300,000-Acre Historic Home on Range 4 Sale

A New Mexico cattle ranch only slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island and encompassing a mountain range, bat caves, vineyards and room for 3,000 head of cattle is up for sale.

The historic Armendaris Ranch, the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, is scheduled to go on the block May 9 in an unusual simulcast auction to be held in Albuquerque, Los Angeles and New York.

Opening bid for this 300,000-acre sea of sagebrush where deer and antelope still roam is $4.6 million. But potential buyers beware: Those who have looked at the land include some really big spenders from around the world.

“We’ve given tours of the place to Japanese corporate executives thinking about raising cattle to ship home where beef is $35 a pound,” said Steven L. Good, president of Sheldon Good & Co., the Chicago-based realty firm handling the sale.

“We’ve also had guys out here with belt buckles the size of silver serving platters,” Good said, “as well as blue pin-stripe bankers dodging cow paddies in their wing-tip shoes.”

The well-heeled interested in looking the place over, however, need not worry about smudging their shoes. The realty company has a fleet of airplanes and helicopters available to provide aerial tours that typically take two hours to complete.

“I suspect there will be a whole variety of potential buyers at the auction--Americans, Europeans, Asians, South Americans, even conservation groups,” Good said.

“The bid that is greatest will get the ranch,” he said, adding that the place will be sold either in one piece or in three huge parcels.

The ranch, which lies 200 miles south of Albuquerque and just to the northeast of the town of Truth or Consequences, was originally granted by King Ferdinand VII of Spain to a garrison lieutenant named Pedro Ascue de Armendaris in 1819.

The property includes a 250,000-year-old lava flow from a nearby volcano that formed the Jornada Bat Cave, home to 5 million Mexican free-tail bats.

Also on the grounds, but excluded from the sale, is Ft. Craig, which was built in 1854 to protect westbound miners from Indians. The fort sits seven miles from Val Verde, the site of a Feb. 21, 1862 Civil War battle.

Over the last 100 years, the property has been managed as a cattle ranch by 10 owners--among them William Randolph Hearst and Alfred Hitchcock. It is now owned by Oppenheimer Industries Inc. of Kansas City, which hopes to use proceeds from the sale to build houses and resort hotels on 86,000 acres of property on Elephant Butte Reservoir.

“It is so vast there are several things careful management can do with this property,” said Robert Levy, corporate attorney for Oppenheimer.

Such pronouncements have raised hopes in sleepy Truth or Consequences of new development that could boost the economy of the town of 7,500 that took its name from an old television program on a dare in 1950.

“We’re all for the auction,” said Jim Streicher, editor of a Truth or Consequences newspaper called The Herald. “We’re hopeful they (Oppenheimer) sell the property so they can start spending some of that money around here.”