Remembering Dawson

“I cried and cried,” says Georgia Maryol of the first time she came to the Dawson Cemetery. “I knew I was looking at history.” Maryol, whose parents were born in Greece, grew up in Albuquerque during the 1940s. What was once the Southwest’s largest coal-mining operation was by then on the wane, a faint blip on Maryol’s radar. “I do remember this old Greek guy talking to one of my father’s cousins, telling him he knew a man who worked in a coal mine in New Mexico,” she recalls. More than 50 years passed before she learned the lost tale of Dawson’s Greeks, who, alongside other European and Mexican immigrants, constituted a large number of foreigners who were killed working in the mines.

Though none of her relatives are buried there, she joined around 400 former Dawsonites and their descendants this past Labor Day weekend for the Dawson reunion picnic. This year’s biennial event took place 74 years after the Phelps Dodge Corporation closed the mines, kicked out the residents, and made the place into a ghost town. That it remains, except for one day every even-numbered year, when the Colfax Land & Cattle Company, the current owner of the old townsite, allows visitors to drive through the usually locked gate after they sign a waiver.

Near the remnants of a few company buildings, multigenerational families in matching Dawson T-shirts usually set up awnings, tables, chairs, and grills starting at 8 a.m. For one day, these Dawsonites get to come back together, sifting through vivid memories of a place that still clings to their hearts.

NINETY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Petra Tovar Sánchez holds a photo of five smiling Dawson High School girls on a senior-class trip to Carlsbad. “She was Caucasian, she was Italian, she was Austrian, she was born in France, and I’m a Mexican,” she says, pointing to each friend. “I don’t think we ever thought seriously about how all our families were from different places,” she adds.

Sánchez’s immigrant parents met and married in Dawson, where she grew up as the youngest of nine. Her father arrived there as a youth with his family of mine workers in 1904, three years after rancher John Barkley Dawson sold his coal-rich part of the Maxwell Land Grant to associates who created the Dawson Fuel Company. Around the same time, a job on the bustling new Dawson Railway—which ran from Tucumcari straight to the mines—brought Sánchez’s maternal grandfather to the young boomtown.

Dawson’s acquisition by the Phelps Dodge Company in 1905 made it a vital supplier of coking fuel to the corporation’s copper-smelting plants in southern Arizona. Coal was the energy king of the Southwest, and in 1913, Dawson’s mines produced 1.37 million tons of it, helping Colfax County alone to net roughly three-quarters of the state’s annual haul that year.

The growing mining camp was distinguishing itself in other ways. “What other coal-town school like that would have an auto mechanic shop, a wood shop, four years of Spanish and English, and history and chemistry and biology?” says Sánchez of her high school. The only coal community school accredited in the state at the time, Dawson teachers were paid better than most, and its sports teams competed for big titles. “The education system alone was worth being there.” Sánchez left Dawson for good in 1947 to attend college at New Mexico Highlands University.

“It had the largest opera house in the state,” says Nick Pappas, author of Crosses of Iron: The Tragic Story of Dawson, New Mexico, and Its Twin Mining Disasters (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). His book describes the sold-out opening night in 1907 of the facility, which also housed a billiards room, dance hall, bowling alley, and other gathering spots for the 5,000 townspeople. With an influx of workers on the railroad and other itinerant guests, the population peaked at around 9,000 in later years, making Dawson one of the largest cities in New Mexico. “They had two churches, a swimming pool, a golf course, a hospital and dispensary,” Pappas marvels. “They had citizenship classes.”

Many of the new workers were lured to America by company recruiters who reached them in countries as far flung as China or Germany. Racial incidents were reportedly few—except when, as former Dawson pharmacist Dewey Tidwell remembers in a 1981 New Mexico Magazine article, “some of the Texans and Oklahomans objected to the presence of the Negroes and the Mexicans. Those with Southern learnings kept their prejudices to themselves or soon got their walking papers, for Phelps Dodge did not tolerate racial discrimination in Dawson.”

With its hundreds of white-framed houses carefully fanned out over the foothills, the orderly company town defied mining-camp stereotypes of tar-paper shacks and dusty urchin children. Dawson also escaped the labor disputes that imploded in camps like Ludlow, Colorado. There, coal company guards and National Guard soldiers collaborated in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, gunning down a tent city of 21 striking miners and their families. Seventy miles to the south, around the same time, Dawson’s tree-lined neighborhoods bore names like Capitán Hill and Back Street, where you could rent a comfortable home with a yard for $8.50 a month. The stately public buildings in the center, constructed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style of architecture, resembled those of a bustling midwestern city.

