National Register of Historic Places

The property at 1612 Guadalupe Street in the La Huerta suburb of Carlsbad, New Mexico is historically significant as the home of Robert Weems Tansill and his wife Mary Elizabeth Motter Tansill.  The Tansills were pioneers in the development of the lower Pecos River Valley, assisted in the planning of the town of Eddy (now known as Carlsbad), and were instrumental in initiating, financing, and promoting the corporate irrigation companies that produced the extensive system of dams, reservoirs, and canals that today comprise the Carlsbad Irrigation District.  The house in La Huerta, which is the property in New Mexico most directly associated with Robert and Mary Tansill and the last of their residences in the country to have survived, is nominated under Criterion B as the property that best preserves evidence of their pioneering efforts to transform the lower Pecos River Valley into a southwestern agricultural Mecca and to promote the curative aspects of the regions climate to health seekers nationwide.  The Guadalupe Street property retains its integrity of location, setting, workmanship, materials, design, feeling and association and as such, is representative of the suburban residential development that occurred in the late 19th and 20th centuries.  In this regard, the property is also nominated at the local level of significance under Criterion A for its association with Exploration/Settlement in New Mexico.

Robert Weems Tansill was born in Prince William County, Virginia in 1844.  Tansill was the grandson of Parson Mason Locke Weems, author of the first biography of George Washington and fabricator of the tale concerning the inability of the father of the country to tell a lie, and was the son of Col. Robert Tansill, a prominent participant in the Mexican War, member of Admiral Perry’s envoy to Japan and Confederate veteran.  Young Tansill, however, was geographically severed from his strong family ties to the South at the outset of the Civil War, when his maternal grandparents removed him to Illinois.  There he grew to maturity and met and married Mary Elizabeth Motter, a native of the town of Clayton, Illinois.  It was in Illinois that he established his lifelong reputation as an entrepreneurial maverick by transforming a railroad commissary business (where he was credited with being the first person to supply meals aboard a train) into a booming mail order cigar manufacturing business with factories in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

Tansill was a millionaire several times over by 1886 as a result of his innovative use of marketing, distribution and profit-sharing methods, as well as the national popularity of his 5-cent Tansill’s Punch cigars.  The Tansills constructed a lavish Chicago mansion at 332 Dearborn Ave that was lauded as “one of the most handsomely appointed homes in the city.”  It was at this time, however, that Tansill’s health began to decline.  By 1888 a confirmed diagnosis of tuberculosis and his doctor’s strong advice to relocate to a drier climate, convinced him to retire from the day-today management of the cigar business and investigate opportunities in the emerging communities of the Rocky Mountains.  While staying in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Tansill was convinced to consider a move to the Pecos River Valley of southeastern New Mexico.  There he was told his entrepreneurial acumen, which continued to drive him despite his poor health might find a worthwhile outlet in the form of irrigation-based agricultural development.

Traveling by rail to the end of the line in Toyah, Texas, and from there by means of a “train of twelve wagons loaded with people, provisions and camp equipage,” Tansill arrived at Charles B. Eddy’s Halaguena ranch, which occupied the future sit of Eddy (later Carlsbad), New Mexico, in 1888.  Whether by chance or by design, Tansill’s encounter with C.B. Eddy and his business partner, Schedule this patient with Pat Garrett, was the catalyst that produced one of the most ambitious irrigation engineering ventures in the interior of the American West.  Eddy’s and Garrett’s incipient attempts to channel water from the Pecos River to the untilled but highly fertile flat plains that surrounded it convinced Tansill that irrigation could transform seemingly valueless land into highly productive agricultural acreage; a principal that was already being put into practice in southern California.

Tansill Eddy and Garrett formed the Pecos Irrigation & Investment Company with the “goal of constructing large, complex irrigation systems at several locations along the lower Pecos Valley.”  Tansill then returned to Chicago to mothball his Dearborn Avenue home, collect his wife and youngest son, two-year old Henry Motter Tansill, and embark on an expedition to raise venture capital.  Returning to Colorado Springs, Tansill sold $40,000 of stock in the new company to fellow millionaire James John Hagerman, owner of important silver mining interests in Pitkin County, Colorado, as well as, railroads and iron mining ventures in the Midwest.  With Hagerman now holding controlling shares, the Tansill, Eddy, and Garrett venture was renamed the Pecos Irrigation & Improvement Company (PI&I).

