Coming in from southeastern Arizona, old US-80 rejoins I-10 at a crossroads community aptly called Road Forks (near the tin-roofed ghost town of Steins), and 15 miles farther east the freeway swerves south to bypass the town of Lordsburg (pop. 3,379). Named not from any religious conviction but in honor of the Southern Pacific railroad engineer who plotted it in 1880, Lordsburg has one great attraction—a taste of New Mexican home cooking at the family-run El Charro (505/542-3400), open 24 hours at 209 Southern Pacific Boulevard, along the train tracks at the center of town.
Like something out of The Andromeda Strain, Lordsburg feels oddly abandoned, as if everyone has just packed up and left town. In fact, the other main draw is New Mexico’s best-preserved ghost town, Shakespeare, three miles south of Lordsburg on a well-marked dirt road. Briefly home to some 3,000 silver miners during the early 1870s, Shakespeare was abandoned when the mines dried up, only to be reborn during another brief mining boom in the 1880s. By the 1930s it was turned into a ranch by the Hill family, whose descendants still live here, care for the buildings, and conduct irregularly scheduled guided tours (weekends 10 am and 2 pm; $3; 505/542-9034) of the Grant House saloon, a former Butterfield Stagecoach station, and the Stratford Hotel, where Billy the Kid washed dishes as a young boy.
