Ruidoso: The Carmon Phillips Collection

By Lyn Kidder

Ruidoso, New Mexico, has long offered a cool, verdant haven to the many visitors who come to escape the desert heat. Commercial development of the area was hampered by the sheer difficulty in getting there You just picked your way through the sand dunes, following someone else s tire tracks, an early visitor recalled. Eventually, the first private cabins in Ruidoso were built in 1915 and a few primitive lodging facilities were added in the 1920s and 1930s. The local economy slowed during the Great Depression, but visitors still came to the cool pines. World War II brought an influx of servicemen from nearby air bases, but it was during the period of postwar enthusiasm that the town really began to grow. Word spread about the little town in the tall pines, due in large part to the efforts of one of its newest residents photographer Carmon Phillips.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781439645918

Lyn Kidder

Lyn Kidder has written articles for magazines such as New Mexico Journey, New Mexico Business Journal, Sabroso, and Oh, So Ruidoso. Kidder has written two books on Alaska: Tacos on the Tundra and Barrow, Alaska from A to Z. For decades, local photographer Herb Brunell has collected vintage photographs and documented Ruidoso history.

Book preview

Mexico.

INTRODUCTION

Legends from many cultures include stories of heroes who went to the mountains, or a specific mountain, to face challenges, receive wisdom, or perform heroic deeds. Mountains are the mysterious homes of gods, monsters, and the unknown and are powerful symbols in the human imagination.

Ordinary mortals are also drawn to the mountains—for healing, for enlightenment, for escape. For the Mescalero Apaches, the canyons of the Sacramento Mountains provided safety, and the legend of their mountain gods tells of a wounded warrior whom they heal in a cave on the slopes of Sierra Blanca (Spanish for white mountain), the highest peak.

On a more prosaic level, people come to the mountains for escape from their everyday lives and, in the Southwest, from the oppressive heat of summer in the desert. In the 1880s, it was a hard three-day trip from El Paso, but the El Paso Times described Ruidoso as the most popular resort for camping out in all the country for 200 miles about El Paso, a grassy mountain valley surmounted by a dense forest in which earthly mortals from the city may hide themselves for a few weeks of rest and relaxation.

In 1907, a primitive road was graded from Alamogordo to Roswell, making the Ruidoso area accessible by automobile. Families camped along the banks of the Rio Ruidoso (Spanish for noisy river) or rented primitive cabins. Some families spent the entire summer in the mountains, with the weary fathers making the long trek for a weekend of relaxation. Many families eventually built cabins of their own, and generations of children enjoyed summers in the pine forests.

The town experienced an economic boom during World War II, when off-duty servicemen and women came from bases in Roswell, Alamogordo, and El Paso. Although Ruidoso’s population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1950, there were still only some 2,000 full-time residents at mid-century.

Among those residents were Carmon and Leona Mae Phillips. Carmon took on the challenge of making a life for himself and his family in a small mountain town. He restored an abandoned adobe mill, operated a photography business, and continuously promoted his new town. Over the next 50 years, he took more than 6,000 photographs of every possible subject. He carefully cataloged the negatives, but after his death, they sat in cardboard boxes on shelves in the mill. In 2011, his daughter, Delana Phillips Clements, donated the collection to the Hubbard Museum of the American West, where the negatives were scanned. This book is but a small sampling of the portrait of Ruidoso that Carmon Phillips created.

Even with a graded road, the trip to Ruidoso could be challenging, according to Dan Storm, whose family moved to the area in 1925: There was no paved road after El Paso. We just picked our way through the sand dunes, following someone else’s tracks.

One

THE ROAD TO RUIDOSO

William Carmon Phillips was born in Erick, Oklahoma, in 1913. Like many Oklahomans of the era, necessity taught him lessons in self-reliance. During the Depression, he traveled the country, sometimes by train, looking for work. It was on one such trip that he first came to Ruidoso.

I first saw Ruidoso in 1936, when I was on a bus on my way to California, Philips later said. The bus pulled up in front of the Wingfield house, and there were people who had set up a couple little stands, selling cherry cider and food to the passengers and other visitors. Ike Wingfield, who built the house in 1929, had been born in the adobe mill that would later be a part of Carmon Phillips’s life in Ruidoso. The enterprising Wingfield family ran a dairy, general store, and post office, and their children collected nickels in exchange for opening the pasture gate for automobiles headed to the Upper Canyon.

Phillips found no work in California, but he did get a job with the Lyceum Theater Circuit (and, later, the Griffith Amusement Company), renovating and promoting movie theaters in small towns in New Mexico and Texas. Phillips was a tireless promoter, organizing publicity events that had some connection with the films that were being shown or that simply got people into the theater.

After a theater was successfully reestablished in a community, the company sent him to another town. While working in Clovis, New Mexico, he met Leona Mae. They married in 1938 and continued their gypsy lifestyle until World War II, when they moved to Dallas, Texas, where Carmon worked for Lockheed Martin. While in Dallas, he also found time to attend classes in photography and painting.

After the war, he had the opportunity to move to California and continue