Silver City Museum and Historic District

The museum occupies the H.B. Ailman House, built in 1881 by a miner who struck it rich in silver, a showpiece of the boom years with its brick walls, decorative cupola, and steep mansard roof. Climbing to the cupola gives one of the best views over the historic district and the mountains beyond, and the house itself is part of the exhibit, a survivor of the town's most prosperous decade.

Inside, the collections trace the region's mining history, its Victorian domestic life, and the many cultures that shaped this corner of New Mexico, from the Mimbres people who made the region's famous painted pottery to the miners, ranchers, and merchants who followed. The museum is free to enter and serves as a fine first stop for understanding how a raw silver camp became the town you see today.

In the 1890s a series of ferocious floods roared down the town's main street, which had been built along a natural drainage. The water scoured the street away entirely, cutting a gully dozens of feet deep where the busiest thoroughfare had been. Rather than fight it, the town rebuilt facing the next streets over and left the old route to the water.

That scar is now the Big Ditch, a sunken linear park running through the heart of downtown, planted and shaded and threaded with a walking path along the creek at the bottom. It is a quietly remarkable thing, a green refuge where a bustling street once stood, and a reminder of how completely water can rewrite a place.

Silver City counts a famous outlaw among its former residents. Henry McCarty, who would become known as Billy the Kid, spent part of his boyhood here in the 1870s, and his mother is buried in the town. Long before that, this country was home to the Mimbres branch of the Mogollon culture, whose strikingly painted black-on-white pottery is among the finest ancient art of the Southwest, and to the Apache peoples, including the bands led by Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo, whose homelands surrounded these mountains.

Mining built the town and shaped the region around it, first silver, then copper on a vast scale at nearby pits and towns. That industry brought waves of workers and cultures, Hispano, Anglo, Chinese, and others, whose mark remains in the town's architecture, food, and families. Silver City today wears all of that history lightly, a former hard-rock town now known as much for its galleries as its mines.

Silver City's greatest asset is its location at the doorstep of the Gila National Forest and the Gila Wilderness, the first tract of land in the world set aside as designated wilderness, in 1924. From town, a winding scenic road climbs north into high pine country toward the Gila cliff dwellings, natural hot springs, and hundreds of miles of trail.

That combination, a walkable arts town below and true wilderness above, gives Silver City an unusual balance. A visitor can spend a morning in the museum and the galleries, then drive into the mountains for an afternoon among cliff dwellings or a soak in a wild hot spring, all from the same small base.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.