Hey hey USA - 16th October - it's raining in Hillsboro

 

By the time we left Lake Valley the rain was coming down hard. We drove north to Hillsboro, a sister mining town to Lake Valley, which had managed to survive as Hillsboro had mined for gold as well as silver. But in the 1890's the population downturned until it reached 1200 people in 1907. There was a devastating flood in 1914 and then the town was hit really hard by Spanish Flu in 1918. The Great Depression in the 1930's saw the end of mining here. It is now a very small, quite arty community with a general store and a post office. 

In 1884 Hillsboro became the county seat for Sierra County but lost this to the town of Hot Springs, now Truth and Consequences, in 1936. The people of Hillsboro were extremely upset and kept seizing records and documents from Hot Springs and bringing them back to Hillsboro. Eventually the citizens of Hot Springs got fed up and dismantled the Hillsboro courthouse brick by brick and used it to build their own. A shame because the Hillsboro courthouse had been extremely impressive building.

The rain slackened off a little so we visited the small cemetery in Hillsboro. It was a strange mix of impressive monuments and odd homemade memorials showing all are not equal. I particularly liked the gravestone of John (Adobe) Johnson.

We drove west out of Hillsboro, and before we got to Kingston stopped at Percha Creek where the first gold deposits round Hillsboro had been found. There are the remains of the original bridge across the creek and we walked to an overview down the gorge to see the little river flowing at the bottom. This is vey much the land of red rock.