A Once Lively Place

There isn't much left of Cloverdale. The old adobe store is boarded up and shuttered. On one side of the cream-colored building there is a darker that looks like a door might have been located in that spot at onetime. farther west along the dirt road is an abandoned flagstone house that is still in decent condition and still farther west is an old wooden outdoor dance pavilion. There is little else to Cloverdale these days. A few broken chunks of concrete, rusty nails and tin cans and scattered detritus from years gone by. There are no substantial ruins to tell their story of this dead, isolated town, just two intact buildings and a dance pavilion. On my two trips to Cloverdale over the years, I was unable to even locate where the school once stood.
  That outdoor dance pavilion was a story in an of itself. In 1918, The annual Cowboy Picnic was launched to honor soldiers returning from World War I. In that first year, approximately 150 people showed up in this isolated locale for a day of barbecue, horse racing, music and other events and the day ended with a big dance that night where people danced under the stars. This event became more and more popular over the years as people would drive in from Animas, Lordsburg, Deming, Silver City and even Douglas, Arizona to attend the festivities that got bigger and better every year. In the years when automobiles were in widespread use, this became a big problem for this little town not accustomed to crowds. Sometime after World War II,
I am not sure of the exact year, the dance was discontinued because it had become too popular and also because the town itself was nearly a ghost town, still clinging to a tenuous existence.   
 

A Rather Mysterious Town

Not much is known about Cloverdale's establishment as a town. Not much is known about the town during its lifespan either. This is probably due to the extreme isolation of the town.
  It seems to have gotten its start around 1895, fifteen years after Michael Gray and his two sons started their ranch in the area. That is the year a small store was established to serve a small number of ranchhands, homesteaders and miners over a wide area. Cloverdale did not have a post office until 1913, and it was discontinued in 1943. For a while, the tiny town even had its own school that served students up to eighth grade. The school was most likely started in 1913, the year the post office opened, but that is not a certainty. At any rate, the school burned in 1926 and was never rebuilt.
  As near as anyone can determine, either Bob Anderson or John Weames filed on a section of land (640 acres) in the area where the store was eventually built. If this is the case, the establishment of the ranch by Michael Gray was not the beginning of the town as many people had previously thought.
  The town served as a supply center for a very wide  area that also includes southeastern Arizona. The town was evidently very spread out for several miles east and west along the principal dirt road that leads from this area to Animas and, eventually, Interstate 10. The store was located at the junction of this road and another dirt road that leads over the mountains into Arizona. Today these mountains, the Guadalupe mountains, are part of Coronado National Forest. These are not the same Guadalupe Mountains that exist farther east near Carlsbad, it is another mountain range with the same name.
  During its existence, Cloverdale claimed a population as high as 250, however no Census records have ever been found for the town, as far as I can tell. Was it too isolated for Census takers to reach?  After visiting this ghost town on two occasions, I wish I could have seen it when it was still an active town. It was evidently very far removed from the rest of society. It did, however, have one big event that is was known for. An event that was a held weekly during the summer months and, less frequently, other times of the year as well.