Pancho Villa State Park

Three miles from the Mexican border, the village of Columbus keeps the ground of Camp Furlong, the army post that Francisco Villa's raiders attacked along with the town in the dark before dawn on March 9, 1916. Fighting from the camp drove them back over the line, but much of Columbus burned.

The state park on the site took the raider's name. It was established in 1959, and the name is credited to Jack Breen, a deputy sheriff at the time of the raid who never believed Villa himself had been in Columbus that night; he proposed it as a gesture of goodwill toward Mexico. Each March, Camp Furlong Day remembers the eighteen Americans killed in the raid and marks the friendship between the two countries.

Within days of the raid nearly five thousand troops gathered at Camp Furlong, and from here General John Pershing's Punitive Expedition went into Mexico, the army's first campaign with motor vehicles and aircraft. Hundreds of trucks and cars came in through the 1902 railroad depot, and the 1st Aero Squadron flew Curtiss JN-3 Jenny biplanes from a dirt strip southeast of town, the first tactical military airfield in the country. Most of the planes were wrecked in the Mexican mountains. Buffalo Soldiers and Apache scouts rode with the expedition, and Villa was never caught.

The park's exhibition hall has a replica Jenny and a Jeffery Quad truck, and the ruins of adobe officers' quarters and the 1916 recreation hall stand on the grounds. Across the street, the Columbus Historical Society runs a museum in the old depot.