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.