New Mexico's United States Timeline
1912 - Present
1909 - George McJunkin a cowboy who was a former slave found a spear point in an extinct bison slaughter site near Folsom. (Folsom point)
1912, Jan. 6 - New Mexico was admitted to the Union as the 47th state under President William Howard Taft after being a U.S. Territory for 62 years.
1912 - The "Great Seal of the State of New Mexico" was officially adopted. In 1887 the seal was originally adopted by the Territorial government as the "Official Seal and Coat of Arms." The new one substituted the date of 1912 for the old Roman numerals. (The seal hanging in the New Mexico History Museum still has the phrase "crescit eundo" or "it grows as it goes." It was made by Shapleigh Hardware Company of Saint Louis, Missouri.)
1912 - The City Planning Board in cooperation with the City Beautiful Movement codified the "City Different" plan defining the local Santa Fe style of architecture officially defined as "Spanish Pueblo Revival". The Santa Fe style was thus defined as: adobe construction, thick stucco walls, flat roof, exposed vigas (or roof beams), canales (or water spouts), portals, enclosed patios, and floors made of brick, flagstone or wood (earlier ones were packed sand with ox blood). Sylvanus Morley and Jesse Nusbaum (both archaeologists) conducted an extensive photographic survey of Santa Fe to determine the local vernacular architecture.
1915, July - 1927 - Taos Society of Artists originally made up of Joseph Henry Sharp, E. Irving Couse, Oscar E. Berninghaus, W. Herbert Dunton, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips.
1915 - 1929 - Alfred Vincent Kidder conducted research and excavations at Pecos Pueblo introducing the concept of stratigraphy to Southwestern archaeology. He also helped develop a classification system to distinguish the different chronological divisions in the prehistoric history of the region known as the Pecos Classification.
1916, March 9 - Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa crossed the Mexican/US border and raided the town of Columbus, NM killing several soldiers and civilians. A military expedition under Brigadier General John J. Pershing pursued the raiders into Mexico, but failed to capture Villa. Afterward ge was a senior United States Army officer. His most famous post was when he served as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front in World War I, 1917–18.
1917 - Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband, and Elsie Clews Parsons moved to Taos where she began a literary colony. On the advice of Tony Luhan, a Native American whom she would marry in 1923, she purchased a 12-acre property. In addition to D.H. Lawrence she hosted a number of influential artists and poets, including Marsden Hartley, Arnold Ronnebeck, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una, Florence McClung, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Hunter Austin, Mary Foote, Frank Waters, Jaime de Angulo, Aldous Huxley, Ernie O'Malley and others. She died at her home in Taos in 1962 and was buried in Kit Carson Cemetery.
1917 - New Mexico Art Museum in Santa Fe was built as an example of Pueblo Revival Style architecture. It stands behind and connects to the Palace of Governors.
1918 - Carlos Vierra was the first resident artist and was one of the first three "members" of the Santa Fe Art Colony. He was a strong advocate for preserving landmark buildings and for making sure that new buildings were in the style that is so unique to Santa Fe. His home is believed to be the first residence built in the Spanish Pueblo Revival Style architecture.
1914 - 1918 - World War I. More than half of the AEF troops killed in Meuse-Argonne, 14,246 (32 from New Mexico) are interred at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. The second largest number of New Mexicans killed in France died at the Battle of Chateau-Thierry in July 1918.
1926 - US Highway Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. In 1937 the old route in New Mexico was changed from Arizona to Los Lunas, through Albuquerque to Santa Fe to near Las Vegas to Santa Rosa and headed straight east through Albuquerque to Moriarty bypassing Santa Fe and Pecos entirely.
1939 - 1945 - World War II.
In the Pacific:
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Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys became the place for the development of the atomic bomb code named "The Manhattan Project (1942-1946)." The downtown location in Santa Fe at 109 East Palace Street was used as the contact point for the Project. A single post office box, P.O. Box 1663, served all Los Alamos’s residents. Babies born during the Manhattan Project had “P.O. Box 1663” listed as their birthplace on their birth certificates.
The first detonation was at the "Trinity Test Site" in southern New Mexico close to Alamogordo on July 16, 1945. The two detonations on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was the cause of the Japanese surrender. The surrender ceremony was held on September 2, aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri.
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Navajo code talkers were used in various locations in the Pacific Theater of war.
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The American surrender at Bataan to the Japanese, with 76,000 soldiers surrendering in the Philippines altogether ending in the "Bataan Death March." Approximately 1,800 men from the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery Regiment were deployed to the Philippines in September 1941. The battle lasted from January 7 – April 9 1942. The 200th was made up of men from New Mexico.
Internment camps were authorized throughout the United States Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942. There were Japanese and German interrnment camps in New Mexico ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. They were located in Santa Fe - (From March 1942 to April 1946 it was the largest camp located on the site of an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp at the current site of the Casa Solana neighborhood holding 4,555 men of Japanese ancestry), Fort Stanton - Old Raton Ranch in Lincoln County (German and Japanese), Lordsburg (German- held Japanese from July 1942 to July 1943), Roswell (German and Japanese).
1947 - The UFO Incident at Roswell
1948 - American Indians received the right to vote
1950 - Uranium was discovered near Grants
1960s - Hippie communes, antiwar protests, and civil-rights activism simmered across New Mexico during the 1960s and ’70s.
1966 - The new State Capitol, the "Roundhouse," was dedicated
2000, July 25 - Valles Caldera National Preserve was established in the Jemez Mountains
2000's -
Although the first movie ("Indian Day School" filmed at the Isleta Pueblo) filmed in New Mexico was in 1898, many more movies and TV shows have been filmed in the state during the 1900's until present.
2009, May - The New Mexico History Museum opened behind the Palace of Governors.
There are many interesting festivals and fairs held in New Mexico