CHAPTER 3

Albuquerque and the Locomotive Repair Shops in the Early 1880s

In order to erect the various buildings that would comprise the Albuquerque station and shops complex, AT&SF had to first acquire the land on which they would be built. American railroads had recourse to several different means of land acquisition, ranging from very generous grants from the federal government to purchase to outright theft. Central New Mexico in 1880 was a region already organized according to long-standing land tenure rules, many inherited from the time of Spanish and Mexican authority over the region. Thus, AT&SF expected to have to purchase the land where its Albuquerque facilities would be located.

A similar situation existed concerning residences for the hundreds of anticipated locomotive-shop employees. The area where the Shops and their surrounding halo of residences were likely to be built was already known as Barelas. It was a small village consisting of houses and other buildings associated with farm fields that occupied the floodplain on the east side of the Rio Grande a little less than two miles southeast of the Albuquerque plaza, now known as Old Town Albuquerque.

At a meeting of residents held on July 8, 1879, discussion centered on the possibility of the town donating land to the railroad as an incentive for the AT&SF to formally designate Albuquerque as a division point, which would bring a massive economic infusion to the town. Father Donato Gasparri, head of a group of Jesuits who had recently arrived in New Mexico, maintained that “poor people could not afford to donate their scant property to the railroad company, that the wealthier members of the community should contribute toward the purchase of these lands from the poorer people, and that the grant could then be made to the railroad company.”¹

By the last days of 1879, “the advance guard of the railroad—laborers, speculators, traders, contractors, etc.—had already come to town, and it was expected that the line would be completed by the fifteenth of March of the following year.”² In keeping with the Gasparri proposal, enterprising Albuquerque residents, especially a handful of recent newcomers, sought to buy up swaths of land in the vicinity of Barelas, through which the rail line would presumably run and where the main support infrastructure would have to be built. Among those entrepreneurs were Franz Huning, William Hazeldine, Elias Stover, Santiago Baca, and John Phelan.

Even weeks before the railroad reached Albuquerque, it

was now a busy little town indeed. The Central Bank had been organized with Jefferson Reynolds as president, and instead of one saloon there were now fifteen. There were two hardware stores, a saddlery, a shoemaker’s shop, two Chinese laundries, six architects and builders, about twenty carpenters, two seamstresses, two pawnbrokers, two wholesale liquor stores, a planing mill, a grist mill, two drug stores, half a dozen restaurants, a tan yard and wool pulling house, a sash door and blind store, and the professions were represented by five doctors, six lawyers, one assayer, and one editor.³

In March and early April, 1880, [Huning, Hazeldine, and Stover] were furiously buying up land between Barelas Road and the proposed depot site. . . . This was the area later to be known as the Original Town Site. It seems certain that these Albuquerque citizens were acting under the auspices of the New Mexico Town Company [an organ of the AT&SF] . . . which was organized March 3, 1880. . . . The land which comprised the actual depot grounds was purchased by the three between March 3 and April 3. . . . On April 9 and 10, Huning, Hazeldine and Stover deeded their holdings to the N[ew] M[exico] and S[outhern] P[acific] [wholly owned by the AT&SF] for $1.00. Furthermore, on May 8, they deeded the whole of the original Town Site to the New Mexico Town Company, likewise, for $1.00.⁴

Other deals that facilitated establishment of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops included one in June 1880, between Franz and Ernestine Huning and the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (A&P, soon to be another subsidiary of the AT&SF) by which the Hunings transferred somewhat less than an acre lying just north of the A&P’s station grounds to the railroad for one dollar.⁵

Two Barelas area farmers, Antonio Candelaria and Ignacio López, refused to sell to Huning and his partners, but later sold their properties directly to the railroad. With the railroad tracks laid down between the main Barelas irrigation ditch and the fields that it had irrigated, farming became impossible there.⁶ Huning, Hazeldine, and Stover signed an agreement with the railroad that “they were to receive jointly from the [New Mexico Town] Company one-half of all net profits derived from the sale of lots situated on land owned by [the] Company.”⁷ By this means, as well as through direct sales of lots, the three men were to gain fortunes selling land they had just themselves purchased in the new Barelas and San José neighborhoods. Their customers would be largely the families of AT&SF employees at the Locomotive Repair Shops (see appendix 1).

