LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Steins was originally a coal depot for the Southern Pacific Railroad. The town was abandoned virtually overnight when the railroad switched to diesel fuel in the Forties.

The town's population of 1,000 people or so left their belongings as they were. The detritus of a one-time bustling town was allowed to gather dust and fade away for the past 70 years.

Steins became a tourist attraction as the curious gathered to view the abandoned railroad town. Accessible by Interstate 10, the town was bought Steins enthusiast Larry Link.

Link, a rattlesnake farmer was obsessed with the old mercantile stores, outhouses and stagecoaches of the town, bought the town outright in 1988. Link originally wanted to clear the overgrown tumbleweed and grass that had grown through the main street of the town to let people access to the eerie buildings of the ghost town.

Melissa Lamoree, Link's granddaughter, took over the family business from the 68-year-old Link last year after he was murdered outside his house. "He didn't want to entertain people," Lamoree explains. "He just wanted the history of this place to speak for itself."
 
The only real cosmetic changes to have occurred in the ghost town are to the roads and lanes of the seven acre site.

Visitors to Steins are struck by the impression that people have just upped and left the town, like a dry land version of the famous Marie Celeste.

Having closed Steins to mourn the unsolved killing that devastated the Link family, the town re-opened for tours this year.

At its peak, 1,300 people lived in Steins when it was a depot workstation for the Pacific railroad connecting California to the Gulf of Mexico.

"When things shut down, people were offered a ride on the train," Lamoree says. "They were told to take whatever they could carry." Heavier items such as stagecoaches were left to rot in the broiling desert sun.

Evidently, the people of Steins were pushed into a hurry to leave as the forgotten pianos in the bar and the still-made beds testify to.

Everything there has been left as the Link's found it, with every abandoned lantern, spice jar and typewriter telling its own story to each person who visits.

Steins is among many ghost towns, managed publicly and privately, that dot the southern New Mexico landscape.

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