The last building before the bridge is called the Old Adelphia Hotel in the Historic Building Survey, although it first appeared in the city directory as the New Metropolitan Hotel and remained so until 1906. It’s a moot point because, although it has been used for other purposes for some time, long time residents still call it the Hausman Drug building because it was the location of that favored business for so many years. According to its sign, still visible on its river side, it was much more than a drug store, selling hunting licenses and fishing gear and featuring the town’s favorite soda fountain.
The current bridge was completed in 1991. The award-winning design replicates, as closely as modern standards allow, a bridge that had spanned the river for 86 years and had developed structural problems. It had replaced a bridge swept away by the terrible flood of 1904, which itself was a replacement for a previous bridge also swept away. Historically, the little stream could be very unruly, a situation now controlled by the Trinidad Dam and Lake constructed four miles upstream in the 1970s.
The river will be flowing full if you are here during summer irrigation season, but at other times, it is a small mountain stream, swift and clear. It is officially called the Purgatoire River. But it has a more interesting name, one with mysterious origins. In Spanish, it is called El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, the River of Souls Lost in Purgatory. And the legend goes like this. In the very early days of Spanish exploration, an expedition was wandering across the plains hoping to find the golden riches of Quivira, a legendary land supposed to lie to the northeast. The two leaders of the band, both vicious and avaricious, fell to quarreling over the direction to take and the argument became so heated that one of them stabbed and killed the other. The priests of the expedition refused to go on under the leadership of a murderer and turned back, taking many of the soldiers with them. Although depleted and weakened, the others pressed on, only to be slaughtered by hostile Indians while camped on the banks of a small river (this one?). Because the Spaniards died without Last Rites administered by priests, their souls were doomed to wander forever in purgatory. That is not correct according to the tenets of the Catholic Church, but nevertheless we have the name. Later, with the coming of French-speaking mountain men from Canada, it was shortened and changed to Purgatoire. Early settlers often twisted that into Picket-wire (pronounced “wahr”) but the U.S. Geologic Survey selected the French version.