| Boomtown revival Artists bring new spirit to former ghost town of Kingston |
by William P. Diven |
It's a Tuesday evening and the Spit and Whittle Club has drawn about 90 residents and visitors to the only room in Kingston's former schoolhouse. Seated in a loose circle on straight-backed chairs, a sofa and a piano bench, they are half the population of this once boisterous mining town set deep in the Black Range canyon. The club traces its roots to Kingston's boom and bust a century ago and today is the closest thing to government in this community of independent souls. The club roster provides evidence of Kingston's evolution as the art colony of the 1960s enters the Hollywood scene in the 1990s. Present are a founder of the long-established Black Range Artists group, a country musician turned Western sculptor, several writers, a recent film-school graduate and a producer-director who helped bring a movie crew and Academy Award nominee to Kingston. But tonight wasps top the agenda. Ben Whiteman, part of the crew painting trim on the schoolhouse a few weeks earlier, suggests additional work wait until cooler weather calms the wasps nesting in its walls. The group agrees and moves on to discuss whether club meetings should feature entertainment by members assigned each month. The idea is approved only after participation is made voluntary. If there is a Kingston Ethic, one member says later, it is to live and let live and to agree to disagree. The Spit and Whittle Club allows neither spitting nor smoking and prohibits discussion of religion or politics. An exception is made when Whiteman, the only occupant of the former Victoria Hotel, apologizes for a recent absence spent helping his son win a primary election for sheriff in an East Texas county. "He said if he didn't win, he and the wife and the kids would come here to live with me," Whiteman adds. "I said I'd be right there." The others laugh approvingly, then proceed to elect newcomer Charlie Sena club president succeeding John Atkinson. Sena arrived in Kingston four months earlier after 20 years drumming in country western bands and seven more becoming established as a sculptor of expensive Western bronzes. While the new secretary-treasurer receives the club's important papers, John is showing Charlie where to find the sweeping compound. Then members descend on the potluck buffet spread in front of a blackboard. "Kingston is an inspirational place whether you're sculpting or writing or painting," Sena says. "There is a serenity of place and a friendliness of people. And I don't see an influx of people coming in because there is no economy." Sena creates "peaceful-moment bronzes" such as Payday Dream showing a cowpoke studying a hole in his boot. He says he happened on Kingston while looking for a new studio site so he could leave Salt Lake City. A few weeks later limousines creep to a stop in front of Santa Fe's Lensic Theater for the New Mexico premiere of Paper Hearts.
An open-topped red Cadillac carries stars Sally Kirkland and James Brolin while a stretch Lincoln delivers Catherine Wanek, a producer of the movie and vice president of the Spit and Whittle Club. "I can always quit acting and go to Kingston and be with God," she tells Margaret. Later Kirkland describes retreating to Kingston each night to meditate on her character and sleep to the soft chattering of Middle Percha Creek. Nearby stood Kingston's buzzard tree, a dead pine, which attracts a dozen or more of the winged scavengers to its bare branches each dusk. "That was kind of far-out," she says. When the month ended, quiet returned to Hillsboro and Kingston, briefly New Mexico's biggest city when its payday population reached 7,000 in the 1880s. Each resumed its role as a ranching, farming, creative and retirement community, despite their listing on some maps as ghost towns. Headlines jolted the peace early in 1992 with word the multimedia couple Jane Fonda and Ted Turner were buying the 300,000-acre Ladder Ranch and might raise buffalo on it. Some ranchers wondered what buffalo would do to the range, others grumbled about Fonda's political past. Limousine sightings and the coming and going of cattle trucks were reported in Hillsboro. Then Jo Ann Merk, whose Hillsboro phone number is one digit removed from that at the Ladder Ranch, got the celebrated misdialed call. "She said she didn't have a phone book and was calling from Montana," Merk says. "I recognized the voice and said, 'Jane, is that you?'" "I just felt like I was talking to a new neighbor." During Paper Hearts the Merks joined a wedding scene as extras and rented their guest house to Brolin. He was impressed with Hillsboro and the Merks with him. Still Jo Ann worries about the community and its many fixed-income residents. "I would feel very badly if Hollywood came in here and bought up the town and drove costs up," Jo Ann says. "If it's just a getaway and not home for them, we might have a house nicely fixed up but lose a neighbor and community volunteer. It's nice to drive around town at night and see lights on in the houses." Merk adds she is ready to sign up should Fonda organize exercise classes in Hillsboro. Other commercial growth has come in recent years, although it pales beside the stampede of miners who drove the Apaches from traditional lands early in the 1880s before being booted themselves when silver prices crashed barely a decade later. Hillsboro now boasts a barbecue place and the Three Angels Bakery. Residents led by Dudley Merk and screenwriter McCall successfully lobbied a Truth or Consequences bank to keep the Hillsboro branch open a few days a week. Large-scale mining, however, disappeared with the closing of a copper mine outside Hillsboro and the flood of fraud indictments that swept away a purported gold mine nearby. Kingston's recent commercial spurt began in April 1988 when Sarah and Andrew Murray opened a sandwich shop serving gourmet coffee and pies.
