Sunday, August 24, 2014

Trail Dust: New Mexico county boundaries evolved over time


Development of our state’s county boundaries over the centuries forms a curious story virtually unknown to New Mexicans.

Neighboring Texas has a total of 254 counties, most of them comparatively small. By contrast, New Mexico’s counties number only 33, but all are respectably large in size, except tiny Los Alamos County, at only 111 square miles.


When Gen. Stephen W. Kearny seized New Mexico for the United States in 1846, he found the Mexican province divided into three large administrative districts, each governed by an official called a prefect. But it was a far cry from the county system of local government familiar to Americans.

Such a system was not introduced until 1850, when Congress created the Territory of New Mexico. Within two years, 10 counties had been defined, but were identified only on maps, since no survey of boundaries had yet taken place.

At that time, New Mexico stretched from the Texas line westward to the border of California and took in even the southern portion of Nevada.

Four of the New Mexican counties extended in an unmanageable sweep from Texas to California. One of them, Socorro, was believed to have been the largest county in the United States.

From then on, to the end of the century, county boundaries were constantly redefined by the territorial legislature.

Part of the reason had to do with federal actions that led to major changes in the boundary of the territory itself. The first involved the Gadsden Purchase (1853), when the U.S. acquired from Mexico a large wedge of country within the border region of the present states of New Mexico and Arizona.

Soon afterward, the territorial legislature added the Gadsden acquisition to Doña Ana County. It thereby became the fifth county reaching from Texas to California.

However, what the legislature giveth, it can also take away. In 1860 a legislative act from Santa Fe lopped off the western half of Doña Ana, creating the new county of Arizona.

That entity, nevertheless, enjoyed only a short life. For President Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, signed a bill (1863) cutting New Mexico roughly in half. The western portion became the separate territory of Arizona.

As a result, the New Mexico counties that had included significant ground in the west now found themselves with much diminished boundaries.

For Taos County, that proved to be its second major territorial loss. The first had occurred in 1861.
With organization of the Colorado Territory in that year, Congress had amputated a huge piece of Taos County, centered on Trinidad, to fill out the Colorado boundaries we know today.

Even apart from these major episodes, county boundaries remained in a constant state of flux. As New Mexico’s population expanded into previously unsettled areas, the territorial legislature seemed to take genuine glee in scissoring up the map to reshape old counties and from them cut out new ones.In the second half of the 19th century, for example, San Miguel County suffered 11 “boundary redefinitions,” Bernalillo County 15, and the record-holders, Doña Ana and Socorro, both experienced 17.

It appears that record keepers of the day had a hard time tracking all the changes. but it was necessary to do so, since county boundaries played an essential part in determining the districts for membership in the territorial House of Representatives.

In January 1876, the legislature abolished one of the original counties, Santa Ana, and parceled out its area to neighboring Bernalillo and Sandoval counties. Geographer Jerry L.Williams claims this was the only case in New Mexico history in which a functioning county was dissolved.

With opening of the 20th century, New Mexico had 20 counties. By the statehood year of 1912, that number had climbed to 26, and then to 31 by 1921.

In the latter year, the period of radical or chaotic adjustment of county boundaries seemed to have come to an end. Only two important exceptions can be noted in the recent era of stability.

The first occurred in March of 1949. The U.S. government, which had federalized a mountainous section of Santa Fe and Sandoval counties for atomic energy research, returned the land to state jurisdiction. From it, Los Alamos County was formed.

Second, Cibola County was split from Valencia County in 1982. The main reason was that residents of the Grants area had been 70 miles from their former county seat at Los Lunas.

It remains to be seen whether New Mexico has any more new counties in its future.

Now in semi-retirement, author Marc Simmons wrote a weekly history column for more than 35 years. The New Mexican is publishing reprints from among the more than 1,800 columns he produced during his career.

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