Hammel Museum

The HAMMEL MUSEUM started as a beer garden and, in the intervening century, became successively a brewery, an ice plant, a soda bottling plant, and finally ended as an active industry still making ice. The museum is named in honor of the Hammel family, who came to Socorro in the early 1880's and built the brewery. Clarence Hammel was the last of the family to operate the business. He died in 1986. The structure was willed to the Socorro County Historical Society to become the Hammel Museum. The museum structure was built during the boom years in Socorro which began with the coming of the railroad in 1880 and ended with the closing of the mines by 1893. The museum chronicles the industrial and commercial history of those boom years.