By Denise Tessier
If you’ve traveled U.S. 60 to Willard, you’ve passed the railroad town of Lucy, N.M., and likely never saw it; a tall railroad berm parallel to the highway had long kept Lucy hidden. Twelve years ago, when members of the East Mountain Historical Society toured the town, even those on that field trip saw nothing of the 1905 homestead settlement until
members headed their vehicles south at the Lucy turnoff, topped the peak of the train ballast pile and bumped across the tracks.
Then the remnants of Lucy came into view: the walls of a ruined school house (above) looming beyond a solitary old farmhouse (below), the latter’s fences intact, curtains hanging in the window and the number 13 by the front door.
Still out of sight, however, was the treasure across the street. Members spent a lot of time in the Lucy Cemetery, which was marked then only by scattered, tilting fence posts. It would have been easy to miss if they hadn’t been on foot. Fences were down, the tombstones toppled by wandering cattle.
Four years later, in 2014, the two sides of Lucy’s street couldn’t have been more different.
On the east side, the school walls were gone. The little house had burned down.
But on the west side, the cemetery had risen like a Phoenix, taking its place as Lucy’s landmark, its spirit and legacy. Sturdy red corral bars and net wire protected its plots from cattle; headstones had been raised up and righted. In a large black arch over the corral-quality gate, lettered metal carried the “Lucy Cemetery” name.
Bernadine Harper Creager, whose mother Willie Belle Boyd Harper is buried in Lucy (b. 1894, d. 1933), had been dismayed at the cemetery’s condition when she came up one day from her southern New Mexico home in Anthony. And she decided to do something about it.
She talked to fellow Lucy native Armon Austin, who suggested calling rancher Leroy Humphries. “My mother died when I was 2 and my father would take me to play ball at the cemetery rather than a park. So, I grew up liking cemeteries,” Humphries noted at the time. Humphries drew plans for a fence to encircle the cemetery, got materials at a discount and had his ranch manager, Allen Brown, weld pipe and do construction. Brown’s two children helped. Austin provided the gate and Creager’s daughter Judy Hilger came up with the cemetery arch.
On June 23, 2013, the Harper family and others gathered to rededicate the newly cleaned and protected cemetery “in the memory of all” buried there. Austin died in February of 2014 at the age of 95, but Creager noted, “He lived long enough to see his dream come true, the cemetery refurbished. That was part of our goal. He cried when he saw it.” Austin’s daughter, Bonnie Sue Thomas, brought him out to the rededication in a wheel chair. She later accepted on Austin’s behalf an East Mountain Historical Society Award of Recognition, created by EMHS to recognize those who preserve history. “I would like to honor my Dad,” she said at the time.
“Daddy was born and raised at Lucy,” she added. “He has nobody buried in that cemetery. It’s just part of his heritage and where he went to school as a child.” Boyd Harper, Bernadine Creager’s brother, was a classmate.
In an oral history conducted in 2007 for the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, Armon T. Austin described the town of Lucy as having a school, depot, blacksmith, justice of the peace, two stores, a post office and gas station, plus a ladies’ auxiliary. According to Legends of America, Lucy also was the original location of the Cline’s Corners Trading Post, before Roy Cline moved it to the more frequently traveled Route 66.
Austin was born in Lucy on a snowy night in February 1919 and, according to his oral history, “The doctor had come from Willard by train, and Armon’s dad had sledded him to the house where Armon was born.” Creager said she was born in that same house, though she and Armon lived on different homesteads and were born 10 years apart. She said the doctor came from Willard on horseback to deliver her.
Armon’s family supported themselves by farming and selling corn and beans. They raised chickens and traded eggs and cream for groceries. Austin told his oral historian railroad workers would “throw coal off the train as it went by so that poor families could use it in the winter.” The family kept a barrel of water in the kitchen for drinking, and in winter, it often froze.
Creager did some research while working on the cemetery and learned that Hanlon Funeral Home was housed in a general store in Willard in 1908 and did not officially open in Mountainair until 1948. She said her mother’s casket from Willard was made of wood with a covering of black crepe, cost $65 “and was paid for by my dad, William E. Harper”. Harper was a ranch hand in Lucy until the family moved to Albuquerque, where he started the Five Points Rodeo.
Today, the once-ghostly walls of the Lucy school are gone. But the cemetery remains, honoring the spirits of those who resided in or simply cared about this once-thriving community.