San Pedro

An army lieutenant first recorded the village in 1846, as Don Pedro. Its farmers grew Mission grapes for wine and a local champagne, and when the railroad came, miners from the Carthage coal field across the mesa filled it out. The 1940s decline the panel mentions had a cause: demand for heating coal fell and the Santa Fe switched its locomotives to diesel. Fewer than fifty people live here now. Guadalajara, the next village south on the Camino Real, was battered by the flood of 1929 and drowned in 1937; one ranch house remains.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker San Pedro Established in the 1840s on the east bank of the Río Grande, San Pedro became an important trading center along the Camino Real. The sister village of San Antonio, it was once known for its extensive vineyards and other agricultural produce. The village waxed and waned over the years, declining significantly in the 1940s, and is now almost abandoned.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 8.2 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 — 27 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 Antonio — 1.6 mi
• Carthage-Tokay-Farley — 7.2 mi
• Socorro — 9.4 mi
• Jumbo — 10.0 mi