According to Don Edmund and his wife Dona, owners of the Pioneer Store Museum in Chloride, his research indicates the cabin was built in the 1870s and was used by miners as a general store and post office in the Black Range Mountains, in the former mining town of Grafton.
The cabin was constructed of hand hewn logs, and chinked with a mixture of mud, clay, ash and sawdust, in the German style of pegged and notched logs, and had four doors (one for each wall, useful for escaping fire or marauders) and a small window in each door, useful for ventilation and also for gun sites in times of danger. The town of Grafton slowly dwindled in size as the mining in the area playout out and partially due to an attack by Geronimo in 1885 when many residents left, leaving the town nearly abandoned.
In 1884, Sierra County was created when part of Socorro and Dona Ana counties were divided in 1884, and that was when both Grafton and Chloride wound up in the western part of the new county. The town of Grafton continued to decline due to ecomonic reasons, and was essentially a ghost town by 1957 when a flood wiped out all of the buildings escept this log cabin, located on a hill above a creek and out of reach of the floodwaters.
In 1972, Sid Blakley rediscovered the cabin while hunting, and he and his wife donated it to the city of Las Cruces as a gift to area children, and in time for the nation's bicentennial celebration. It was to be used as a musem. It was dismantled, its parts numbered and it was moved to the north end of downtown Los Cruces and reassembled where it stayed for 30 years, (called the Bicentennial Log Cabin Museum or the Los Cruces Log Cabin Museum) until some city road improvements placed the cabin in peril of demolition again. A fundraising drive by Don and Dona Edmund of Chloride proved to be the saving factor for the cabin. It was again relocated, in August of 2006, this time back to the near-ghost town of Chloride where it is being refurbished to be part of the museum and intrepretive center complex the Edmunds are helping to develop.
The locations of the Grafton Cabin:
1870s-1972
Grafton: N 33° 25.683 W 107° 44.498
1972-2006
Los Cruces: N 32° 18.762 W 106° 46.837
(671 North Main Street, Las Cruces)
2006-present
Chloride N 33° 20.341 W 107° 40.850
Source of coordinates for historic location of Grafton: (
visit link) (on Turkey Creek in Alaska Draw, Sierra County, NM
Website for Bicentennial Cabin: (
visit link)
(
visit link)