White Iron Crosses at the Dawson Cemetery

I scrutinized the wide-angle, black-and-white photograph taken inside the Phelps Dodge Mercantile in Dawson, NM, circa early 1900s.
The ceiling, supported by massive pillars, was probably 20 feet high with long windows lighting the spacious building and electric lights hanging from chains every few feet.
Employees had stacked clothes on shelves lining the aisle. Women wore Victorian-style dresses. Beside them, their little ones showed off fancy dresses or suits. The men, all except the clerk, sported debonair suits, and all wore hats.
In the mercantile, customers could buy clothes, hardware, jewelry, furniture, food, baked goods, and ice. It could have doubled for one of the fanciest stores on New York’s Fifth Avenue instead of one located in the remote hills of northeastern New Mexico.
A second photograph is a stark contrast to the first. A group of about 30 miners sit on a steep hillside beside a coal mine. Many boasted mustaches, most looked middle aged and Italian or Greek.
All wore hard hats with lamps and displayed their tools: pickaxes, buckets, and shovels. I wondered if any of those men perished in the two disastrous mining accidents and lay buried in the Dawson Cemetery, their graves marked by white iron crosses.
On the fourth day of our spring tour, we drove through the high desert country of northern New Mexico and pulled in front of the Dawson Cemetery where we could see hundreds of white iron crosses, memorializing the graves of 383 coal miners who died in nearby mines.
Other gravestones, some tilting from age, honored residents who once lived in the thriving company town of Dawson.
In 1901, John Barkley Dawson sold his coal-rich land to C. B. Eddy who kept the name, created the Dawson Fuel Company, and opened the first mine.
Dawson Fuel constructed a railroad from Tucumcari, NM, about 17 miles away, to the mine and then sold the property to the Phelps Dodge Corporation in 1905. Phelps Dodge carved out nine more mines and created a company town, building four-room, white-framed homes with electricity and running water for its miners, a contrast to the Ludlow tent town where the miners’ strike led to the violent Colorado Coal Field War.
Like Ludlow, many of the Dawson workers immigrated from Mexico and countries across Europe. Phelps Dodge, intent on keeping its families happy in such an isolated location, constructed four schools, equipping the high schools with mechanics shops, woodshops, and four years of accredited academics.
The Corporation also built an opera house, dance hall, hospital, hotel, bowling alley, swimming pool, golf course, mercantile, and churches. Dawson ran its own newspaper as well as a short-lived, but highly competitive minor league baseball team which played during the 1912 season.
Phelps Dodge was especially interested in metallurgic coke, a necessary ingredient in making steel and smelting copper.
Coke is derived from coal in coke ovens when heated to around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the ovens served another purpose. They produced carbon monoxide which the company trapped, burned, and turned into steam to produce electricity for the mines and town.
By 1913, despite its remote location, Dawson’s population ballooned to 6,000, later topping out at 9,000 with its mines becoming the center of New Mexico’s coal industry.
In 1913 alone, it produced 1.37 million tons. Remarkably, despite the diverse ethnic groups, residents got along, and they loved the town even though coal mining is labor intensive and dangerous.
Because of the danger, Phelps Dodge provided safety measures inside the mines which included huge fans and sprinkling systems in case of fire. Despite those precautions and others, Dawson experienced two major disasters, one in 1913, the other in 1923.
In the first, against company policy, a worker set off dynamite inside a mine, igniting the coal dust and causing an explosion which residents could feel in town two miles away.
Rescuers worked two days to free the trapped men, but when they took the final tally, 263 men died out of 286 with two of the rescue team also succumbing to noxious fumes. It is the second worst mining disaster in our nation.
According to the article, “The Dawson Memorial” posted by the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, “Phelps Dodge paid all funeral expenses and gave each widow $1,000 and child of a dead miner $200. Once the cause of the disaster was understood, the company implemented many safety practices to try to prevent further accidents.”
Unfortunately, the safety measures did not prevent the second explosion ten years later. A derailed mining cart knocked down timbers and an electric trolley cable with the sparks igniting the coal dust. One-hundred-and-twenty died in the 1923 accident with only two emerging the next day alive.
Despite the accidents, production continued for nearly thirty more years until Phelps Dodge closed the mines in 1950 because of the decreased demand for coal. By that time, the mines had produced 33,000,000 tons of coal.
The company sold the land and razed most of the buildings except some of the houses which they moved to other locations. Little remains of Dawson now except the cemetery.
Some sources claim the site is haunted, but Ted and I didn’t feel any hauntings as we wandered through the white iron crosses, just wonder at the town which once bloomed nearby. On the plaque detailing the town’s facilities, the last sentence reads, “There never was a town like this before, and there never will be again!”