Corona, New Mexico: Ranching Country at Seven Thousand Feet

Corona sits on the high plains of northern Lincoln County at roughly seven thousand feet above sea level, where the air is thin and the summers are cool even when the Tularosa Basin bakes below. Ranchers ran sheep and cattle through this country in the nineteenth century, and the landscape suited the work: open range, sparse scrub, and reliable grass. The community organized around a railroad stop when the railroad came through in the early nineteen hundreds, which brought homesteaders and farmers and made Corona a trade center for the surrounding ranches.

Then the railroad stopped stopping, and the town contracted. Today Corona is again primarily what it has always been at its core: ranching country on a high plateau, a village of roughly one hundred thirty people holding the land between the Sacramento Mountains and the eastern New Mexico plain.