A February 1881 contract lists 298 lots in the Atlantic and Pacific Addition across 1st Street from the railway station and Shop grounds that were owned and offered for sale by Franz Huning, Elias Stover, and William Hazeldine.⁸ The asking price for those lots ranged from a low of $75 (for a 50 x 142-foot lot at the corner of Broadway and Iron Avenue) to a high of $450 (for a 25 x 175-foot lot on Atlantic Avenue between Barelas Road. and 5th Street). At those rates, the total asking price of the 298 lots was well over $25,000.⁹ In today’s dollars that would be the equivalent of more than $550,000.¹⁰

map 3.1). In 1896, a relative of Peter Quier’s, presumably a son, was still residing on that property, and other relatives were living on the Arno Street side of the same block.On the east side of the tracks from the Atlantic and Pacific Addition, Huning and John Phelan laid out the Highland Addition, comprised of 34 blocks made up of 350 lots, including some of irregular size and shape. One of the early purchasers in the Highland Addition was Peter Quier, who bought lot 10 in block 9, on Broadway between Railroad/Central Avenue and Gold Avenue for $100 in December 1880 (see ¹¹

Within weeks of the opening of the rail line as far as Albuquerque in April 1880, numerous construction projects were underway in Barelas and San José: a station house, a roundhouse and coaling and watering facilities, as well as residences for railroad workers. A civil engineer, Walter Marmon, who had been living at Laguna Pueblo for several years, laid out the streets and blocks in what were to become the neighborhoods of Barelas and South Broadway. Lots, though, were slow to sell at first, even at prices as low as ten dollars each. A number of the first buildings that were erected were prefabricated structures carried by the railroad in pieces on flatcars from one location to the next, as the end of the line moved south and west. The railroad depot that welcomed the first passenger train to Albuquerque was an assemblage of old boxcars.¹²

But it wasn’t long before more substantial homes became the norm.

Housing tracts platted on the east side of the railroad tracks . . . included arguably the city’s most prominent early neighborhood: the Huning Highlands Addition that was developed by. . . . Franz Huning. Touted as ‘Albuquerque’s first subdivision,’ residential housing in Huning Highlands Addition began in 1880 and within eight years sixty-three percent of its 536 lots had been sold. It was platted at the base of the sand hills just east of Broadway and spanned both sides of Railroad [Central] Ave. It was thus situated slightly above the lower-lying valley which was marked by the feverish noise and activity accompanying the industrial and commercial development occurring across the railroad tracks.¹³

Map 3.1. Map of John Phelan and Franz Huning’s Highland Addition, December 1880. Lot 10, Block 9, Purchased by Peter Quier, Highlighted. Line of the New Mexico and Southern Pacific Railroad (AT&SF) shown at the bottom. Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office.

This included most notably the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops.

In large part because of its ‘boom town’ beginnings, and perhaps because of [New Town Albuquerque’s] somewhat transient population initially, single-family houses . . . were supplemented by multi-unit dwellings. Within ten years of the town’s founding, there were thirteen hotels, lodging houses, and houses offering ‘furnished rooms.’ . . . These included the city’s multi-story hotels such as the Armijo House and San Felipe Hotel as well as more modest two-story wood frame structures such as Strong’s European Hotel . . . and the Windsor Hotel. . . . The latter were both popular with railroad workers.¹⁴

Even with only vestigial locomotive repair shops at Albuquerque and residential areas for anticipated employees barely platted out, the work of extending the tracks farther west went forward. In October 1880, Railway Age reported that AT&SF “has just received twenty-eight boarding cars [dormitory cars], which will enable it to put on a still larger [work]force. Thirty-five miles of iron [track] are now in the Albuquerque yards, and material for 100 miles more is on its way. The contracts for grading as far as Fort Wingate are about to be let.”¹⁵ New Albuquerque hardly had time to become more than a name on a map before road crews were also working farther south along the Rio Grande, pursuing the quickest connection to California.

