Lincoln Historic Site

State Historic Site Covering Most Of A Single Street Town Preserved As It Stood During The 1878 Lincoln County War; A National Historic Landmark District With No Modern Commercial Development On The Main Street · Lincoln, New Mexico

Lincoln is a single street of adobe and stone buildings along US 380 in the Sacramento foothills, and it is preserved almost exactly as it stood in 1878, when a dispute between two merchant factions over a government beef contract turned into a five-day gun battle in the middle of it. The Lincoln County War produced Billy the Kid, who was tried, sentenced to hang, and then escaped from the courthouse here in 1881 after killing two deputies - you can stand at the top of the stairs he came down and see the hole a shotgun blast left in the wall. What makes the place unusual is not any one building but the absence of everything else: the state owns most of the street, there are no souvenir shops, no neon and no modern commercial frontage, and the result is one of the least altered nineteenth-century towns in the American West. The state site also covers the Apache, Hispanic and Buffalo Soldier history of the valley, which is better material than the gunfight and which almost nobody arrives expecting.

US Highway 380, Lincoln, Lincoln, New Mexico, 88338, United States

The Anderson-Freeman Visitor Center and the historic buildings are open most days through daylight hours, with several buildings closed on particular days of the week and reduced opening in winter. Some structures are unlocked only when staff are available. The street itself is a public highway and can be walked at any time, so the exteriors are always viewable. Old Lincoln Days in early August is the one weekend the whole town is active.

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