Mountainair (New Mexico)
Mountainair is an American small town in Torrance County, New Mexico. The census in 2000, according to Mountainair had 1116 inhabitants.
The village lies at an altitude of 1987 m east of Abo Pass, a mountain pass in the southern Manzano Mountains, which separate the septic Estancia Basin in the northeast of the Rio Grande in the west. It is being developed by the U.S. Highway U.S. 60 and several state and county roads. The railway line of the BNSF Railway is now used only to freight. A small municipal airport for regional transport located in the northeast of the village.
History
Originally, the Estancia Basin was sparsely inhabited by Indians of the Pueblo culture. The oldest traces of human occupation date back to 6000 BC, lasting settlements can be from about the year 700 proof. 1581/82 came Captain Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and Frater Agustín Rodríguez from the north as the first white person in the area and visited the pueblos below the Manzano Mountains. 1598 Don Juan de Oñate built the first permanent Spanish settlement in Nuevo Mexico. He established his capital at today Española and visited all the pueblos of the region. With Don Oñate monks came from the Order of Friars Minor and established Spanish missions in the region. In 1610 they reached the Estancia Basin. Until 1626 there five missions were built, the other four pueblos were covered by a regular visiting service to the Padres. End of the 17th century collapsed after a drought period, all state structures and the Spanish settlements Nuevo Mexico, which decimated Indian population fell back into the subsistence economy.
Mountainair itself was founded in 1905 when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway planned a branch line through the subscription pass. The Estancia Basin had been settled only in the last years of the 18th century by settlers again after the Homestead Act and Mountainair was the first organized settlement in the region. Economic basis of the place were the agriculture, the cultivation of pinto beans and the depot of the ATSF. A ten-year drought in the 1950s and the setting of the passenger traffic on the railway line in the 1960s hit hard the settlement. In addition, the opening of approximately 50 km north-trending cross Interstate Highway 40 took through traffic from U.S. 60 and Mountainair. The population fell from over 5000 to below 1000. Since the 1980s, the population is increasing again slowly.
In Mountainair today is the main visitor center for the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. It preserves ruins of three pueblos and the corresponding Spanish missions that are spread around the Estancia Basin.