Montoya: Spanish Land Grant to Route Sixty-Six Ghost

The land around Montoya in Quay County has been claimed, named, and abandoned twice. In eighteen twenty-four, a former Spanish soldier named Montoya received a land grant from the territorial governor for this stretch of New Mexico high plains, where he had traded with local peoples for years. The grant gave the place a name it would carry forward.

In nineteen oh two, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad made Montoya a cattle-loading point, and a stone store and small settlement grew up to serve the surrounding ranches. When Route Sixty-Six came through in the nineteen twenties, a filling station and a roadside store called Richardson's, opened in nineteen twenty-five, kept the community alive for another half century.

When Richardson's owner died in the mid-nineteen seventies, the business closed. Interstate Forty bypassed the town entirely. Today Casa Alta, an early nineteen hundreds stone house that belonged to a ranching family, still stands near the old highway, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the only visible remnants of a settlement that a Spanish land grant, a railroad, and a highway each built and then abandoned.