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The Coming of the Railroad and the Birth of New Town
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New Albuquerque's first permanent depot. Previous to this, the railroad used a converted boxcar.
A brief diversion from the Lyon Letters in order to set the stage. When Dr. Lyon arrived in Albuquerque in 1882, he was pursuing success in the town of New Albuquerque. This article is a brief introduction to how New Albuquerque came to be.
According to Erna Fergusson, patron saint of Albuquerque history, New Albuquerque was born with “one blast of a steam whistle". On April 22, 1880, almost exactly 174 years after the Villa de Alburquerque was founded two miles west, the first AT&SF train pulled up to a makeshift depot on newly laid track to the applause of a crowd that had gathered for the occaision in the barren sandhills that rose up from the middle Rio Grande valley and filled the expanse to the Sandia Mountains.
A brass band played, and mariachis sang. There were speeches in both English and Spanish by men whose names still resonate in Albuquerque today - Huning, Hazeldine, Stover. Marc Simmons, in his wonderful book Albuquerque, a Narrative History, relates that Judge Hazeldine in particular delivered a fiery piece of oration that praised the “new Civilization of the East” that would come with the railroad and “sound the death knell of old foggyism [sic], superstition and ignorance…”, by which he referred, in a not terribly subtle manner, to the culture and values endemic to New Albuquerque’s namesake, the Villa de Alburquerque.
Other than the Villa's initial founding, there have been few events with as profound an impact on Albuquerque's character and growth as the arrival of the railroad so far from the original town. Perhaps most importantly, it radically changed the power dynamic in the community- the older traditions and influential families of the Villa were suddenly irrelevant as New Town began to rise well outside of their "jurisdiction". There was little need for compromise between the Hispanic culture of the Villa and the new arrivals, mainly from the Eastern United States, that set their sights on New Town.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that illustrates this change in dynamic nicely. According to various accounts, but notably contradicted by Marc Simmons, the reason that the railroad came into the area so far from the Villa was because of a sort of conspiracy. The story goes that in the 1870s, representatives of the railroad scouted the land near the Villa as a possible location for the rails and the depot, but that the landowners at the Villa asked far too extravagant a price. Instead of acquiescing to these, in their view, unreasonable estimates, the railroad scouts instead secretly met with some business owners in the Villa who had only recently arrived from the east, men like William Hazeldine, a lawyer from Arkansas, Franz Huning, a german immigrant who ran a mill and general store, and Elias Stover, a speculator and former Kansas politician. If these business men could secure land for the railroad and depot, the scouts said, they would be poised to make a fortune.
The men received the railroad representative's message loud and clear and set about secretly buying up land in the barren area east of town. When they had secured enough, they sold the requisite amount to the railroad at a mere dollar an acre. As soon as the depot was built, they knew, they would be in the best possible position to capitalize on the inevitable rush to build facilities- warehouses, saloons, hotels, brothels, hostelries- nearby. And, indeed, the rush came, and their fortunes and status as New Albuquerque's moneyed elite, were secured.
It is true that men like Huning, Hazeldine and Stover were able to capitalize on the railroad to a dramatic degree, and it is true that a similar scenario to that laid out above (the railroad reps finding local prices too high and changing the location of the depot to an area farther away and less expensive with the cooperation of willing interests) played out in other New Mexico locations, and it is true that the Villa de Alburquerque began a decline as a result. But was it really a conspiracy, complete with secret meetings between the reps and Hazeldine and his friends?
Marc Simmons doesn't think so. In his book he dismisses this story. "A happenstance of geography had pretty well precluded the possibility of tracks reaching the old Albuquerque plaza. The town, nestled in a bend of the river, was approximately a mile and a half west of a straight line the surveyors drew down the eastern side of the valley. Construction engineers preferred building along the straightest and most direct course. So even before any route decision was announced, Albuquerqueans were reconciled to the fact that the policy makers of the [railorad] were unlikely to allow a curve in the tracks just to accomadate the scant 2,000 residents of a backwater town on the Rio Grande." This, and the Villa's notorious propensity to flooding, make it seem unlikely that there was any formal collusion to marginalize the residents of Old Town, despite the fact that this story is so often repeated (including, on many previous occaisions, by myself).
Regardless of the details of its founding, a New Town had been born in the valley, and Albuquerque, New and Old, would never be the same.
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