Gladstone, New Mexico: End of the Road on the High Plains
New Mexico
Gladstone, New Mexico barely exists on the map anymore, and what remains tells the story of a dozen similar places across the high plains of Union County.
William Harris founded the settlement around eighteen eighty and named it for the British statesman William Ewart Gladstone, whom he had known personally. The original inhabitants had come north from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to try their luck on the Cimarron country grasslands. A post office opened in eighteen eighty-eight and gave the community official standing. For decades a general store and scattered ranch families formed the whole of it.
The post office that outlasted nearly everything else finally closed in two thousand ten. Today Gladstone amounts to a gas stop and two houses at the crossroads of US Route Fifty-Six and a county road. The high plains wind does the rest.
