In Memory of Jed Howard

April 25, 1934 - September 22, 2017

Fmr. SENMHS President + Benefactor

Founder of nearlovingsbend.net

About Near Loving’s Bend

For twenty years as a Carlsbad, NM High School teacher, Jed Howard pursued the hobby of locating and copying old photographs of the area for the Southeastern New Mexico Historical Society. Coincidentally, this period of search corresponded to a time when thousands of small family photo shops around the US were dropping out of business due in part to the shift from the traditional household camera to the wider use of digital photography.

In Carlsbad, as the businesses closed, several passed their large collections of developed negatives to the SENM Historical Society. In addition, the town's single newspaper, the Carlsbad Current Argus, gave the SENMHS almost ten years of its final developed negatives before it, also, shifted to a new system. As a result, the SENM Historical Society has thousands of negatives in storage behind these 20,000+ photographs that offer a fairly inclusive look at 120 years in the history of this one small US town in the midst of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Accuracy: I have chosen to interview very few people. Most of this information comes instead from newspaper sources. But, I have been personally interviewed a number of times for articles about myself, and knowing what I told the reporter, I have found several inaccuracies in each and every article that appeared. I have to believe that this level of inaccuracy - increased by my own failures as a recorder - is an inevitable constant across this database. We can only hope that you will help spot and correct this misinformation.

(Edit 12/7/20: Caption inaccuracies can be submitted for correction HERE.)

Across this database many of the ages given to the individuals are followed by a question mark. This is because these are based on an assumption that this individual would have been 17 when their class graduated from High School. That is not always a correct assumption...

Jed Howard

With deep appreciation to: Mary Frances Merchant, Jim and Sue Ogden, Claibe and Rus Power