According to Ralph Emerson Twitchell, “Following down the Rio Grande valley, [the AT&SF] was completed to Deming [NM], March 10, 1881, where a connection with the Southern Pacific Railroad was made, thus forming the first all-rail route across New Mexico to San Francisco.” With construction of that stretch of track from Albuquerque to Deming, the second transcontinental railroad in the United States became a reality, and Albuquerque was truly launched as a transportation hub.¹⁶

That route, though, was a circuitous one for passengers and goods bound for San Francisco, which at the time was the major destination in California. Even with the Deming route in operation, AT&SF pushed its A&P track westward, loosely following the thirty-fifth parallel. By January 1883, the AT&SF/A&P track had reached to within 110 miles of crossing the Colorado River into California, “leaving only 130 miles to be completed to secure another connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”¹⁷ Less than two months later, the line was only sixty miles from California.¹⁸ And in July it was announced that “track on the Atlantic & Pacific railroad is now finished to a connection with the Southern Pacific of California at the Needles, completing another great through line to the Pacific which will be opened as soon as the bridge across the Colorado River is finished.”¹⁹ In the meantime, AT&SF had officially absorbed the Atlantic and Pacific so that as a single railroad it now stretched from Kansas City to Needles, connecting at both ends with other lines to complete the transcontinental route.

Figure 3.1. Railroad (Central) Avenue at 1st Street, 1881. Photo by Cobb Studio. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; CSWR PICT 000-119-0575.

Despite the optimistic plans of 1880, the new railroad town of Albuquerque did not immediately mushroom into a little metropolis. Some of the people who, in the first wave of enthusiasm, began building near the tracks, gave up and moved before their structures were finished. By the end of the year 1880, however, the newly platted town became the locus of a genuine building boom “that was to continue unabated for years to come.”²⁰ Within a matter of only a few years, both residents and visitors were astounded by the transformation. C. M. Chase, a newspaper editor from Vermont, for example, noted that “last February [1882] in the locality of the depot there was nothing but two or three shanties and a few cloth tents.” In the following year, though, “Railroad [Central] Avenue was nearly solid with business houses for five blocks,” and other buildings, both commercial and residential, were multiplying with astonishing speed. Gone were the days of cheap building lots. Now lots were selling for between $200 and $2,000 each.²¹

Remembering New Albuquerque after it had existed for just three years, Sylvester Baxter wrote:

To the rapid growth of the place I can testify. Returning after a month’s absence in 1881, I found that the number of buildings had about doubled. The manufacture of adobes was going on at a prodigious rate, and there was a lively clatter of carpentry in the erection of frame buildings. . . . Visiting Albuquerque again a year and a half later, in 1882, I found the changes that had taken place in the mean time still more remarkable. Where at that time there was but one business street, lined with an inferior class of buildings, and scattered houses dotted here and there over the level fields, outlining the anatomy of the town that was to be, the skeleton had become clothed with good solid urban flesh, or, to speak more literally, with brick, stone, adobe, and timber. The buildings now stood in sturdy ranks. Railroad [Central] Avenue had been paralleled by another and a handsomer business street named Gold Avenue; the intersecting cross streets had also been built up with business houses; large and glittering plate-glass windows were filled with attractive goods in the latest fashions. . . . the streets were brightly illuminated by a gas of excellent quality made from coal mined out on the Atlantic and Pacific Railway near the Arizona line. . . . The first brick had been manufactured in the town only a few months before, and there were already numerous brick buildings of substantial architecture on the business streets.²²

Most important for the aspiring community’s future, “The first [locomotive repair] shops were built at Albuquerque in 1881. . . . The more important buildings erected at that time consisted of a machine shop, a boiler shop and a blacksmith shop, all of which were constructed of red sandstone walls” with timber roof framing and tile roofs.²³ By 1886, a bird’s-eye-view map of Albuquerque clearly depicted two large locomotive shop buildings (the machine and boiler shops), an associated power plant, and a roundhouse. Years later, when the old machine shop was about to be demolished, an accompanying scaled drawing of it was made.

Evidently, even before the tracks reached Albuquerque, perhaps as early as 1879, the Santa Fe had at least one water well dug at the location of the future shops and erected a windmill to pump water from the well, in addition to a 30,000-gallon water tank. By 1888, the Shops were already being supplied from six of an eventual fourteen water wells.²⁴ Abundant water was an essential resource at any steam locomotive shop site, not only to supply the locomotives but also because all the machinery and power tools ran either directly by means of belts from stationary steam engines or via steam-generated electricity.

