Banquet Room

Immediately off the lobby adjacent to the Corn Exchange Cantina, and once prominently known as the “Grape Room”, this dining room was the original La Posta Cafe in 1939. With just four tables and a small kitchen (with no running water), Katy Griggs-Camuñez would grow La Posta to one of the finest dining establishments in the southwest. But the history behind this room prior to 1939 is even more notable.

During the 1850’s and 1860’s, the Butterfield Stagecoach Line used this room for their headquarters. During the 1870’s and 1880’s the Banquet Room, then a part of the famous Corn Exchange Hotel, was a very popular upscale restaurant serving several varieties of fish, seafood and steaks. It was particularly popular to bachelors who would look forward to Augustina Davis’s Christmas dinner every Christmas Eve.

Many notable personalities of the time dined there including Pablo Melendres (one of the Mesilla Valley founders), Colonel A.J. Fountain and a young man named William Bonney (Billy the Kid). The room was later occupied by the Billy the Kid Museum. Many of the artifacts once displayed there are now displayed one block away in the Gadsden Museum.