Buckman Bridge, c. 1920. Courtesy/Los Alamos Historical Society Archive
Overlook view of the Buckman site, 2020. Photo by Sharon Snyder
By SHARON SNYDER
Los Alamos Historical Society
One of my recent articles mentioned the little settlement of Buckman, leading a friend to ask, “Just where was Buckman?” So, I decided to answer that question.
Buckman was a small village on the east bank of the Rio Grande about 5 miles south of today’s Otowi crossing. It was also a stop on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW), affectionately known as the Chili Line..
In 1893, the Personals column in the Santa Fe New Mexican revealed that “Henry S. Buckman, owner of extensive lumber mills at Tres Piedras, is in the city on business.”
Buckman was an Oregon lumberman who came to New Mexico to take advantage of the lumber boom in the 1890s. It’s likely that he was in Santa Fe to scout out the possibilities of leasing nearby land grants for cutting timber, a practice that was common in the last decade of the century. By 1899 he had succeeded in acquiring a lease for the Ramon Vigil Land Grant on the east side of the Jemez Mountains and established a small railroad depot for loading his lumber.
The hastily created community consisted of a few wooden buildings, stock pens, a rail siding for the D&RGW, and a post office for which Henry Buckman was the postmaster. He also constructed a rudimentary bridge over the river, strong enough to bring lumber across as well as for use by cars, horses, and livestock. On the west side of the river, Buckman cleared a primitive road to the Pajarito Plateau and erected a small sawmill in the area that is known today as S-Site.
By 1903, Buckman and his crew had cut all of the Ponderosa pine allowed by his license—and reportedly much more. He closed the post office in January and abandoned the community he had created.
In addition to the people living in Buckman, the homesteaders in the area had used the post office as well as depending on the D&RGW to transport their harvested crops to market and bring in needed commodities as well. The Los Alamos Ranch School also used the rail connection and the post office in its early years.
The population of Buckman declined, but the rail siding still existed and the bridge was the only nearby crossing for the river, so the town was still needed. In 1913 the post office was reopened, offering some hope for the people still calling Buckman home, but the optimism wasn’t to last.
The Buckman bridge had demanded repairs often through the years, but in 1921 the bridge collapsed. Even without that disaster, the town would have survived only three more years at best, for in 1924 the bridge at Otowi was improved for road traffic. The Buckman post office was closed for the last time in 1925, and the D&RGW was discontinued in 1941, an event that would have sealed the fate of Buckman had it survived that long.
Peggy Pond Church, author of The House at Otowi Bridge, left one of few first-hand memories of Buckman. She recalled a trip with her sister to the Pajarito Plateau in 1914.
“Our father met us in a car in Santa Fe,” she wrote, “and drove us to Buckman Crossing over the Rio Grande. Because the water covered the bridge, he made us get out and wade across. He thought that would be safer than in the car, which might be swept down stream by the current.”
No trace of the original buildings or the bridge remain today, but Buckman is once again a place of activity. In 2001 the site was chosen for the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, a water supply development serving Santa Fe County. It became operational in 2011.
I doubt that Henry Buckman could have imagined that a bridge, a road, and a mesa would still bear his name more than a century later, or that the little town he created would be the site of a high tech project for sustainable drinking water!
When you next visit the Overlook in White Rock, look across the river to the east and you will see the site that was once a rustic town on the Chili Line.