Figure 3.2. Detail from “Bird’s eye view of Albuquerque, Bernalillo Co[unty], New Mex[ico], 1886,” map by Augustus Koch, showing buildings of the Locomotive Repair Shops (#17). Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; CSWR G4324.A4A3 1973 .K6 c.1.

Figure 3.3. Photo showing the old machine shop, taken from the southeast before its demolition, 1922? Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque Const. Sites Album, CSWR PICT 2002-013-0033a.

Population exploded as well. Lina Browne writes, “Some five or six years after the arrival of the railroad [that is, in the mid-1880s] the town of Albuquerque had a population of 6,000, more than four times larger than [the old town] had been in 1860.”²⁵ Industrial labor at the Repair Shops and associated businesses was the main driver of the transformation of Albuquerque. Because of that dominance by urban industrialism, Albuquerque was unlike any of the other towns in the territory. There were linkages and similarities with other railroad towns in New Mexico (Raton, Las Vegas, Los Lunas, Grants, Gallup, Deming, and Lordsburg), but there was no other railroad facility in New Mexico that came close to matching the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops in size or complexity. The Shops gave Albuquerque a decided industrial character and infrastructure, which tended to attract related and similar enterprises. The concentration of industrial businesses was a self-reinforcing condition. Industries attracted more industries and further differentiated Albuquerque from other places. More manufacturing and industrial businesses meant more employment opportunities, which attracted more residents. As a result, New Town Albuquerque soon far outstripped all other New Mexico communities in size.

The residential and commercial district surrounding the AT&SF Shops was the epicenter of that growth. To the west of the shops was the Barelas neighborhood, and to the east was the San José neighborhood, which has subsequently been subsumed into the South Broadway neighborhood. As described in 2013, “Along the eastern edge of the Rail Yards is the South Broadway neighborhood. Much of the community’s growth took place between 1885 and 1925, following its founding by Antonio Sandoval, a wealthy landowner responsible for constructing the Barelas ditch, which drained and irrigated the surrounding area. As in Barelas, many of South Broadway’s residents made their living through agricultural pursuits before transitioning to jobs at the Rail Yards and local iron foundry.”²⁶

Because of the lack of machinists, boilermakers, and other skilled industrial laborers living in Albuquerque and New Mexico in general before the arrival of the railroad in 1880, the AT&SF Shops relied heavily on workers coming from Kansas and even farther east. There, railroads had already been operating for decades, and a journeyman workforce had developed to meet the labor demands of various railroad companies. Furthermore, steam power had been used in the East for generations in many applications in addition to railroading, from residential and commercial heating to running industrial and agricultural machinery of all kinds. Thus, there were boilermakers, machinists, and mechanics with many specialties and at all levels of experience, from apprentices to senior journeymen with decades of know-how. As a result, many of the first residents of the Barelas and San José neighborhoods were AT&SF / A&P employees who were natives of the East.

Very soon, though, the railroad’s need for workers outstripped the supply of trained specialists from farther east. Although the railroad’s preference was clearly for experienced shopmen, which generally meant newcomers to New Mexico, AT&SF / A&P and other railroads had difficulty recruiting workers to move to the Southwest. “In 1891 A&P General Manager Robinson complained that he could not get first-rate railroaders because no one who could find work anywhere else would settle in New Mexico or Arizona.”²⁷ That led to employment opportunities for some New Mexico natives, who in other circumstances might not have been hired. There were also some New Mexicans who had experience as blacksmiths and other sorts of metal fabricators, as well as upholsterers and wagon and carriage manufacturers, which made them desirable as employees in the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops.

In great part to facilitate the employment at the Repair Shops of local New Mexico natives, the Street Railway Company was incorporated in 1880 and “by the end of the first year, it had eight mule-drawn cars and three miles of track connecting the Old Town plaza with ‘New Town’ and the suburb of Barelas.”²⁸ Hannah Wolberg describes the Albuquerque streetcar system:

