Most of New Mexico's ghost towns have died the hard way-- a
slow death prolonged by hope of revival. San Marcial died in a
single day. Homes, stores, hotel, Harvey House, division point
shops of the Santa Fe Railroad all swept away within a few hours.
It was that terrible day of August 13th, 1929, when heavy
rains overfilled the Rio Grande until it heaved and frothed
house-top high across San Marcial and small neighboring San
Acacia. Some say as high as 3000 residents fled to the
mesquite-robed ridges that fingered down into the turgid waters.
Adobe homes melted away, livestock drowned, streets vanished.
All San Marcial vanished. It never came back. What few buildings
had been left just didn't seem worth reclaiming. The town was
gone. Jobs were gone.
Today only a few houses mark where San Marcial once
prospered, it is now camp headquarters of a U. S. flood control
unit engaged in changing the river channel in desilting work.
The most interesting remnant of San Marcial now is the cemetery.
It lies out in the heavy mesquite, too solitary even to brood.
Ornate iron-grilling fences try to guard individual plots. Old
tombstones keep alive names otherwise forgotten. Packrats heap
up two-foot high nests on other sinking mounds.
On a ridge point is still another lonelier graveyard with but a
few graves. One grave is that of a young man killed in a gun-
fight long before the flood. Local legend tells of a third burial spot
just up the river, the resting place of Chinese laborers killed by
Apaches while building the railroad into San Marcial.
Out on the greasewood flats, 30 miles south of Socorro, High-
way 85 ribbons past important historical markers. One tells of
nearby old Fort Craig. A monument honors the Confederate
soldiers killed in the battle of Valverde a few miles away. The
third marker reminds you that only thirty-odd years ago a nice
townfull of people lived down there on the river, two miles away.