NARA VISA NEW MEXICO

The ranching town got its start when the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad was built through the area in 1901. The town’s name came from the creek that flowed through it called Nara Visa Creek. In the 1880s a Hispanic sheepherder named Narvaez lived there. In those early years, English-speaking settlers pronounced his name “Narvis”, which was corrupted further to Nara Visa. Living nearby were two brothers — Sim and Fred McFarland, originally from La Veta, Colorado, who had come to New Mexico to work on their uncle’s cattle ranch. In 1902, the brothers each filed a claim on either side of the railroad track, formed a partnership and opened a box-car-sized store in which they installed a safe for their money. Before long, they began keeping their customers’ money in the safe and paid it out when crude checks, scrawled on scraps of envelopes or brown paper sacks, came in. Nara Visa’s first “bank”, though unofficial, was born. However, its term would be short, as the McFarland Brothers sold their Nara Visa business to John and Anastacia Burns and moved their operation to nearby Logan, New Mexico in 1904. The next year they would establish the long-running McFarland Brothers Bank. In the meantime, two small stores had been built in Nara Visa and the town had become a shipping point for area cattle. John Burns who had bought the McFarland Brothers business helped to organize the First National Bank in 1907. A more substantial stone schoolhouse was built in 1908 to handle the increasing population of homesteaders’ children and in 1909, McNeil & Crain began to publish a weekly newspaper called the Nara Visa New Mexican and Register. In 1911, its name changed to the New Mexico News, and from 1912-1914, it was called the Nara Visa New Mexican, no doubt, changing publishing companies with each name change.