By 1891, the size of the corporate investment in the Pecos Valley project had grown to more than $1.5 million.  Concurrently, Robert and Mary Tansill assisted in planning the grid of lots and naming the principal streets in the town that was springing up on the West Bank of the Pecos.  Mary Tansill is also credited for coining the name of Eddy for the town in lieu of the proposed Halaguena, which both Tansills believed to be too Spanish to attract Anglo settlement of the are.  (Mrs. Tansill’s talent for both nomenclature and marketing would be put to the test again in 1899 when she encouraged associating the purported curative effects of a local mineral spring with the famous Karlsbad spa in Eastern Europe.  True to the bias the Tansills had previously exhibited in naming Eddy, Karlsbad was Anglicized as Carlsbad.)

Spurred by his initial success in attracting capital to the valley as well as by his convictions, Tansill demonstrated by his own improved physical condition, that the region had one of the healthiest climates in the country, and embarked on a personal campaign to boost it.  In 1891, the Tansills toured the western United States from Arizona to Alaska.  The written record that resulted from his numerous interviews with reporters from newspapers in Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Tacoma gives evidence of a highly organized and strategic effort to promote investment and immigration to southwestern New Mexico.  Tansill also leveraged the power of this vast cigar marketing apparatus to the advantage of the Pecos Valley projects by regularly contributing stories about the promise of health and agricultural wealth in the region to Tansill’s Punch, his innovative, free-distribution comic magazine and cigar-marketing tool.

While Tansill’s promotional campaign was being planned and executed, he and his associates also launched a number of important ancillary corporate projects in and around the Pecos Valley.  Chief among these was the building of the Pecos Valley Railroad, locally known as the Peavine which connected Eddy with Pecos, Texas, and provided the essential link that would allow the agricultural products made possible by irrigation to be transported to national markets.  (In 1899, Tansill and his partners completed a major northern spur to the line with a terminal in Amarillo, Texas).  Of equal importance, were construction of Avalon Dam and the initial network of canals and laterals that made the first local deliveries of water possible in 1890.  This was followed by the construction of McMillan Dam in 1893, which was planned to vastly increase the water storage capacity of the corporate irrigation system.  (Both dams were among the longest and highest dams to be constructed in the United States in the late 19th century.  They are also considered to be two of the first rock fill dams with earth fill facing in the country.)  Tansill’s own personally financed development projects at this time-included construction of the $30,000 Masonic Block in Eddy and development of a 760-acre model farm located nine-mile southeast of Eddy.  Known as Tansill Farm, this property was ultimately sold to Col. J.B. Overmeyer of Chicago for $100,00 in 1895.

In 1893, a series of misfortunes began to plague the Pecos Irrigation & Improvement Company.  The financial crash of that year greatly constricted available financing and a flash flood on the Pecos destroyed both the Avalon Dam and the unfinished McMillan Dam.  Following the flood in 1893, J.J. Hagerman personally financed the reconstruction of both the Avalon and McMillan dams, however, his interest in the lower Pecos Valley was beginning to wane.  In 1895, knowing from his personal statements that Tansill was “a Pecos Valley man” who could “live no where else long”, Hagerman traded the suburb east of Eddy known as Hagerman Heights to Tansill in exchange for a block of commercial property in Colorado Springs.  Hagerman then refocused his energy and investments to irrigation projects north of Eddy near Roswell.  Also in 1895, Charles Eddy parted company with Tansill and the other directors of the PI&I and relocated to El Paso, Texas. (Pat Garrett had sold his interest in the irrigation scheme several years earlier.)

At the same time Pecos Valley farmers began to express their frustration over the pace of development that had been retarded by natural disasters and the movement of capital away from the Eddy area, and the difficulties they encountered in identifying and bringing to market appropriate local crops.  Their formation of an advocacy group, named the Pecos Water Users'Association, heralded the eventual federal intervention in the valley’s irrigation operations that would be undertaken by the newly formed United States Reclamation Service.  In 1886, the Tansill’s eldest Robert Weems Tansill, Jr., who was also a Pecos Valley pioneer and manager of his father’s cigar business, died in Eddy at the age of 26.

