The Fort Sumner Review Archive

The town of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, was established four different times. Located on the Pecos River, it served as a military installation from 1862 to 1868. Gen. James H. Carleton anticipated bringing an end to the Navajo and Apache raiding and named the fort for Col. Edmond Vose Sumner, who had served as the military governor of the New Mexico Territory from 1851 to 1853. Approximately 8,000 Navajos and 400 Mescalero Apaches were forced on to the establishment. The Apaches later fled and the Navajos successfully negotiated their return to their homeland, and Fort Sumner was deactivated in 1868. In 1875, the military installation was purchased by Lucien Maxwell, at the time, a major private landowner and cattle baron. A small settlement developed, which also took the name Fort Sumner. It was in Maxwell’s bedroom, that Pat Garrett, a sheriff from Lincoln and Dona Ana Counties, New Mexico, shot the notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. Later, the New England Cattle Co. purchased Maxwell’s holdings, and the properties deteriorated. Another settlement emerged slightly south, again called Fort Sumner. Around 1905, construction for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad began, and a new settlement, Sunnyside, immediately sprouted.  After Sunnyside was devastated by a storm, its residents asked to join Fort Sumner on April 17, 1909, creating the present town.

The Fort Sumner Review was launched in 1908.  On July 17, 1909, an article commemorated the newspaper’s founding:  “Our birthday, with this issue we commence vol. 2 no. 1 of the Fort Sumner Review, and we take this occasion to say that the Fort Sumner Review feels pretty proud of its growth for a youngster.” It was an English only newspaper, printed every Saturday by the Review Publishing Co. The editor was M.R. Baker and the publisher was J.V. Sterns. A subscription cost $1 per year, 50 cents for six months, and 25 cents for three months, all to be paid in cash. The motto, “Devoted to the interests of Fort Sumner, of Guadalupe County, and of New Mexico,” appears below the masthead. Publication of the Review ceased on September 11, 1947, at which time the paper was absorbed by De Baca County News.

The Fort Sumner Review reported local, national, territorial, and international news. Among the items covered was, in 1910, the resignation of New Mexico’s territorial governor George Curry. In 1911, he was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives from New Mexico. A bill was presented to the New Mexico legislature on January 27, 1917, by Sen. J.A. McDonald of Socorro County prohibiting the sale of liquor except for scientific, medicinal, and sacramental purposes. The Review also endorsed statehood for New Mexico.  Local political ads read: “The man who does not go to the polls to vote has no right to kick on the kind of government he gets” and “Take the territorial handcuffs off of your wrists and vote for Statehood. It means self-government, freedom, progress and prosperity.”

A story that appeared in the Fort Sumner Review on January 6, 1917, covered a report from the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution on simplifying and standardizing the transcription of Indian place names. That same year, the newspaper described President Woodrow Wilson’s second inauguration, and in 1918 it reported on the death of former President Theodore Roosevelt.