Lincoln Historic Site

Nuevomexicano settlers from the upper Rio Grande came into the Bonito valley in the 1850s and named their village La Placita del Río Bonito, the little place by the pretty river. In 1869 the county and the town were renamed for the murdered president. The round stone torreón they raised in the 1860s as a refuge during raids still stands in the middle of town.

The war that made Lincoln notorious was about money. Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan's store, known as the House, controlled the county's trade and the contracts to supply beef and goods to Fort Stanton and to the Mescalero Apache agency. In 1876 the young Englishman John Tunstall opened a rival store and bank with the lawyer Alexander McSween and set out to compete for that business. On February 18, 1878, a posse loyal to the House killed Tunstall, and the killings that followed ran through a five-day battle in the town that July.

The state owns seventeen of the town's buildings as Lincoln Historic Site, nearly all of them strung along the one street. The old courthouse, built as the House's store and later a Masonic lodge, county courthouse and jail, tells the story of the war and of Billy the Kid's escape from it. The Tunstall Store still holds nineteenth-century merchandise on its original shelves and in its original cases. The Montaño Store has exhibits on adobe building and the Hispano community of the war years, and the Anderson-Freeman Visitor Center begins with the valley's Native peoples.

Lincoln is now a village of a few dozen people. Each August, Old Lincoln Days brings a pageant and living-history weekend.