by Molly Boyle on
“YOU GO TO A MUSEUM to learn the heart of a town,” says Britney Swart, executive director of the Herzstein Memorial Museum in Clayton. I’m only a few steps inside, though, when she intuits a darker purpose, steering me to a photo of outlaw Black Jack Ketchum’s infamously botched 1901 hanging, which happened nearby. Swart calls the Wild West–era death—one of very few beheadings in American execution history—“the terrible, gruesome story that keeps people coming to Clayton.”
Swart, the nonprofit’s only full-time employee, began going to Herzstein events as a kid shortly after the free museum’s 1987 opening. She has some good evidence that the ghost of Ketchum, who she familiarly calls by his given first name, Thomas, frequents the place. But many more stories reside inside the two-story 1919 Methodist Episcopal Church building. There are exhibits on dinosaur discoveries; the Santa Fe Trail; Union County cowboys, dentists, nurses, soldiers, and Jewish frontier traders; and the Dust Bowl era, when Clayton was hit by a “black roller” cloud a mile across in May 1937. There’s a putter and golf pencil gifted by John Wayne, an original Salvador Dalí, and the largest permanent display of WPA artifacts in the state. I could pore over the stuff here for hours.
But I can’t. Swart is midway through Clayton Dino Days, the museum’s biggest community event, celebrating the 100-million-year-old footprints at Clayton Lake State Park and Dinosaur Trackways. She has a raptor program (the bird kind) to put on today at the Herzstein, and I’ve got another town full of stories waiting down the highway. Before I head out, Swart gives me a local road-trip pro tip. “Look out for Dawsons!” she says, meaning the square mass-produced homes that originated in the coal mining ghost town of Dawson, near Cimarrón.
I’M DRIVING THROUGH THE HIGH plains to visit the quirky local museums of Clayton, Folsom, and Ratón. Their homemade displays and dioramas are far removed from the rotating professional exhibitions in Santa Fe, where the largest state-sponsored museum system in the country is headquartered, including institutions like the New Mexico History Museum at the Palace of the Governors and the Museum of International Folk Art. But while state-run museums are just beginning to embrace the practice of community self-curation, the value of an independent small-town museum lies in the clear fingerprints its people leave on the permanent exhibits, the charming and sometimes offbeat ways they’ve chosen to tell their stories, and the fun local events they continue to mount.
I spot a sweet-looking Dawson house just before pulling into the free Folsom Museum. The former mercantile is the actual heart of the tiny town, since it’s the only thing open daily from June through September. A historical marker outside tells the heroic story of telephone operator Sally Rooke, who saved many lives after midnight on August 27, 1908, by calling people to warn about a flood that struck the Dry Cimarron River’s headwaters and ultimately drowned 18, including Rooke.
Inside the museum is a telephone switchboard from the era. The 20th century’s greatest archaeological discovery is also headquartered here. A collection of local artifacts and personal items surround the still-unsung tale of Black cowboy George McJunkin, who uncovered a cache of giant prehistoric bison bones just after the 1908 flood ripped through a nearby arroyo. “Everybody’s always interested in the Folsom Man story,” says Folsom Museum treasurer Daylan Thompson, who helps with annual museum-led expeditions to the archaeological site. (Get tickets for the August 15 tours at folsommuseum.org.) “This museum is just a fascinating place.”
SO IS THE RATÓN MUSEUM, where I head after driving west across the tall grasses of Johnson Mesa. There, director and curator Roger Sanchez is gearing up for the influx of out-of-towners attending the 2026 Dawson reunion picnic, held biennially on Labor Day weekend. Housed in a two-story 1910 building, the museum contains the largest collection of Dawson and other area coal-mine artifacts in existence, alongside regional gems including Ratón-manufactured midcentury electronics and an array of santos that date back to 1760.
Over his 33 years at the museum, Sanchez has served as a resource for the Dawson diaspora, locating mining camp photos, identifying family burial plots, and cataloguing donations of historical items. “I spend more time here than I do at home,” he says. “I love this place.”
While Sanchez shows off a large cache of recently acquired vintage Ratón photos, I’m reminded that the keepers of these museums are as valuable as the objects they put on display. Before I leave, he provides two more bits of information: where to find the Dawson houses in Ratón, and another ghost story you might ask him to tell you in person.
Read more: Here’s a sampler of current historical exhibitions across the state.