08/30/2025
Here is a postcard of the "Endee Grocery" & Texaco service station and U.S. Post Office in Endee, New Mexico, in the 1940s. Its ruins are gone. Endee is another ghost town on the Historic Route 66 alignment from Glenrio to Tucumcari, in eastern New Mexico, and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In his 1946 book about Route 66 (A Guide Book to Highway 66) Jack DeVere Rittenhouse dedicated a line to the "town" of Endee: "ENDEE. (Pop. 110; gas; small garage; grocery and a scant handful of cabins.) Only three establishments in this "town" ~ Jack Rittenhouse (1946).
"On June 16, 1947, there was a stark reminder that Endee was an isolated place when a young Wisconsin man, James Howard Lane, attempted to hold up Wellington Johnson’s grocery store. Johnson’s son-in-law, Crosby Hammons, was running the store that day and refused to give up the takings. There was a struggle during which Hammons was shot in the thigh but, gaining control of Lane’s .22 pistol, Hammons then shot Lane in the back as he tried to run to a waiting car which contained his sister, Helen, and Louis Sweatman. Lane survived and served less than two years for armed robbery, although Quay County officials reckoned it had cost them $844.36 to patch up and deliver Lane to the state penitentiary. Today, about all that remains of this once bustling little town are the foundations of Wellington Johnson’s Endee Grocery, the aforementioned restrooms and a tiny abandoned motel." This quote is courtesy of Blue Miller from her book 'Abandoned Route 66 New Mexico: Land of Trading Posts".
