Shakespeare Ghost Town Preserves Hidalgo County's Silver Mining Frontier Legacy

A Town Born at a Spring, Not a Crossroads

The site that became Shakespeare didn't start as a town at all. It began as Mexican Spring, a reliable water source near New Mexico's Pyramid Mountains that drew Apaches, Mexicans, and American travelers long before any silver was pulled from the ground. By 1856, the spring had become a stage stop on an alternate route of the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line, used when Apache raids made the main passage through Doubtful Canyon too dangerous. John Butterfield's Overland Mail took over in 1858 and built a permanent adobe stage station on the site. That building, later called the Grant House, still stands today. It is one of the oldest intact structures in Hidalgo County, and it is the same room where two men were hanged from the roof timbers on November 9, 1881.

Four Names, Two Booms, One Surviving Town

Shakespeare went through as many identities as it did economic cycles. After Butterfield halted service at the start of the Civil War in 1861, the site passed through Confederate and Union hands before re-emerging as a silver-mining settlement. In the 1870s, backed by William Ralston, co-founder of the Bank of California, the town boomed under the name Ralston City and attracted as many as 3,000 miners, promoters, and dealers. That run ended badly: a diamond-salting fraud, in which a mine was seeded with stones to inflate stock prices, was exposed in 1872 and most of the population scattered overnight.

The second boom came in 1879, when Colonel William G. Boyle acquired the best claims and renamed the settlement Shakespeare, deliberately distancing it from the swindlers' era. The new name brought new capital, but the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed Shakespeare in 1880, routing its tracks through what would become Lordsburg instead. The town lingered. A Southern Pacific spur briefly ran straight up Shakespeare's main street in 1914, but by 1929 the mines had closed for good. The town was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, decades after the last resident had gone.

The Hill Family: Nine Decades of Uncommercial Preservation

What distinguishes Shakespeare from most ghost towns in the Southwest is the family that bought it. In 1935, ranchers Frank and Rita Hill purchased Shakespeare and the surrounding land, and they made a deliberate decision: no souvenir hype, no gift shops, no commercialization. That philosophy has held across three generations. The town is now stewarded by Gina Hill and her husband Dave, who continue to maintain the original structures and offer guided access on their own terms. There are six original buildings still standing, along with two reconstructions, and the guided tour covers the interiors of seven of them. The result is one of the most authentically preserved ghost towns in the American West, not because it was restored with outside money, but because one family refused to let it disappear.

Getting There from Lordsburg

Shakespeare sits 2.5 miles south-southwest of Lordsburg on New Mexico Highway 494. From downtown Lordsburg, take Main Street south to Highway 494 and follow it toward the site. The drive takes under ten minutes, but the transition from the interstate-exit energy of Lordsburg to the silence of the Bootheel scrubland is immediate. A fenced gate marks the boundary of the Shakespeare property.

Do not simply show up and walk in. The Hill family operates guided tours daily, with departures at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. (Mountain Time). Admission is $15 for adults and $7 for children ages 6 to 12, with a $30 minimum per tour group. The best approach is to call ahead at (575) 542-9034 to confirm availability; you can also call from the gate as you near Lordsburg. Unescorted and unscheduled visits are not permitted, both for liability reasons and because the fenced town sits within thousands of acres of active cattle range.

What the Tour Actually Covers

The guided tour traces 28 points of interest across the preserved town, including building interiors that most visitors don't anticipate. The Grant House, the 1858 Butterfield adobe, anchors the experience. Other structures span the full arc of the town's history, from its stagecoach-stop origins through the silver-mining era. The tour includes the room in the Grant House where Sandy King and Russian Bill Tattenbaum were hanged by vigilantes on November 9, 1881. The next morning, according to period accounts, the stage keeper told arriving passengers that Russian Bill had stolen a horse and Sandy King was a damned nuisance. No courthouse, no judge, no trial. Shakespeare had no church, no newspaper, and no formal law enforcement at any point in its active life.

The roster of figures who passed through reads like a casting call for a Western film: Billy the Kid, John Ringo, Curley Bill, the Clantons, Jim Hughes. Visitors can walk a section of the original Butterfield Trail. From a small hill at the edge of the property, you can see the town layout from above and locate the mine workings to the south, a perspective that makes the scale of the silver-boom ambition visible in the land itself.

The Shakespeare Cemetery: Family History Beneath the Desert

Just southwest of Lordsburg, the Shakespeare Cemetery holds burials that predate the formal creation of Hidalgo County, placing it among the oldest documented burial grounds in the region. Many graves are unmarked, and the work of identifying and recording them has fallen largely to volunteer genealogists who have indexed hundreds of memorials and tombstone photographs through repositories including Find a Grave, Interment.net, and RootsWeb. For families with roots in Hidalgo County, the cemetery is often the most direct archival connection to the earliest generations of local settlement.

When visiting the cemetery, follow any posted access rules and coordinate with local custodians. The site deserves the same care as the town itself: it is not a tourist attraction in the conventional sense but a working record of the people whose lives shaped this corner of the Bootheel.

Your Weekend Field Checklist

Before you go:

• Call (575) 542-9034 in advance to book a tour slot; do not rely on walk-in access
• Confirm the 10:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. departure time that works for your schedule
• Budget $15 per adult, $7 per child (ages 6-12), with a $30 group minimum

On the day:

• Wear closed-toe shoes with grip; the small hill overlook involves uneven terrain
• Bring water; there are no concessions on site
• Arrive via NM Highway 494 south from Lordsburg, roughly 2.5 miles
• Bring a camera: the Grant House adobe, the town-wide overlook from the hill, and the mine works to the south are the three strongest photo positions

At the site:

• Stay with your guide; unescorted movement on the property is not permitted
• If visiting the cemetery, check for posted access instructions before entering
• Genealogy researchers can cross-reference tombstone records with the volunteer-indexed databases at Find a Grave and Interment.net before arriving, making the visit significantly more productive

Shakespeare is not a reconstructed theme environment. The adobe walls of the Grant House are the same walls that Butterfield's crew raised in 1858, and the silence around the site on a weekday morning is the same silence that followed every population collapse the town survived. That continuity is what the Hill family has protected for nine decades, and it is the reason a 2.5-mile drive south of the Lordsburg exit still has the capacity to reframe what Hidalgo County's frontier era actually looked like at ground level.