According to the Taos News, on the first Saturday of September, Donna Howell spent the day hanging from catwalks inside a three-story adobe mill, greasing roughly 200 oil reservoirs so a water-powered flour mill that hasn't run commercially in eight decades could spin, whirr and clank for a crowd. Howell calls herself the Cleveland Roller Mill Museum's "chief grease monkey," and told the paper the prep work left her "too tired to burn my clothes when I got home." Her reward was a room full of visitors watching 125-year-old machinery separate bran from endosperm, a state historian giving a music-infused lecture on the valley's history at noon, and a trolley running hourly loops to two other historic mills down the road.
Three weeks later, on the last weekend of September, Mora MainStreet holds Fall Fest, its signature fundraiser.
If you live in the Mora Valley, you already know both weekends exist. What's less obvious, unless you've watched the pattern for a few years, is that they're not two versions of the same thing. One is the valley's public face. The other is how the valley pays for it.
The Weekend That Gets the Trolley
The Las Vegas Optic reported that the fourth annual Valley of the Mills Tour ran September 5 and 6 this year. It's become the closest thing Mora County has to a signature tourism event. The tour connects three mills built in the second half of the 1800s, back when flour from the Mora Valley traveled as far as California and helped supply Fort Union during the Civil War: the St. Vrain Mill, a stone mill dating to 1864 that anchors the Mora Arts and Cultural Compound; the Cleveland Roller Mill, a water-powered mill built at the end of the 1800s whose original equipment is still intact and operable; and La Cueva Mill, now part of the Houser Raspberry Ranch.
All three are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and Mora County is the only place in New Mexico with four standing mills, according to reporting from the Las Vegas Optic. A fourth, the Gordon-Sanchez Mill, still stands but isn't part of the public tour.
The event has real institutional weight behind it. Free trolley rides between the mills, run by sponsors including the Mora Creative Council and the Mora County Economic Development Corporation, mean visitors don't need a car to see all three sites in a day. State historian Rob Martinez gave a lecture titled "Lo de Mora: A History of the Valley" at the Cleveland Roller Mill on the Saturday, and author Virginia Sánchez discussed her book on the history of the valley the following day. At La Cueva, the Houser family runs the Razz Café out of their restored ranch, serving breakfast and lunch with fresh pastries, smoked brisket and huevos rancheros while roasting and selling green chile on-site.
Jose Rivera, the retired University of New Mexico professor who helped organize the tour and establish a historic marker for the valley's mills, has been explicit about what the event is for. It isn't just heritage tourism. It's a deliberate act of recovery. "We need to have activities to bring back the pride of the Mora Valley, as well as the unity," Rivera told the Las Vegas Optic, connecting the tour directly to the aftermath of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.
That's the version of Mora that shows up in print. The Optic covered it. The Taos News sent a reporter who watched Howell give tours and wrote up her account of the prep work. The Los Alamos Daily Post has covered it in prior years too. It's a genuinely good event, and it deserves the coverage.
The Weekend That Helps Pay for It
The tour itself doesn't fund the preservation work it showcases. The St. Vrain Mill Preservation and Historical Foundation is still working toward full ADA accessibility, adding a ramp and accessible restroom so the mill can open to more visitors. That kind of work costs money, and it isn't coming from Labor Day weekend ticket sales, most of which are $10 cash-only museum admissions and trolley fares.
It's coming from events like the one Mora MainStreet holds three weeks later. Fall Fest, which the organization describes on its own site as its "signature fundraising event," lands on the last weekend of September as a harvest-season celebration built around community members, entertainment and food.
It isn't an isolated case. Earlier this year, Mora MainStreet also held a Cleveland Mill Benefit Dance in August and a pop-up boutique at Parish Hall the same weekend as the mills tour, selling quilts, soaps, artisan breads and locally made goods under the banner "Made in Mora." These smaller events serve a local audience.
Mora's preservation work has several sources of support. The tour is a shared showcase, funded and staffed in large part by volunteers like Howell. The year-round budget for keeping these buildings standing comes from residents showing up to a benefit dance in Cleveland, buying a quilt at Parish Hall, or spending a Saturday at Fall Fest. The tour draws attention, and smaller events help sustain the preservation work.
The Rest of the Season, If You're Making Plans
For anyone in the valley wondering what's actually open between now and the first hard freeze, the pattern holds beyond festival weekends too. The Cleveland Roller Mill Museum runs weekends only through November 1, giving you a handful more Saturdays and Sundays to catch a tour before it closes for the season. Howell gives them year-round, but the crowds thin out considerably once September ends.
For groceries, the Los de Mora Local Growers' Cooperative on NM-518 remains the valley's answer to a problem it was built to solve. When Russell's Discount Foods, the town's last grocery store, closed in 2017, a collective of local farmers that had been organizing since 2012 opened a farm stand with refrigerators the following year, less than two miles from the Cleveland mill. It now receives shipments from two distributors and stocks everything from local beef and honey to name-brand pantry staples, open daily except in winter. It's the kind of infrastructure that doesn't show up in a tourism write-up but matters more to daily life than any single festival weekend.
For a sit-down meal, Main Street Grill, owned by Mora natives Bengie and Patricia Regensberg, hosts local musicians on Friday evenings from 5:30 to 7:00, though the kitchen closes at 7 sharp. If you want something quieter and more traditional, Hatcha's Café serves New Mexican fare most days but is closed Saturdays.
None of this is a spectacle. It's a small valley economy running on a handful of families and volunteers who show up for each other repeatedly. The tour draws attention, and these everyday efforts help keep the mills standing.
Mike Sanford spends a lot of time in places like this, where the character of a community shows up more clearly in who runs the benefit dance than in any listing description. If you're thinking about property in the Mora Valley or anywhere else in northern New Mexico's rural stretch, and you want someone who actually knows the difference between the two, Michael Sanford would be glad to talk. Let's Connect.
