Originally Hillsboro was called
Hillsborough. It got its name from a lucky entry drawn from a
hat during a town-naming contest. The name was eventually shortened
to what it is today. The town of Hillsboro was founded in 1877
when gold was found in the nearby mountains. It is estimated
that between six and nine million dollars in gold, silver and
other precious ores were produced from the various mines during
Hillsboro's heyday. Hillsboro became the county seat in 1884
and by 1907, 1,200 people lived there, though there are only a
little over 200 people that make their homes in Hillsboro today.
Most are artists, retirees or writers.
In 1886, the soon-to-be famous
Madam, Sadie Orchard, came to Hillsboro. It is said that she
traveled to America from London's Lime house District, and that
she learned her 'wicked ways' on London's docks. During her time
in Hillsboro she operated the Ocean Grove Hotel and restaurant,
Orchard's Stagecoach Line, for which she also drove, and her "House
on the Hill" on Virtue Avenue. When she was young, she was
said to be very beautiful with a tiny waist, cornflower blue eyes
and jet-black hair. Though she tried hard to fit in and tried
her best to imitate the upper class, she fell far short whenever
she spoke. She had a pronounced cockney accent and was know to
have a very extensive vocabulary of obscenities and profanities.
She lived in Hillsboro until her death in 1943. She was somewhere
around eighty years old. She is buried in Truth or Consequences.
In 1892 a red brick courthouse
and a stone jail were built. It is the same courthouse where
in 1899; three men were tried for the 1896 murder of Judge Albert
Fountain and his son, Henry. The judge had gone to Lincoln, New
Mexico to secure indictments against two cattlemen, Oliver Lee
and William McNue. After securing the indictments, the judge
was anxious to get home to Las Cruces. Returning home via St.
Augustine Pass in the Organ Mountains, he and his son stopped
for the night in La Luz. Despite reported warnings to delay the
trip, the two drove on towards Las Cruces the next morning. When
they had not arrived by the next evening, a search party was sent
out. His abandoned buckboard was found but no trace of the bodies
of either him or his son has ever been found.
The two men against whom he had
secured the indictments were tried along with a third man, James
Gilliland, for the murders. The trial lasted three weeks and
people came from all over to attend. Due to lack of sufficient
evidence, all the men were found not guilty and released. To
this day, the murders remain one of New Mexico's most celebrated
unsolved crimes.
After the mines panned out and
the town began to empty, Truth or Consequences, then known as
Hot Springs, became the county seat in 1938. Over time the courthouse
was dismantled and the bricks sold. The story has it that the
owner of the courthouse felt he could make a substantial amount
of money selling the bricks from the courthouse. After discovering
that easy money was not to be had, he abandoned the project and
the courthouse remains today, abandoned and in ruins, along with
the jail.
The Hillsboro jail itself is an
excellent example of a dual-function jail. A dual-function jail
is one that had both cells for prisoners and an office for the
sheriff or jailer. The building is rectangular in shape and constructed
of fieldstone. The jailer's office is located in the center of
the building and there is a jail cell on either side. The cells
are connected to the office via two steel doors, one of which
can be seen in the photograph below. The doors directly inside
each cell contain only round steel bars, and the door connecting
each cell to the interior office is of solid flat steel construction.
That way the jailer had the option of being able to view what
was happening in each cell or close them off if he chose. The
cells had large windows at one time, some of which that have long
since been boarded over. Still accessible in each cell is a front
window facing the courthouse. From that view, a miscreant would
have been able to look down on the courthouse and imagine what
might happen when he had his day in court.
The building as it stands today
is slowing melting back into the earth. The roof is gone, the
back wall is crumbing and there are trees growing in each room.
The mortar between the stones is slowly trickling back into the
ground. Soon all that might remain are the steel doors. Not
much to show interested visitors what the jail was once like.
How to get there: Hillsboro is 32 miles southwest of Truth
of consequences on NM 152. It is 17 miles west of I-25 on NM
90.
If you have information about jails in this New Mexico County or in any other area of the United States, please contact us via e-mail at HistoricJails@cs.com or you may call us at 505.541.1557. Thank you.