Ada McPherson Morley (1852-1917)

Ada McPherson came west from Iowa, a state senator's daughter, and married the railroad engineer William Raymond Morley, who died in Mexico in 1883. With her second husband, Floyd Jarrett, she put her inheritance into a cattle ranch in the Datil Mountains, and when he disappeared she ran it herself. She led New Mexico's Woman's Christian Temperance Union and wrote hundreds of letters for the vote. Thomas Catron, the senator whose name this county took in 1921, fought suffrage; he lost his party's primary in 1916, and she died the next year.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Very Large Array — 21 mi
  Twenty-seven radio dishes, each 82 feet across and 230 tons, spread in a Y across an Ice Age lakebed on the Plains of San Agustin and moved on rails to change how sharply they see.

More markers nearby

• Plains of San Augustin — 20 mi