Riley

Farmers founded Santa Rita about 1880, and when the post office opened in 1890 the name on the records was Riley, after a local sheep rancher. By 1897 about 150 people lived there, with two stores, a Catholic church and a stone school, and four coal and manganese mines nearby. The mines ran down, the water table dropped and the range was overgrazed, and the post office closed in 1931. The church and school still stand twenty miles north of this panel. In 2021 an archaeologist gave a 1,200-year-old Ancestral Puebloan site beside the town to the Archaeological Conservancy.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Riley Twenty miles north of Magdalena, Riley was a small agricultural village originally named Santa Rita by its Hispanic founders in the mid- nineteenth century. By the late 1880s, mining drove the town's economy and in 1890 it was granted a post office under the name "Riley." The mines gave out, and the town was slowly abandoned. Former residents still gather every May to observe Santa Rita days.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Very Large Array — 22 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.
• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 30 mi
  A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.

More markers nearby

• Kelly — 0.2 mi
• Magdalena — 0.6 mi
• Magdalena Fault — 9.5 mi
• Sabino y Lemitar — 19 mi