Raton Downtown Historic District

Raton sits at the foot of Raton Pass, and the pass is the reason the town exists at all. In eighteen seventy-nine the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad needed a route south into New Mexico. They bought a private toll road from a frontier entrepreneur named Richens Wootton, known as Uncle Dick, who had carved a wagon road over the pass in the eighteen sixties.

With the railroad came a boomtown: coal mining, cattle shipping, and Santa Fe Trail traffic all converged here, and within a year the town was platted on land purchased from the Maxwell Land Grant. By the early nineteen hundreds, Raton had become the principal trading center of northeastern New Mexico. The downtown historic district, designated in nineteen seventy-seven, covers roughly two hundred acres and ninety-five significant buildings, including the nineteen oh three Santa Fe depot still standing on First Street.