Cruzville to the Lower Frisco

I've got the bug for sure now - can't stop driving around taking pictures and wondering who built the houses, and when, and how. Later this week, I'll have a chance to talk to two people who can maybe tell me more about the builders and the time periods. One lives in a house built by the very person who built the house I live in, and the other got a grant to go around and document abandoned and derelict adobe houses on what is now public land, if I understood the project correctly. A third person I hope to speak with soon is a woman in Aragon who's in her late eighties, and recalls playing in the house I live in, as a child - now may be a bad time, since her son is ill. I'm hoping that these people will have lots of information, and be able to give me introductions to people who have even more.

The demographics of Catron county are changing. There is a solid core of families who've been here for many generations; ranchers, and back when there was more rain, pinto bean farmers. There are families who moved here when logging became a big industry, who are still hanging on even though the sawmill has been shut down - some of the families were Okies escaping the dustbowl years - think Grapes of Wrath - who lived in tin shacks in logging camps. Afer the sawmill was shut down, the economic outlook became pretty bleak for many, and the population of the county dropped as families with children moved elsewhere to find work. Now the population is rising again as subdivisions are being created and populated with retired folk who are trading their urban mini-mansions for 5 or 10 or even 20 or 40 acres in the country and building ugly lincoln log kit homes that look as out of place in this landscape as the adobe houses look at home.

That's my general impression, anyway - I may have some of the details wrong.

So here are some more old houses which I hope to find out more about.