The Coal Town That Came Back

State Road 14 leaves the edge of Albuquerque at Tijeras, crosses the low pass, and runs north through country that has been mined, grazed, and abandoned back into beauty. This is the Turquoise Trail, the old two-lane between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and it still has the look of a road the interstate let go of. Piñon and juniper crowd the ditches. Chamisa turns gold in the fall. The mountains change names as the road goes — Sandias, Ortiz, Cerrillos — all the same dun color until the afternoon light turns them blue.

Madrid, New Mexico, appears in a valley without knocking. Painted company houses in long rows. A big false-front building left over from the days when one business owned everything. Hand-painted signs, gallery doors, the smell of piñon smoke in the cold months. In summer the town is thick with slow traffic; in January it is so quiet that the sound of a porch door closing carries the length of the main street.

The valley narrows, the junipers lean east away from the wind, and then the rooftops crowd the roadside as if they had been waiting a long time for company. The name is pronounced MAD-rid, flat and final. Nobody in the town says it the other way. On that much, everyone agrees.

The Town the Company Owned

For the first half of the twentieth century, this valley made coal, and the coal made the trains go. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway ran steam locomotives, and a steam locomotive is hungrier than anything else on wheels. The coal came out of the ground in this valley, up through the workings to the tipple, and down the line to every depot the Santa Fe touched. The town grew up around that traffic like rust on a nail.

It was a company town in the full sense of the phrase. The company owned the mine and the mountain, the houses and their paint, the store and its prices, the school, the hospital, the water in the pipes. It owned the whistle that woke the town before dawn and the bell that sent the afternoon shift up the hill. Wages came partly in scrip, good at exactly one store, and the store was the company's. On Saturday nights the pay went back into the same ledgers it came out of. The store stocked what a whole town might need in a year, and in a company town that meant nearly everything.

In the mine the dark was total, the way darkness only is underground, and a man carried his light on his hat. The crews knew the mountain by its sounds — the timber groaning, the water ticking, the coal settling — the way sailors know a ship. At its height the town held thousands, crowded up the draws and along the rows. Miners came from other coal camps that had failed, which is to say from everywhere, and they brought the accents of those places with them. The valley made room. The company built everything a workforce needed and nothing more, and the town inside the company became a real one anyway. Families raised children who swore they would not go into the mines, and then the children went into the mines. The mountain took men the way mines do, and the town buried its own and went back up the hill.

Winters were the season the place had been built for. Coal smoke and piñon smoke mixed over the roofs. Snow came early and stayed late and made a white quiet over a valley that never otherwise shut up. All year the railroad wanted tonnage, and the mine gave it, and the town burned its own product and called it prosperity.

The Emptying

Diesel came to the railroad in the years after the Second World War. A diesel locomotive carries its power in its belly and asks for oil at a fueling dock; it has no firebox waiting for coal. The orders thinned, stopped, and then stopped for good. One by one the mines shut, and by the 1950s the last of them was through.

The company left. It took what it could carry and sold the rest. Buildings that had held whole families were bought for the lumber in them and hauled away on flatbeds, heading down the road to towns that could still use them. A house on blocks is a lonely thing, and the road out of Madrid was busy with lonely things for a while. The great store went dark. The tipple went still. A town of thousands came down to a few dozen people who had no money to leave and, after a while, no wish to. They kept gardens in the company soil and kept the town's story straight for anyone who came asking.

For twenty years Madrid was the kind of place a person could drive through twice and never once notice. The town kept its name on the maps and in the county records, which is all a place needs to stay real on paper. The rest of it — the rows of company houses, the false-front store, the sealed mouths of the mines — sat on in the hard high light. The interstate pulled the world away along the river, and the old road went quiet.

Bought Back, House by House

Then, in the 1970s, the buying began. Not by a company, and not all at once. It began with the people who find towns like this one — potters wanting a cheap shed and a kiln, painters wanting the light, veterans wanting the silence, sons and daughters of miners wanting the ground they remembered. They bought the leftover company houses for the price of a season's worry. They bought the big store by the room and filled it with worktables. They painted over the company colors and put up hand-lettered signs in desert colors: turquoise, adobe, the green of a cottonwood in June.

For most of its life, the land under Madrid had one owner, and ownership had been a kind of company policy. Now it passed to many hands. Every sale was small, and every sale mattered. The town was bought back, in the end, not by a man with a ledger but by the people inside it, a little at a time, the way a bucket fills under a slow tap. Some of the old miners stayed in their houses to the end. Newcomers learned the names of the seams and the old workings, because the ground under town still holds the coal, and the town has decided not to be surprised by its own ground again.

The mining is over, but the work shows. The hillsides behind the town display their cuts and waste dumps the way a face shows old weather. The company store, too big for the town that rattles around inside it, came back by the piece, one door at a time. In the long dark of December, windows glow the way they have always glowed against the winter. The town is not a museum, though a visitor could mistake it for one on a slow Tuesday. It is a working place — studios with the lights on late, kitchens with the radio going, a street of small businesses that open and close by their own logic. The seasonal traffic comes and goes. The town stays.

What no company ever owned was the town's idea of itself. Madrid was mined, emptied, sold off, and bought back by the only people who could afford to love it properly. It sits at the high end of the Turquoise Trail, by its own name and its own rules, burning through the winters quietly. The main road carries the world somewhere else now. The town does not care. It has already been somewhere else, and it came back.