San Antonio

Conrad Hilton was born here on Christmas Day, 1887, the son of Gus Hilton, a Norwegian immigrant whose general store stood beside the railroad tracks. As the children came Gus kept adding rooms, and the house tied to the store became a ten-room hotel for train travelers. Conrad took over the store at twenty-one, sat in New Mexico's first state legislature in 1912, and came home in 1919 after his father was killed in a car accident. That same year he bought his first hotel, the Mobley in Cisco, Texas, and the chain grew from there.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker San Antonio On the Camino Real Established in the mid 1600s, the mission of San Antonio de Senecú was the last outpost on the Camino Real before the Mesilla Valley to the south. Around 1820 Hispano settlers from the north re-occupied the area after the Pueblo Revolt. Conrad Hilton got his start here, carrying luggage from the train station to his father's hotel located in his family's adobe house.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 7.8 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.
• Trinity Site — 28 mi
  Where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, open one day a year, and remembered by its neighbors as the start of decades of illness the government took eighty years to acknowledge.

More markers nearby

• San Pedro — 1.6 mi
• Carthage-Tokay-Farley — 8.8 mi
• Socorro — 9.0 mi
• Jumbo — 9.7 mi