|By Mike Cook, REDTT Technical Writer

Reprinted from Trails & Treasures Volume 6, No. 2; Fall 1998.

Trails & Treasures is a publication of the Rural Economic Development Through Tourism (REDTT) Project, a program of the New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service. REDTT is based at the College of Agriculture and Home Economics at NMSU and is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Extension System. College of Agriculture and Home Economics, New Mexico State University; PO Box 30003, Dept. 3HRTM, Las Cruces NM 88003-8003. NMSU Cooperative Extension Service is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer and educator. NMSU and U.S. Department of Agriculture cooperating. www.nmsu.edu/~redtt

A sketch map of Chloride
lists it as site #19. It's just
up Wall Street from the old
"hanging tree" and not far from the site where
an English muleskinner named Harry Pye discovered
high-grade silver ore in 1879.

Built in 1880 of hand-hewn ponderosa pine logs, Pioneer Store has served as a dry goods store, a commissary and a post office. The "Black Range" newspaper was printed upstairs for several years.

Today, owners Don and Dona Edmund have converted it into a world-class museum. The building is now listed on the New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs' list of Historic Places. Although not yet officially open, the Edmunds show the museum to visitors nearly every day.

When they bought the building, it had not been in use since 1923. Many of the town's records dating back to its founding were stored inside. Bats and rats had taken up residence, and Don and Dona knew they had a huge job ahead of them.

The Edmunds, who moved to Chloride full-time in 1986, have put in thousands of hours cleaning and restoring the building inside and out. They did research to determine the building's original colors (gray and red outside, with whitewashed walls inside) before repainting. They were even able to reattach the building's original door handles, which were returned to them by descendants of an early store owner.

The approximately 1,000 square feet of the museum are packed with exhibits, including a huge safe, a section of a tree with a cross cut into it by Buffalo Soldiers to mark the site of an attack, the store's original silver and nickel display cases, photos and stories about Chloride's most famous residents and a lot of mining artifacts and other relics.