User:Pbritti/archived/Berwind, Colorado

– Campaignbox Coal Wars Berwind is a ghost town in Las Animas County, Colorado, nestled in Berwind Canyon 3.1 mi southwest of Ludlow and 15 mi northwest of Trinidad. The settlement was founded in 1888 as a company town for the Colorado Coal & Iron Company and, from 1892, the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. It was a battle site in October 1913 during the Colorado Coalfield War and housed a Colorado National Guard encampment during the latter stages of the conflict.

Description
Founded as a coal mining company town in 1888 for the Colorado Coal & Iron Company, the settlement was named for then-company president Edward J. Berwind. Berwind was also the founder of the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company. Berwind, West Virginia–another one-time Berwind-owned company town–is named for him.

The site is located in Berwind Canyon and is composed of several ruined structures. A neck of the Colorado and Southern railroad ran to the town, connecting it with nearby Ludlow and the coking furnaces in Tabasco. A row of structures along what used to be the main road are still visible and largely intact, as is the the old jail.

The proximity of other mines and settlements makes it difficult to delineate the boundaries of Berwind and Tabasco. During their operation, the communities shared amenities, including a schoolhouse named the Corwin School that once served 65 students at a time.

Founding
Berwind was among many company towns established in the Berwind Canyon area in the last two decades of the 1800s. Others include Aguilar and Tabasco. After the merger of the Colorado Coal & Iron Company with the Colorado Fuel Company under Henry S. Grove, the town was assimilated into the new Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. By 1903, CF&I was the largest coal producer in the Rocky Mountain region. That same year, partial ownership of the company and its assets–including Berwind–were transferred from John C. Osgood to John D. Rockefeller, who would later gift his portion of CF&I too his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. Roughly 67 percent of the coal mined at Berwind was taken to the CF&I steel mill in Pueblo, the Minnequa Steel Works.

The mine at Berwind, also known as El Moro No. 2, would operate from 1890 to 1928, when the town closed. During those years, CF&I reported the mine had produced 9,076,980 tons of coal. In 1912, the combined total of the Berwind and Tabasco mines and their 300 miners was 362,939 tons of coal, with miners receiving roughly $600 per annum. The first miners at Berwind were Welsh and English men who introduced their methods and unionization under the Knights of Labor, though such organizing was prohibited. The miners following the 1903 Colorado Labor Wars were predominantly immigrants from Eastern Europe, with Greeks, Italians, Poles, Germans, Austrians, Cretans, and Slavs coming to coalfields in Berwind Canyon and across Colorado and Utah.

Colorado Coalfield War and Ludlow Massacre
Mining conditions in the southern Colorado coalfields proved extremely hazardous during the decade preceding the 1913-14 Colorado Coalfield War, with fatalities twice the national average. In 1910, two explosions at CF&I mines, first in Primero then Starkville, killed 131.

Supported by the national organization and Mother Jones, CF&I coal miners in southern Colorado established a local United Mine Workers of American (UMWA) chapter and declared a strike on 23 September 1913. Shortly thereafter, many miners were evicted from the company towns. These evicted miners and their families constructed tent colonies, then largest of which was found outside Ludlow near Berwind. Violence between the strikers and CF&I–with its support from mine guards, detectives, local police, and the Colorado National Guard–began before the end of September and escalated into October.

On 24 October 1913, following a mass deputization in Walsenburg to bolster their numbers against the strikers, a group of about 20 deputies and other militia led by Karl Linderfelt went to guard a section house in Ludlow only to come under fire from Berwind Canyon. From the militia, a National Guardsman named Joe Nimmo was shot and killed. The militia chased the strikers into Berwind only to become pinned down by rifle fire. A relief unit of 40 militia and Baldwin-Felts detectives armed with a machine gun succeeded in rescuing the remaining militia as a snowstorm rolled in.

As the winter intensified, violence became less frequent and the majority of the National Guard withdrew north to Colorado Springs and Denver, leaving only some militia and guardsmen behind in a series of encampments, including one led by Linderfelt at Berwind, another led by Patrick Hamrock at Ludlow, and a third more distantly at Cedar Hill.

On 20 April 1914, the day after the celebrations of Eastern Orthodox Easter, fighting began between strikers and the militia encamped at Ludlow. A planned signal explosion notified Linderfelt and his men to move from Berwind to the fighting. The battle, known as the Ludlow Massacre, saw a half-dozen armed and unarmed strikers killed. Three children and eleven women were also killed, most by a fire that burnt the entire tent colony. One National Guard soldier was killed.

Strikers, with public support from elsewhere in the state and material support from the union, initiated a ten-day campaign of disorganized violence against CF&I and other mining interests along a 225-mile front running from the southern border of the state to Louisville. Much of the fighting was within Berwind Canyon, with one mine guard killed at Tabasco and another at nearby the Southwestern Mine Co. mine of Empire. At Empire, strikers laid a 21-hour siege against trapped company-aligned mineworker families that was only broken by the negotiations of a minister and the mayor from Aguilar, also in the Berwind area. The fighting ended on 29 April 1914 after President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal U.S. Army troops into the strike area to break up the fighting.

Final years
Berwind continued to produce coal for CF&I through to the closure of the Berwind Canyon route of the C&S railroad in 1928. CF&I's total investment into Berwind was estimated at $362,765 in 1922. In 1927, the mines were manned by 290 miners and still primarily mined by hand rather than by machine.