Survey of Columbus, N. M. for the National Park Service
This was the railroad station at the time of the raid. Now it is the Columbus Historical Museum.
During the academic year of 1996-1997, the Public History Program conducted a survey of the historic buildings in Columbus, N.M. for the National Park Service. Columbus was the last place in the continental United States that was invaded by a foreign army. In 1916, Pancho Villa and five hundred of his soldiers launched a pre-dawn raid into this border town. In the ensuing fight, fifteen U.S. citizens and two hundred Villistas lost their lives. In response to the raid, the U.S. Army, under the command of General "Black Jack" Pershing, mounted a punitive expedition into Mexico to capture Villa. Despite the failure in capturing Villa, the Army experimented with the use of trucks and planes in combat conditions for the first time and used this knowledge on the fields of France during World War I.
In 1974, concerned citizens in Columbus applied for and received National Historic District designation; however, a comprehensive survey of the district was not done at the time. To correct this oversight, the National Park Service asked the Public History Program to conduct an inventory of the historic district. After initial visits to the village in the Fall of 1996, a Historic Preservation class from New Mexico State University surveyed the district in the Spring of 1997. On consecutive Saturdays in February, the students inventoried the significant structures in the district and then went outside the district to surveyed the significant structures elsewhere in the village.
At the end of the semester, the History Department and Public History Program supported five graduate students in traveling to the National Council on Public History Conference in Albany, N.Y., where they presented a poster session on the project.
NMSU Graduate students point to a bullet hole from the Villa raid in an old adobe wall.