Remembering Ludlow: Two Scholars on the Massacre, Its Descendants and Its Cellar

Episode 147 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, has host Catherine Cooper talking with Fawn-Amber Montoya and Karin Larkin. The two had published Communities of Ludlow: Collaborative Stewardship and the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission, and they talked about the massacre, how they came to it, and the people they wrote for.

The episode: "Communities of Ludlow", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

What happened at Ludlow

Larkin, summarizing, called the massacre the climax of one of the most violent episodes in U.S. labor history, and one few people know. In September 1913 thousands of southern Colorado coal miners went on strike for better living conditions, safer work and fair wages. Evicted from company-owned housing, they and their families moved into tent colonies prepared for them along the strike zone and lived there for 14 or 15 months, through one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record. Tension ran high between the strikers and the company, the militia and the Colorado National Guard policing the strike.

Ludlow was the largest colony. On April 20, 1914, gunfire swept through it. Four women and 11 children took shelter in a cellar they had dug beneath a tent. When the shooting stopped, the militia and the Guard came through and set the colony on fire. Two of the women got out; the other two and all 11 children suffocated in the cellar. Larkin said the horror woke the nation up to conditions in the mines and during strikes, and led to reforms, a congressional inquiry and changes in labor law across the country.

How each came to it

Montoya grew up with Ludlow. Her family came north from northern New Mexico in the late 1800s and settled near Trinidad, Colorado, at Camp Engle, or Engleville; she grew up in nearby Hoehne, and her first third-grade field trip was to the tent colony site. What stayed with her was a family reunion around 2005, when her great uncle, a former coal miner, went missing that morning because he had gone to Ludlow. Researching a dissertation on the region's steel mill in World War II, she kept driving past the site on the way from Texas Tech University to the Steelworks Museum of the American West, and decided Ludlow's story was not finished. Good books existed — she named Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal — so she turned to the community and its memory of the massacre. She and Larkin do not see their book as the last word, and want future scholars to stay mindful of the communities involved.

Larkin had never heard of Ludlow until she was invited onto the archeological excavation, and wondered what a tent colony could leave behind. The answer surprised her: alongside miners' ax heads and buckets were children's toys, pieces of baby bottles, heirloom dishes and canning jars with food still inside, finds that made the history personal to her.

Whose story counts

Montoya said the many voices in the book were not planned from the start. When the official commission wound down and the governor's report was written, the two did not want their work to sit on a shelf. Historians decide what becomes official history, and unless the commission's contributions and the stories it brought out were written down, they could be lost. The book reflects everyone who took part, from presenters to people who simply lent a building. One person she wishes she had included is Carolyn Newman, a Mother Jones re-enactor who runs a museum in Walsenburg, Colorado, and who reprinted newspaper coverage from 1913 and 1914 a century later.

Larkin described the scholar's problem of seeing the gaps and biases in the historical record and filling them ethically as well as accurately, sometimes without multiple lines of evidence. They deliberately put Linda Linville's family story into an academic book because historians had not merely left it out but dismissed it, and they believe descendants' accounts belong in the official telling after being shut out for so long.

Written for the descendants

Montoya said the book's readers were the commission members, the statewide committee and the lineal descendants, not other historians; what matters to her is whether those people feel it got things right, and whether it did right by the women and children who died. At the annual Ludlow memorial the two gave a copy to Mary Petrucci, granddaughter of the first Mary Petrucci, and showed her the photograph in it of her father, whose brother and sisters died at Ludlow.

For Montoya, the trauma still marks the people and the land, and the commission could not undo it; telling the story again and again has not made it hurt less, and it is the story she would most want passed to the next generation. She pointed to Bob Butero's chapter on the United Mine Workers and why the labor history still matters.

A past that stays unburied

Larkin said new things keep turning up. Renovating the cellar revealed a cross and a shield on its outer concrete wall, with no trace on the inside. The team also found a tent stake still in place, probably one of those that held down the tent over the cellar. When she sent pictures to Mary Petrucci and Linda Linville, Linville answered that the past seemed to refuse to stay buried. Larkin's point was that remembering is what keeps the history relevant, and keeps its mistakes from being repeated.

Sources

Based on the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, Episode 147, "Communities of Ludlow," produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (public domain); the guests' words are rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.