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Lea County Guide
Last updated on Thursday, February 20, 2003
Buckeye is located on NM Highway 238 seventeen miles southwest of Lovington. The settlement is named for the Buckeye Sheep Ranch nearby, and does not have a post office. Traveling this part of eastern New Mexico reinforces your awareness of the size of the state, fifth largest. There are so many miles of nothing but miles and miles. As often happened when areas were settled, the date of founding is the same date a post office was established. Eunice is a case in point.
J. N. Carson from Shafter Lake, Texas circulated a petition in 1908 seeking a post office for the present-day location of Eunice. He had claimed 320 acres for homesteading by plowing a furrow around the boundaries. He then applied for a post office.
Hobbs came into existence on January 28, 1910, with the opening of a post office named for the pioneering Hobbs family. For nearly two decades, the town remained isolated and inconvenient, a difficult place for settlers to wrest a living from the land.
All that changed, however, when the Midwest Refining Company (now Amoco) began drilling for oil near Hobbs on October 12, 1927. Soon the plains area was the stage for one of the great oil booms of the West. November 8, 1928, marked the No. 1 well's depth of 4,220 feet producing 700 barrels of oil per day.
When a town is small with no visible attractions on the main highway, reasons to cause people to stop for a while, it becomes a place on the way to . . . . Tatum is 21 miles to Lovington to the south on New Mexico Road 206 or 73 miles west to Roswell or 15 miles east to Texas on U. S. Highway 380.Tatum, population 768, elevation 3,986, was founded in 1909 by James G. Tatum when he filed on a homestead of 320 acres and opened a general store. There was no post office, so as a service to his customers he brought mail three times a week from Scott, another settlement, no longer in existence. Eventually Tatum was granted a post office, and Mattie G. Tatum was the first postmistress.
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