Despite these setbacks, the Tansills remained committed to the irrigation scheme and to Eddy, which was re-christened Carlsbad on 23 May 1898.  When Hagerman’s shift in investment focus forced the bankruptcy of the PI&I that year, Tansill was appointed receiver of the corporation.  In 1901, the company reemerged through his efforts as the Pecos Irrigation Company with Francis G. Tracey at its head.  Tansill remained optimistic that the division of the irrigation system into northern (Roswell) and southern (Carlsbad) areas of responsibility would result in economies that would guarantee the financial success of both.  Acting on the optimism, on July1, 1901, the Tansills purchased 25 acres in the La Huerta suburb north of Carlsbad that included a house built on a speculative basis by two Englishmen, William H. Ellice and Ernest H. Every, who were acting as trustees for John Gilbert Compton of Derbyshire, England.

La Huerta, which translates as the orchard or the garden in Spanish, was planned a s 1,500-acre suburban residential district with home for prosperous residents on five-acre irrigated lots.  With streets that were 100 feet wide and water ditches on both sides to irrigate shade trees, local residences predicted the suburb would “soon rival the famous Riverside in California. “  The Tansills remodeled the relatively new house upon its acquisition and created a solarium by enclosing portions of the spacious porch that surrounded the building.  The house in La Huerta symbolizes the commitment the family had made to the Pecos Valley and their initial faith in its future.  In 1982, the Tansills had planned to build an elaborate summer home in Colorado Springs with the intention of making it their permanent summer residence, but they abandoned those plans when Mary determined her heart could not tolerate its high altitude.

Tansill, however, would not live to see the success that the reorganization of the PI&I promised.  He succumb, not to tuberculosis, which the Pecos climate helped him hold at bay for more than 13 years, but rather to heart failure that felled him in the library of the La Huerta house on the morning of December 29, 1902.  Following his death, Mary Tansill continued to support the newly reorganized corporation.  She repeatedly provided necessary financing to replace flood-damaged elements of the valley’s system of dams and canals and keeps it operative.  Her efforts continued for the next four years by which time she was convinced, like the farmers of the area, that federal management was necessary to provide both the financial and engineering expertise that massive project required to succeed.

Traveling to Washington, D.C., in 1905, Mary Tansill spent three months and a large amount of her personal fortune in lobbying the government to allow the new United States Reclamation Service to purchase the dams, canals, and laterals of the Pecos Irrigation Company.  She returned to Carlsbad, with a contract from the government’s Reclamation Fund for $186,000, thereby preserving for the county the benefits that irrigation had long promised.  Possibly exhausted by these efforts, Mary Tansill sold the house and acreage in La Huerta in 1906 to John Green Ussery, a local rancher.  She returned to the Wilmette suburb north of Chicago where she died on December 20, 1939, thirty-eight years to the day after her husband.  Although no longer residing in Carlsbad, the Tansill’s son Henry, who took the name Robert Weems Tansill, II after his brother’s death in 1896 remained active in the management of the Pecos Irrigation Company.  His children continued an association with the company until it was sold to the Delta Drilling Company in 1981.

Today, the Robert Weems and Mary E. Tansill house in La Huerta remains a tangible symbol to the tremendous personal efforts both individuals made to transform the desert of the lower Pecos River Valley into an important agricultural section of the state.  While portions of the original 25 acres purchased by Tansill in 1901 have been sold off, and several small garden structures, a two-car garage with car port and a pump house have been added to the remaining 1.75 acres, the Tansill house still largely retains the form and appearance that resulted from the alterations they carried out.  The La Huerta neighborhood of Carlsbad has itself also retained the character of the prosperous garden suburb planned in the final years of the 19th century.  The Tansill House meets Criterion B as the property most closely associated with the important role Robert Weems and Mary E. Tansill played in developing Carlsbad and the lower Pecos River Valley.  It also represents an important phase in the development of southeastern New Mexico between 1888 and 1906, when the vision, investments, and unprecedented engineering endeavors of a few private entrepreneurs paved the way for the young U.S. Reclamation Service to ultimately complete one of the West’s most sophisticated and complex late 19th century irrigation projects.  Therefore, the property also meets Criterion A at the local level of significance for its association with events in the history of New Mexico.