BROWN, DALTON, HAMPTON, HUST, MAY: It's inaccurate to say everyone in Lincoln County is related, but many close families arrived in the 1880's from Missouri. One wagon train contained twenty-one wagons, said George S. Brown recalling he was six at the time. Mary Margaret Pfingsten, nee May, who was nine when the train left Missouri said there were eighteen wagons. Others said forty wagons headed westward. Several wagons left the train and headed for Colorado after several weeks.
On 14 July 1890, Dea Richmond Hust said he lived south of Springfield, Missouri after the Civil War and went to Jefferson and Park Counties in Colorado and lived there from 1878 through part of 1880. Miles May, who had seen the the area around Reserve New Mexico returned home to Cedar Valley Missouri. He urged his family and others to move.
Miles thought the area around Reserve was so fine that he returned to his home in Cedar Valley, Missouri urging his family and the Browns to move. Abe May, a brother of Miles May, was Maggie's father. David and Almary May were the parents of Miles and Abe. Maggie's mother was Cynthia Ann May, nee Hust. They were part of the party that left the main group and went to Colorado when Dea Richmond Hust had lived earlier. Hannah Hust, a daughter of Dea Richmond Hust and Hannah Harriet Hust was also in the wagon train. She later married Jeremiah Dalton.
Cynthia's parents were Dea Richmond and Hannah Harriet Hust, nee Hampton. Dea and Hannah moved briefly from Colorado to Missouri. Hannah Hust was another daughter of Dea Richmond and Hannah Harriet. She later married Jeremiah Dalton. All of them--aunts, uncles, cousins, sons, and daughters, started West in June of 1883.
In later years, Maggie said, "Some of the party dropped out along the way and...my parents and my grandparents (Hust) went on to Colorado. The Browns and the Mays settled in Tortilito Canyon. It took us three months to get to Horseshoe, a little mining town near Leadville.... The next fall we left Colorado to come to Lincoln County. My grandfather (Dea Richmond Hust) and grandmother (Hannah) were with us and two of their young boys, George and Clark Hust."
Dea Richmond wrote in 1890, "...in the fall of 1885, I moved to Nogal..." Soon Abe May ran a blacksmith shop in Angus. A couple of years earlier he had homesteaded 160 acres. The family later moved to Nogal where Maggie married Fred Pfingsten on 1 November 1894. Fred, a son of Henry Pfingsten, called himself a freighter but went to work at the Vera Cruz mine in 1907.
George Brown wrote of his trip from Missouri to New Mexico in 1937, "My mother's father, David and Almary May, drove one wagon drawn by two white oxen. The rest of the crowd in the train were all uncles and aunts and cousins. They had their own covered wagons drawn by mules."
He also said at times there would be as many as fifty wagons in our train. "We would overtake some of them and some would overtake us, and we would all go along together for awhile and then those other wagons would drift off on their own way."
Originally, according to Brown, the intention was to go to Mesa, Arizona. But it took the group he was with six months to get to New Mexico. So, they went to White Oaks and camped at the Manchester Rock House, about three miles from town. The Browns lived there for two months, then moved in October 1884 to Tortolito Canyon, ten miles southeast of Carrizozo. These folks are gone now and many are buried in the Angus Cemetery and in the Nogal Cemetery.
US Archives, Washington, DC; 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880 Missouri Censuses, 1885 NM Agricultural Census, 1900, 1910 NM Census; Civil War records and pension files, Carrizozo Newspaper and the May Family Bible.
First Family contributed by Hal Taylor.
©2005