Tularosa Basin has been inhabited for at least 11,000 years. There are signs of previous inhabitants in the area such as the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture, the peoples of the Archaic period, and the Formative stage.The Mescalero Apache were already living in the Tularosa Basin when the Spanish came in 1534, and Mescalero oral history says they have always lived there The Spanish built a chapel at La Luz (about 5 miles (8.0 km) from the future site of Alamogordo) in 1719, although La Luz was not settled until about 1860.
The city of Alamogordo was founded in June 1898, when the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad, headed by Charles Bishop Eddy, extended the railway to the town.Eddy influenced the design of the community, which included large wide thoroughfares and tree-lined irrigation canals.Charles Eddy's brother John Arthur Eddy named the new city Alamogordo ("large/fat cottonwood"in Spanish) after a grove of fat cottonwoods he remembered from the Pecos River area.When Alamogordo was laid out in 1898, the east-west streets were given numerical designations, while north-south streets were named after states. The present-day White Sands Boulevard was then called Pennsylvania Avenue.
Several government buildings in Alamogordo were constructed by the Works Progress Administration, a government program created in 1935 in response to the Great Depression. These include the Otero County Administration Building at 1101 New York Avenue, a Pueblo style building originally constructed as the main U.S. Post Office in 1938. The building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The main entrance portico features frescoes by Peter Hurd completed in 1942. The Post Office moved out in 1961, and the building was used by a succession of Federal agencies and was known as the Federal Building. The last Federal agency to occupy it was the United States Forest Service who used it as the headquarters of the Lincoln National Forest until
