How Hobbs Got Its Name

This city carries the name of one stubborn family that put down roots on empty plains. In nineteen oh seven, a farmer named James Isaac Hobbs brought his family out to this corner of what was still New Mexico Territory. He filed a homestead claim on dry grassland, and started over.

For a few years it was just the Hobbs place, far from anywhere. Then, in nineteen ten, a post office opened, and the settlement officially took the family's name, with James Hobbs himself as the first postmaster. That single post office fixed the name for good.

Decades later, oil would turn this quiet homestead into a booming city near the Texas line, but the name on the map still belongs to the family who arrived first.