Dr. Jerry Wallace, Director of the Public History program at NMSU, will present a lecture called “The Ideal Spot to Live is in the Valley” -- Rosedale Farms and the Making of an El Paso Midcentury Neighborhood" at the November 21 meeting of the Dona Ana County Historical Society. The event is free and open to the public. In 1922, Winchester Cooley converted his land into a modern subdivision calling it Rosedale Farms and by 1929 El Paso's newest neighborhood had over 200 one-to-three acre lots. Near the end of the 1920s, Cooley partnered with a local real estate agent M.L. Cadwallader and local developer Roy W. Carey, branding the new neighborhood as "The Ideal Spot to Live...."
What Cooley, Cadwallader and Carey did was create a rural refuge for El Pasoans in a rapidly expanding cityscape. In the early 1930s, new branding and marketing schemes billed Rosedale Farms as an experiment of farm living in the city.