A few weeks later movie producer Wanek and her husband, film editor Mike Sherlock, reopened the Black Range Lodge after 16 years as a private residence. Last Labor Day weekend Sarah made 43 pies and told customers they were her last as she was retiring again to travel. A regular customer might reopen the restaurant retaining Sarah's name and recipes. Wanek and Sherlock chanced on the lodge while honeymooning after their 1983 wedding in Las Cruces. Wanek started as a stage electrician while attending the University of New Mexico and met Sherlock after moving to California and being admitted to the Directors Guild of America. The oldest part of the structure dates to Kingston's early days, but much of the rest is built with stone salvaged from the ruins of Pretty Sam's Casino directly across Main Street. The tale of Pretty Sam's famous 1882 Christmas party is recounted in Black Range Tales, the memoirs of miner James McKenna, who frequented Kingston in the days when elbowing through the Saturday night crowd down the eight blocks of Main Street took 45 minutes. McKenna also wrote of attending Spit and Whittle Club sessions where a handful of miners gathered to chew tobacco, swap mining tales, eat frijoles and whittle juniper sticks. Intent on using the three-story lodge for movie production, Wanek and Sherlock turned away stray travelers seeking accommodations. In the meantime Catherine advanced from DGA trainee to assistant director on movies such as Heart Like A Wheel, Night Shift and Best Defense. Then as a writers' strike immobilized Hollywood and the mortgage came due, two more carloads of tired tourists inspired the couple to open a seven-room bed and breakfast. "Mike painted a sign and hung it up," Wanek recalls. "Two hours later the pump broke, and we took the sign down. It was a few weeks before we got our first guests." Now the lodge fills up for conferences and some weekends. Along the way Wanek and Sherlock found a deeper involvement in the community, joining the volunteer fire department and the Spit and Whittle Club. "Our original idea was to bring Hollywood to the mountains with a production facility, backlot and a community of filmmakers," Wanek says. "We had a grandiose plan, but now that we've lived here for a while, we don't want Kingston to change. But we would like to make one movie a year, like a farm crop." The lodge owners met McCall, a successful commercial director, after he moved to Hillsboro. Wanek drew up a budget under $2 million for Paper Hearts and helped arrange financing while Sherlock worked on the editing. Just down Main Street from the lodge is the Percha Bank, Sierra County's first and one of the few buildings to survive the fires that razed most of early Kingston. Margaret Vetter and her late husband Paul first came to Kingston in 1964 and eventually turned the bank into a private museum displaying remnants of Kingston's heyday. It is open when Margaret can be found to open it. She was among the founders of the Black Range Artists group that drew as many as a thousand visitors to Kingston art shows.
Now relocated to Hillsboro, the group will stage its 32nd annual show there during the Hillsboro Apple Festival this Labor Day. |
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