Van C. Smith and the Founding of Roswell

Roswell takes its name from a man most people have never heard of: a businessman from Omaha, Nebraska, named Van C. Smith, who arrived in southeastern New Mexico in eighteen sixty-nine and built the first adobe structures on a flat stretch of ground along the Pecos River.

Smith and a partner named Aaron Wilburn established a small settlement and applied for a post office. On August twentieth, eighteen seventy-three, Smith became the town's first postmaster and named the place Roswell after his own father. Whether the father ever visited the town named for him is not recorded.

Smith did not stay long. By eighteen seventy-seven, Captain Joseph Calloway Lea had purchased Smith and Wilburn's claim and become the settlement's leading figure. Lea organized the community, attracted more settlers, and worked to establish the basic institutions of a frontier town. He is often called the father of Roswell, a distinction that reflects not who arrived first but who stayed and built something lasting.

The earliest settlers in the area had been ranchers following the Pecos River valley, where the land was flat and the grass was sufficient for cattle. An earlier attempt at settlement in eighteen sixty-five, about fifteen miles to the southwest, had failed when the founders discovered there was not enough reliable water. The lesson was applied. Roswell was placed at a spot where water and land worked together, and it grew slowly at first, then more quickly with the arrival of the Pecos Valley Railroad in eighteen ninety-two.