The co-founder and president of the streetcar company was New Yorker Oliver E. Cromwell, who was [already] an investor in Albuquerque real estate. He partnered up with Franz Huning and William Hazeldine to create the company. The tracks ran down the center of Railroad Avenue, now Central Avenue, from New Town to Old Town on a narrow gauge track, connecting the two sites that had become alienated from each other. In the 1890s the mules were replaced by a horse with a bell hung around its neck that alerted patrons to its arrival. Although slow, cumbersome, and sometimes dangerous due to its inclination to coming off its tracks in high winds or when the load was unbalanced, the trolley transported workers every morning and evening to and from work for ten cents.²⁹

Over the years the trolley line expanded its service area. “At its fullest extent, the streetcar line consisted of approximately six miles of track from Old Town in the west to the University of New Mexico in the east; and the American Lumber Company in the north, and the A. T. & S. F. rail yards and Barelas neighborhood lay at the south end. Another spur off of Railroad Avenue ran for twelve blocks to the south along Edith Street in the Huning’s Highland Addition.”³⁰ The streetcars remained a transportation mainstay for employees at the Repair Shops until they were replaced by a fleet of gasoline-powered buses in 1928.³¹ During the 2010s, a road construction crew uncovered lengths of track from the trolley, buried under Central Avenue.³² Those sections of track are currently curated at the WHEELS Museum.

Although it did not immediately affect employment at the Albuquerque shops, an unusual arrangement between AT&SF and the Pueblo of Laguna brought a significant number of members of that tribe into railroad employment. Known as the “Watering the Flower” agreement, this oral compact was entered into in 1880 and remained in force until 1963.³³ In exchange for passage across Laguna Pueblo land and the use of water for its steam locomotives, the railroad promised that “it would forever employ as many of the Lagunas to help build and maintain the system as wished to work.”³⁴ Initially, Laguna people worked primarily in track laying and maintenance, but eventually they held jobs throughout the Santa Fe system, including skilled positions such as machinists at the Albuquerque Shops.

By 1893, New Albuquerque had become a fairly compact town centered around the Locomotive Repair Shops and the railroad depot. “Most development [had] occurred within two blocks of the train station mostly west of the station, one block north and three blocks south.”³⁵ Railroad-related businesses naturally also took root adjacent to the repair facilities and the freight and passenger depots. Such enterprises included the Albuquerque Foundry and Machine Works, located on the east side of the tracks, opposite and just a stone’s throw from the Locomotive Repair Shops.

One result of the large number of single men working at the shops and on the trains was that they helped support “seven houses of prostitution and an opium den that lined Railroad Avenue west of Fourth Street” in 1882, according B. F. Saunders, then editor of the Evening Review, one of two daily Albuquerque newspapers.³⁶ With an altogether different influence on Albuquerque and New Mexico as a whole, in February 1889 the State Legislature authorized the University of New Mexico to be established in Albuquerque.³⁷

The official census of Albuquerque in 1880 was 2,315, by 1890 it was 3,785, and in 1900 it was 6,238.³⁸ A significant share of the increase directly reflected AT&SF shopmen and their families. The official census figures are much smaller than the population numbers from the 1880s reported by Lina Ferguson Browne and quoted earlier. New Mexico governor L. Bradford Prince complained that the 1890 census of the state represented a serious undercount as a result of enumerators making little effort to obtain information from citizens who spoke Spanish.³⁹ Governor Edmund Ross predicted overly optimistically in 1887 that Albuquerque would soon be home to at least 100,000 residents.⁴⁰ Between 1870 and 1890 the Territory of New Mexico’s population jumped from less than 91,000 to more than 140,000, with more than half of that increase coming from in-migration.⁴¹ The influx of new residents, however, was not sufficient to fill the full range of jobs involved in maintenance and repair of the AT&SF’s burgeoning inventory of steam engines and passenger and freight cars, which was the task of the Albuquerque Shops.

Information provided by the Abstract of the Twelfth Census shows the number of employees in “manufacturing and mechanical pursuits,” which included “steam railroad employees,” in New Mexico in 1890 as 849. A sizeable share of those must have worked at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, but we do not have an accurate count. We can say with assurance, though, that by 1900 the payroll at the Shops was at least 501.⁴²

Railway Age reported in 1883, “The machine shops at Albuquerque are large enough for all present business, and built upon a plan allowing of enlargement to any extent to meet future wants and growth of the road.”⁴³ In less than thirty years after that rosy assertion, however, the number and size of steam locomotives proved to be too large for the original Shops, and the entire shop complex had to be replaced.