A founding father’s riches-to-rags story ended with an intriguing twist—but only the walls of his enigmatic mansion may know the truth.
Oct. 29, 2025
By John Mulhouse /
Illustrations by Marco Lawrence
OVERLOOKING THE CIMARRÓN RIVER at the southern edge of Springer, the weathered mansion of Melvin Whitson Mills looms. Built in 1877, the three-story adobe is a wholly original mix of French Academic and Greek Revival styles with Territorial elements. Called “unique in the nation” when listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, the once-grand home creates an impression that can be difficult to put into words.
Like his house, M.W. Mills seems inscrutable. Often associated with the shadowy Santa Fe Ring and the bloody Colfax County War, the landowner, legislator, and attorney saw his fortunes decline after the Canadian River flooded his Orchard Ranch resort in 1904. Mills tried to recover, but went deeper into debt, eventually losing his mansion.
He died nearly broke in Springer, the town he’d helped plat and where he’d spent most of his life. One repeated tale is particularly emblematic of his fall: Knowing he didn’t have long to live, Mills asked to be allowed to die in his beloved former home. One hundred years after his death at age 79 on August 19, 1925, now seems like a good time to seek the truth of Mills’s last days.
One version of the old man’s dying wish says he asked it of his former Santa Fe Ring associate Thomas Catron. It sounds like one last pact between old amigos—but Catron died four years before. A front-page obituary in the Albuquerque Journal doesn’t mention Mills’s place of death, though the Springer Times announced, “Mr. Mills … passed away at his home.” Curiously, the Santa Fe New Mexican doesn’t appear to have run an obituary for the prominent figure.
When he passed, Mills lived in a modest, possibly rented house across the street from the mansion. In January 1926, almost six months after Mills’s death, his friend Paul A. F. Walter published an account in the New Mexico Historical Review’s first issue. “It was his dying wish that he be carried into his old house,” Walter writes, and “his last moments were spent in the house he had loved so well.” This must be the story’s origin. But who granted the wish?
Some records indicate Luke and Myrtle Clegg owned the mansion in 1925. Nancy Jespersen, who has lived in Springer since 1957, knew the couple and says the Cleggs would’ve granted Mills’s request “because they were super nice people.” But she hesitates about when the Cleggs moved in; Mills’s death “seems too long ago.”
In a 1965 New Mexican story (“Old Mills House Has Air of Mystery”), the Cleggs’s purchase date is given as 1937. “We didn’t intend to live in it,” Mrs. Clegg says. “We bought it to have the pasture.” Still there in 1973 when the newspaper did another piece on the “architectural treasure,” she then added that she knew exactly how Mills felt—because she loved it too. So who was there in 1925 to let Mills in?
Media reports reveal an increasingly chaotic life. In 1902, Mills was charged with “a fraudulent proposal to carry the mail.” In 1905, he joined an effort to cut Colfax County in half. Later that year, he was charged with wrongful sale of oleomargarine. The case was dropped, but another accusing him of enclosing public lands goes forward. In 1909, Catron wrote him an angry letter, upset at the condition of a cow Mills sold and shipped by rail; Catron refused to pay the full amount.
Affairs grow shadier: A 1914 story in El Nuevo Mexicano reports Mrs. Mills was poisoned by strychnine in her tea. It’s considered a murder attempt, though “Mrs. Mills is now out of danger” is the only conclusion.
The more I learn about Mills, the less I know. In 1980, Fritz Thompson of the Albuquerque Journal lamented the difficulty of untangling his life. Of the living people who knew him, Thompson wrote, “Many prefer to say nothing.”
Perhaps, like his time-worn mansion, Mills’s story can never be finished—a long-silent presence that is still felt. It is, indeed, hard to know what to say. Maybe that’s the way he wanted it.
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