The dramatic irony of the entire operation, in hindsight, lurked in the Dawson mines’ supposedly state-of-the-art protection systems. Safety features instituted by Phelps Dodge included high-capacity fans, a fully outfitted rescue station and trained first-aid teams, and a complex water-circulation network in case of fire. But none of them ultimately stood up to dangerously flammable coal dust and a miner’s split-second mistake.

THE TOWN’S MOST HORRIFIC tragedy struck on October 22, 1913, when the ground rumbled shortly after 3 p.m. A crack likened to a rifle shot rang out. “From the mouth of No. 2, a dragonlike tongue of flame spewed hundreds of feet into the sky before giving way to billowing clouds of dense black smoke,” Pappas writes in Crosses of Iron. Emergency sirens pierced the remote valley.

From the nearby mining camps of Sugarite, Van Houten, Koehler, and Yankee, fellow miners saddled their horses, rushing to aid the hundreds of Dawsonites trapped in the gas-filled No. 2 mine. Eager to increase his day’s yield, on which his pay depended, a careless mine worker had set off a dynamite charge that ignited the airborne coal dust lingering in the tunnels. The fire instantly killed all oxygen and poisoned the remaining air. After more than a day of frantic searching by a trained rescue team, the last survivor was found. He was the 23rd man to make it out of the mine alive. Following a month of agonizing recovery efforts, the death toll was final: 261 miners and two rescuers.

“As each body is recovered, it’s placed on a wooden skid and drawn to the mouth of the mine by a mule,” the Raton Range reported. “Some bodies are burned almost to ash. Others are blown to pieces by the explosion.” The event is still known as the second-worst mining accident in U.S. history.

A decade later, Dawson cemented its reputation as “the most tragedy ridden camp in New Mexico.” Around 2:30 p.m. on February 8, 1923, the boom that reverberated through the valley struck a familiar chord of fear among residents. At mine No. 1, half-ton boulders of reinforced concrete shattered “like paper being blown to atoms,” the Raton Register described. The shaft collapsed inward, trapping 122 miners inside.

Nearly a day after the devastating explosion, Filomeno diMartino and Charles George Skandale walked out of the mine alive. After the underground blast cut the lights, the two quickly tore up their sweaters, soaked them in a nearby bucket of water, and tied them around their noses and mouths. “Then we just sat there by the water bucket and waited,” Skandale told newspapers. “We knew we were dead men if we moved and got into the current of gas.” After a harrowing night of waiting in near silence, the men felt the sweetness of freshly ventilated air filter into the shaft. They began moving toward the mine entrance, picking their way over boulders, fallen timber, and the dead bodies of their coworkers. When he emerged, Skandale’s wife rushed to his side from the gathered crowd. She tearfully threw her arms around him.

“You’re the only ones, you’re the only ones to live,” she kept repeating.

Then, as might be expected of the co-founder of the United Farm Workers, she praises the power of labor unions. “Wherever workers are, they should be safe, and they should have the best conditions possible. I know a lot of us come from different places, but I just want to ask all of you to share the story of Dawson, New Mexico. What this town was like, what it meant for people.”

A little while before she spoke, I’d asked Huerta what her memories of Dawson meant to her. She left the town as a child when her parents divorced, though she returned twice to visit relatives (and see movies at the first-run theater) in the 1940s. “Both my mother and my father were born here,” she tells me, her eyes shining. “Different ethnic groups and people from different countries all came together here. There was just a very joyful and humane spirit about the town.”

Behind a large Italian flag on the other side of the gathering, Pietro Scarafiotti is doing his best to keep that community spirit alive. Talking to a group from a Ratón senior center, he points out a remaining building that once supplied the three-story mercantile. Then he shows the gathered crowd an underground map of all 10 Dawson mines, pointing to exactly where the disasters occurred.

Scarafiotti, who runs the 855-member Dawson Facebook group, likely has the largest personal collection of Dawson artifacts and memorabilia going. Six of his relatives worked at the mines. “The sense of home was very great here,” he says. “That’s what brings most people back.”

Some individuals approach Scarafiotti with scraps of paper. Many seem new to the reunion. They write the name of their deceased connection from Dawson, along with their own contact information. To each person, Scarafiotti promises to check his collected housing and employment records, salvaged after bulldozers razed most of the town in the winter of 1950. He’ll scan them for tidbits about their ancestors that are otherwise lost to history.

