Mountainair, NM

Mountainair is a Torrance County town in central New Mexico, with 884 residents in the 2020 census. John Corbett, Colonel E.C. Manning, and former Kansas governor E.S. Stover founded it in 1903 along the Belen Cutoff, the railroad route that brought work trains by 1907 and passenger trains soon after. The town grew around its depot, broad skies, dry farmland, and the mountain pass that gave Mountainair its name. The old depot still marks the town’s railroad beginning.

The Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument visitor center sits in town, with Abó, Quarai, and Gran Quivira spreading the local map into much older Pueblo and Spanish mission history. Mountainair also remembers its railroad-era farm boom as the Pinto Bean Capital of the World, when bean fields and processing filled the surrounding country. Ranching became more prominent after drought changed the agricultural pattern. Mountainair is a New Mexico town where a railroad cutoff, ancient mission ruins, pinto beans, and the Manzano foothills meet.