For years, part of the Murray Hotel's history was hiding in plain sight. As work began on a new restaurant and lounge inside the Silver City landmark, the past emerged on the walls: a mural displaying cattle brands from Grant County ranchers, a remnant of the days when ranch families came into town and the Murray was one of the places where people ate, drank, socialized and did business.
The discovery fit almost perfectly with what was already planned for the space. When the restaurant opens in November, it will carry an old name — the Branding Iron Restaurant and Lounge — and revive another piece of a hotel that has increasingly found its future by reaching into its past.
That past stretches to 1938, when William D. "Billy" Murray set out to build something Silver City had never seen. Murray teamed with local businessman James S. Ryan and traveled to El Paso, where they hired architect Percy McGhee. Plans called for an Art Deco hotel with 52 guest rooms, a restaurant, coffee shop, bar and cocktail lounge, ballroom and office space. There would even be a Governor's Suite.
Rising five stories above downtown, the Murray was designed in the Streamline Moderne style, sometimes called Steamship Modern, a sleek offshoot of Art Deco that emphasized smooth surfaces and horizontal lines and reflected the 1930s fascination with speed and modern transportation.
What feels nostalgic today was decidedly modern then. That included a hand-cranked elevator, among the hotel's technological showpieces. The elevator has long since been converted to electronic operation, but the original governor mechanism remains at the top of the shaft, another piece of 1938 still tucked inside a hotel serving guests nearly nine decades later.
Construction began in April 1938 after J.E. Morgan and Sons of El Paso won the contract with a bid of $99,984. By October, the Murray was ready to show itself off. And Silver City was ready to see it.
The grand opening was Oct. 22. Organizers planned for 350 people and received 385 reservations. Guests could dial 762 — the Murray's original telephone number — to reserve a place. Admission was $2.50 for an individual and $5 for a couple, including dinner, dancing and entertainment. Dinner menus came encased in copper from the Santa Rita mine. Gov. Clyde Tingley attended and he and his wife became the first guests to stay in the Governor's Suite.
But the Murray's importance to Silver City would not ultimately be measured by the people who slept there. It was the people who didn't.
Silver Citians came to the Murray for bridge games and baby showers, weddings and family dinners. They attended meetings in the Martha Room and dances in the ballroom. The Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Kiwanis and Elks made the hotel a regular gathering place. During World War II, servicemen from the Deming Air Base spent leave there, while the hotel hosted charity events, supported the Red Cross and sponsored New Mexico State Teachers College, which eventually became Western New Mexico University.
The Murray had become what its founder envisioned — not simply a hotel in the middle of Silver City, but part of the life happening around it. Sometimes that life even came through the front door on horseback.
Murray named a ground-floor room for his granddaughter, Martha Ryan. In one of the hotel's best-known photographs, Ryan sits astride a horse inside the lobby. According to the story preserved in the hotel's history, pieces of an inner tube were wrapped around the horse's hooves to keep it from scratching the floor. The nervous horse managed to leave a different kind of mark instead.
The hotel continued growing. Business was strong enough that Murray and Ryan undertook a $357,000 expansion in 1948, again using McGhee as architect. The kitchen was enlarged, a ballroom was added and the lobby was remodeled. Even the hand-operated elevator joined the modern age with push-button technology.
The ballroom would become one of the Murray's enduring connections with the community. Dances filled it through the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Meredith Neal and His Boot Heel Boys were among the popular bands that played there. Battle of the Bands competitions drew crowds and rivalries fierce enough that some longtime residents remembered not only the music and fun but an occasional fight.
Downstairs, another gathering place was developing its own reputation.
The Copper Lounge became the Branding Iron. Ranch families coming into Silver City on weekends met friends there or ate at the hotel restaurant. The bar became known as a place where ranchers and politicians gathered, and business deals were made.
Decades later, those ranching connections would be waiting on the walls for someone to uncover them. But first, the Murray nearly disappeared.
The Ryan family sold the hotel to the Milner Hotel chain in 1963. Investment in the property declined. Organizations that had routinely met at the Murray began building or finding meeting places of their own. A new hotel along U.S. 180 brought competition that reflected a changing America, one increasingly built around automobiles and highways rather than downtown hotels.
By the 1970s, portions of the Murray were no longer usable. Water damage closed the fourth and fifth floors, leaving only the second and third operating for a time. Around 1980, the hotel closed. The Branding Iron survived for nearly another decade, at one point operating under another name, but eventually it, too, disappeared.
For more than two decades, the Murray stood vacant.
The contrast with its glory years was stark. A building that once hosted governors, weddings, dances and civic clubs became home to pigeons and bats. Graffiti replaced artwork. Local teenagers sometimes slipped inside the abandoned hotel for a midnight scare.
The photographs are perhaps more jarring than the description. One image in the hotel's history booklet shows the lobby in 2001, its walls deteriorated and its once-polished interior barely recognizable. Another shows a darkened hallway with peeling walls and debris on the floor.
Then Kurt and Julianna Albershardt saw something else. The California couple purchased the building in 2005 and began the long process of restoring it. The job took years, but by 2012 the Murray was operating as a hotel again for the first time in more than two decades.
Its return wasn't about making the Murray exactly what it had been in 1938.
It couldn't be. Travelers who once considered an elevator an amenity now expect Wi-Fi. Today's Murray is smoke-free and pet-friendly, its rooms were refreshed with new carpeting and furniture in 2024, and the building has been adapted repeatedly to accommodate what modern guests expect.
But the Murray's age is not something its caretakers have tried to disguise.
Instead, its history has become part of the experience.
The ballroom again hosts weddings, celebrations and community gatherings, accommodating events of up to 150 people. Historic images and artwork help tell the story of the building and the community around it. The hotel once again provides a downtown base for travelers exploring Silver City's galleries, shops, museums and restaurants or venturing farther into southwest New Mexico.
And now the Branding Iron Branding Iron Restaurant and Lounge is coming back.
There is a symmetry to that revival.
Near the Murray's beginning, its creators believed a first-class hotel could help bring tourists and business travelers to Silver City, putting their dollars into the community at a time when the country was emerging from the Great Depression. Today, the Murray is again positioned as a place from which visitors can experience downtown Silver City and explore the Gila, Pinos Altos, City of Rocks and other destinations across the region.
But the new Branding Iron Restaurant and Lounge adds something more.
Its name is not simply an attempt to manufacture Old West nostalgia inside an old building. The original Branding Iron actually existed here. Ranchers really gathered here. Deals really were made here. And the cattle brands that inspired the new restaurant were found on the walls.
In 2020, years before the current project, a history of the Murray produced by the hotel said ideas were being discussed about someday bringing the bar back to life. Six years later, that idea is becoming something tangible.
It is an approach that suits a building that has survived by changing without completely letting go of what it was.
The hand crank gave way to an electronic elevator. Guest rooms acquired televisions and Wi-Fi. A building that spent more than 20 years abandoned again welcomes travelers. The ballroom where generations of Silver Citians once danced again fills for celebrations.
And behind walls, under paint and within the machinery at the top of an elevator shaft, pieces of the old Murray keep turning up.
They aren't merely reminders of what the hotel used to be. Increasingly, they're helping determine what it becomes next.
