Newman

Newman is on the Southern Pacific line and State Highway 54 sixteen miles northeast of downtown El Paso on the border between northern El Paso County and southern Otero County, New Mexico. The community was named for local rancher Henry L. Newman, whose ranch covered the area. The Newman community is probably best known as the place where the Mexican revolutionaries Victoriano Huerta and Pascual Orozco, Jr., were arrested in June 1915. Huerta had boarded a westbound train in New York, announcing that he was going to San Francisco, but got off the train in Newman (actually on the New Mexico side), where Orozco was waiting for him. The two intended to launch an invasion of Mexico but were apprehended by federal officials before they could leave the station. A post office opened in Newman in 1922, and during the early 1930s two businesses were operating there. The estimated population of Newman grew from ten in the mid-1930s to sixty by the end of the decade. Its post office closed in 1971, and through 2000 the population was still estimated at sixty.