New Mexico Military Institute: The West Point of the West
Near Roswell, New Mexico
On the eastern edge of Roswell stands the New Mexico Military Institute, a state-supported military boarding school and junior college whose three-hundred-acre campus includes a National Historic District. NMMI, as it is universally called, was founded in eighteen ninety-one by Captain Joseph Lea and Colonel Robert Goss, modeled on the Virginia Military Institute. It has since produced one of the most eclectic rosters of alumni of any school its size in the country.
The institute struggled in its first decade. Financial troubles forced it to close its doors on what locals called "Bad Friday," March twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-five. It reopened in the fall of eighteen ninety-eight and never closed again. By the early twentieth century it had established a reputation as a rigorous college-preparatory institution with a military structure that attracted families from across the Southwest and beyond.
The alumni list reads like a catalog of American cultural and economic life. Conrad Hilton enrolled here before building the hotel empire that still bears his name. Roger Staubach, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Dallas Cowboys to two Super Bowl victories, is a graduate. So is Owen Wilson, the actor, who attended before moving on to the University of Texas. Sam Donaldson, the ABC News anchor who became one of the most recognizable faces in American broadcast journalism, studied here. John C. Morgan received the Medal of Honor for his actions as a World War Two bomber co-pilot, earning it on a bombing mission over Germany in July of nineteen forty-three.
NMMI still operates today with a corps of about nine hundred cadets in its high school and college programs. The campus architecture , red-brick buildings in a modified Spanish colonial style arranged around a parade ground , has changed little in a century. Cadets wear uniforms, keep rigid schedules, and participate in ROTC programs. The school maintains a strong athletic program and consistently sends graduates to the United States service academies.
The twenty-one buildings on the historic district represent one of the more intact examples of late-territorial-period institutional architecture in New Mexico.
