Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Folsom, NM

Folsom is an incorporated village in Union County in northeastern New Mexico, not to be confused with the California city of the same name.

The village was named for Frances Folsom, the fiancée of President Grover Cleveland.

Folsom was established in 1888 on the newly completed Colorado and Southern Railroad, and the older nearby settlement of Madison, founded in 1864 by Madison Emery, faded into a ghost town as activity shifted to the rail line.

In its early boom years Folsom had the largest stockyards west of Fort Worth, Texas, and its population peaked at nearly 1,000 people.

On August 27, 1908, a massive rainstorm sent a flood through Folsom that nearly destroyed the town and killed 18 people, a blow from which it never recovered.

Telephone operator Sally Rooke stayed at her switchboard warning residents during the 1908 flood and died at her post; New Mexico later designated her a Heroine of New Mexico, and a monument in her honor stands beside the Folsom Museum.

Flash flooding from the same 1908 storm exposed the bones of an extinct bison in Wild Horse Arroyo, where cowboy George McJunkin found them and recognized their importance.

The village gives its name to the Folsom archaeological site, about 8 miles west of town, excavated in 1926, where the remains of 23 bison killed with distinctive Folsom points proved that humans had lived in the Americas more than 10,000 years ago.

Outlaw Black Jack Ketchum and his gang held up trains near Folsom three times; after the final robbery in 1899 Ketchum was captured, held in the 1888 Folsom Hotel building, and later hanged.

Folsom's high school had only one graduating class, three students in 1931, and its elementary school closed in 1966, after which local students transferred to school in Des Moines, 8 miles away.