Elizabethtown

The town was named for a four-year-old. Captain Moore, one of the men who platted it in 1867, called it after his daughter Elizabeth Catherine Moore, who grew up to be its first schoolteacher and spent her life in the valley. E-town became New Mexico's first incorporated town and in 1870 the first seat of the new Colfax County, which soon moved to Cimarron. The panel's ghost town of 1875 came back with later mining, and most of what remained burned in 1903. A few buildings stand on private land.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Elizabethtown The discovery of gold on Baldy Mountain in 1866 brought such a rush of fortune-seekers to the Moreno Valley that "E-town" be- came a roaring mining camp al- most overnight. Because of water and transportation problems, and a decline in ore quality, it had become virtually a ghost town by 1875.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Taos Pueblo — 17 mi
  Two terraced adobe houses facing each other across Red Willow Creek, lived in for something like a thousand years, with no electricity or running water inside the old walls.
• St. James Hotel — 20 mi
  Henri Lambert's 1872 inn and saloon on the Santa Fe Trail at Cimarron, a stage for the Colfax County War, where the old saloon ceiling still shows 22 bullet holes.
• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 23 mi
  The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.

More markers nearby

• Eagle Nest Lake State Park — 1.8 mi
• Wheeler Peak — 3.3 mi
• Vietnam Veterans National Memorial — 8.0 mi
• Palo Flechado Pass — 10 mi