Alamogordo: A Planned City Born from Railroad and Timber

Alamogordo was founded in June eighteen ninety-eight by the Eddy brothers, Charles and John, as a division point on their El Paso and Northeastern Railroad pushing north from El Paso toward Santa Rosa. John Eddy named the new town for a grove of fat cottonwood trees he remembered along the Pecos River, Alamo Gordo meaning fat cottonwood in Spanish. From the start it was a planned community, with wide boulevards, tree-lined irrigation canals, and a deliberate grid.

Its early economy rested on two pillars: the railroad and timber shipped down from the Sacramento Mountains. Alamogordo became a city in nineteen twelve. In the decades that followed it grew into the commercial center of the Tularosa Basin, anchored as much by the military presence at nearby Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range as by ranching and tourism.