Roswell Pioneer Plaza

The courthouse was built for a state that did not yet exist. Chaves County spent about $164,000 in 1910 and 1911 on a building meant to meet statehood, due the next year, and hired Isaac Hamilton Rapp of Trinidad, Colorado, whose firm had designed the Beaux-Arts territorial capitol and who would later be called the creator of the Santa Fe style. The architectural historians' society calls it New Mexico's only surviving Beaux-Arts civic building; its own National Register nomination calls the styling much attenuated. It was carefully restored in 2005.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Roswell Pioneer Plaza This plaza incorporates two of downtown Roswell's most historic buildings. East of this location is the Chaves County Courthouse, built in 1911. It is one of the best surviving examples of courthouses built in the Beaux Arts Revival "monu- mental civic style" architecture. The nearby Conoco service station was built in the 1920s. It is one of the few re- maining architecturally intact gasoline stations from this early period of New Mexico's transportation history.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• International UFO Museum and Research Center — 0.2 mi
  A 1930s movie theater on Roswell's Main Street turned into a museum by two men who had been part of the 1947 story, one of them the officer who announced the flying disc.
• Bottomless Lakes State Park — 12 mi
  Nine sinkhole lakes under red bluffs east of Roswell, named by vaqueros whose ropes never touched bottom, and set aside in 1933 as New Mexico's first state park.

More markers nearby

• Roswell — 2.5 mi
• Roswell — 3.0 mi
• Walker Air Force Base — 4.7 mi
• Roswell — 5.7 mi