalgic soul. Reach her at:

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