“Helen Donati was your grandmother?” he says to one woman. “I’ll tell you what my grandmother told me. She said the best sauce recipe she ever made was Helen’s,” Scarafiotti shares. “They were always together,” the lady replies fondly.

Others come over to show off objects they’ve found throughout the day: a half-gallon wine bottle made of vintage glass, a 1900 penny. Over at the table where three members of the Ratón-based Bacca family make up half of the reunion committee, a few raffle winners will take home other town artifacts: miners’ headlamps and a dynamite blasting box.

More skeletons of Dawson are scattered across the plains of eastern New Mexico, since the company didn’t raze all the homes. Many were sold to residents of Cimarrón, Maxwell, Ratón, Springer, Clayton, and Tucumcari, who purchased the miners’ houses for $400 apiece and had them relocated intact with the help of I-beams. Roger Sanchez is the director of the Ratón Museum, which has close to 800 photographs of the old town. He says the DNA of the houses, which went as far east as Oklahoma, is instantly recognizable: “They’re just a square four-room house with a chimney in the middle.” Springer resident Nancy Jesperson has lived for nearly 50 years in what is said to have been the Dawson company doctor’s house. “My husband’s grandfather worked for the rural electric here when it was moved,” she says. “He told us, ‘I helped hold the high lines up for that house.’”

Stories wind throughout the hot afternoon as the picnic powers down. On a hike through the old neighborhoods, I meet people from Idaho, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles County, and Mesa, Arizona. The Andazola family stands out among the crowd in their matching red T-shirts, which are emblazoned with a miner’s pick. “We found my great-grandmother’s smashed tea set here once,” one woman calls out to her children, who are climbing a steep hill.

I start to notice a veil of glossy nostalgia that descends over people as they chat about Dawson. “It was the best place I ever lived,” says retired Spanish teacher Joseph Padilla, who is attending the reunion from his home in Roseburg, Oregon. He was 12 years old when Dawson closed. I ask him how it felt to come back for his first reunion in 2000, to visit the town of his boyhood, a place he vividly remembers that no longer exists. “For me, it was quite emotional,” he replies. “We were such a close-knit community. Everybody liked everybody.”

I ask Pappas why he thinks the stories of this place—the site of two such devastating accidents, from which the town never truly recovered—are so overwhelmingly positive. He recalls an early interview he did for the book, when multiple former residents regaled him with fond memories. After a few hours, Pappas told the group, “All right, I haven’t heard one bad thing about what it was like to grow up in a coal town. I haven’t heard one bad thing about Phelps Dodge.”

He says, “A woman looked me right in the eye and said, ‘And you never will.’”

Some lament the dwindling numbers at the reunion, which are down in attendance from 600 people in 2022. But Carlos Tenorio, a junior at the University of New Mexico, promises to keep the tradition alive for as long as he can. Having attended his first Dawson picnic in 2004 when he was just seven months old, his enthusiasm for a place he’s never lived is so great that he named the family dog after it.

“It’s a chance for me to feel close to my grandpa and uncle again,” he says of the several reunions he’s attended. Tenorio’s great-uncle Angelo Muñoz was known as the unofficial mayor of Dawson, thanks to his devotion to the biennial gatherings, which he loved going to right up until his death in October 2018.

“It feels like home,” says Tenorio, who grew up being entertained by tales of the unusual place his family hails from. “I don’t know how else to say it. I can walk down that wide street and say, ‘Oh, the mercantile was here. The hotel’s here. The Snake Saloon was located over there.’”

Back at the cemetery, I end the day by watching the New Mexico chapter of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association dedicate a Day of Remembrance plaque commemorating the scores of Greek immigrant miners killed in the explosions. After, I wander the children and infant graves at the back of the cemetery, noticing the wild gourds that vine among some hundred-year-old plots.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” an elderly man toting an oxygen machine says as I leave the cemetery. He’s holding hands with a woman, and they seem to have just arrived. He squints toward the line of cars snaking from the old Dawson townsite, soon to be locked up for another two years.

“Now where was the town?” he wonders aloud. I smile. I want to tell him that everyone’s taking it back home.

Read more: Levi Romero, New Mexico's first poet laureate, shares his grandfather's story as a traveling produce vendor and the lasting bonds he formed with the communities he served.

Managing Editor Molly Boyle thanks her history-teacher dad for first showing her the Dawson Cemetery a dozen or so years ago.