Then and Now -- A Brief History of Tokay, New Mexico

Abstract

In the 1920s the coal-mining settlement of Tokay, Socorro County, New Mexico (Fig. 1), was a bustling town of a few hundred inhabitants, including 125 coal miners (Julyan, 1996, p. 356). Tokay was on the southwest side of the Carthage coal field, about 10 miles east of San Antonio, New Mexico. See map in Hook and Cobban 2015 (this volume, p. 27). Among more than 50 frame structures Tokay boasted a single two-story building that had a pool hall/ barbershop/bar on the first floor and a school for grades 1-5 on the second. A staircase on the outside of the building allowed the students to go to school without having to pass through the bar first. A power plant on the north end of town provided electricity for Tokay; it billows smoke both in the postcard (Fig. 1) and in the 1927 oil painting of the town (cover and Fig. 2B). A combination general store/post office/mine office on the north side of the camp provided supplies for the miners and their families. The settlement had no bank, so the miners were paid partly in script or trade tokens in various denominations that could be redeemed at the store. The general store stocked the case of Tokay grapes that gave the town its name in 1917 (Anonymous, 1968). The original town was established in 1915 by Bartley H. Kinney, who later served as President of the board of Regents of the New Mexico School of Mines. Mr. Kinney, a mining engineer, organized the San Antonio Coal Company to mine coal in the southwest portion of the Carthage coal field. During the first year or two of its existence, the town had no formal, i.e., no federally recognized, name. The Post Office Department had rejected many names for the town, including the name “Kinney,” which it found to be in conflict. One day, according to Julyan (1996, p. 356), “... while Kinney and a postal inspector were discussing names in the community’s general store, Kinney looked at a case of Tokay grapes on the counter and asked, “How about Tokay?” The inspector agreed and the town of Tokay was born, named for a very sweet grape and wine that had nothing to do with coal mining. Tokay had a post office from 1917 until 1932. Mining ceased in the late 1940s, when most of the town’s frame buildings were moved to Socorro. However, during Tokay’s heyday, the plaza between the school house and general store (Figs.1 and 3) was used for festivals and celebrations; three major holidays—Mexico’s 1862 victory over France (Cinco de Mayo), U.S. Independence Day (July 4th), and Mexican Independence Day (Sixteenth of September)—were celebrated with explosions of miners’ firecrackers (sticks of dynamite). The married miners and their families lived in four rows of six frame houses on either side of the plaza (Fig. 3). A physician lived and worked in town. A small Catholic mission, part of the San Marcial Parish, was located on the south end of the settlement, as was a windmill that was the water source for the camp’s boilers and industrial use. A well about a mile south of the camp provided drinking water. Details of the town of Tokay (Fig. 3) are from Trancito Diaz, (1915–1990), a long time resident of Tokay, who moved there from Jalisco, Mexico in 1920. Bartley H. Kinney (1884–1959), former superintendent of the Carthage Fuel Company, founded what would become Tokay in 1915 when he homesteaded 160 acres on the southwest side of the Carthage coal field in the SW1/4 NE1/4 and the W1/2 SE1/4 section 8 and the NW1/4 NE1/4 section 17, T. 5 S., R. 2 E. of the New Mexico Meridian, Socorro County, New Mexico. At an elevation of 5,055 ft, Tokay sat on a mesa underlain by the resistant Pleistocene Sierra Ladrones Formation. The productive Kinney No. 1 and No. 4 mines were located about half a mile southeast of the settlement. The main coal seam, which is up to 5 ft thick, lies in the basal part of the Dilco Coal Member of the Crevasse Canyon Formation, 25 ft or so above its contact with the Gallup Sandstone (Hook 2010, fig. 6). Coal mining was backbreaking, dangerous work. Miners were generally paid by the number of coal cars they filled; usually six to seven cars per shift. In her scrapbook of memorabilia on life in Tokay and the Carthage coal field, Ruth Kinney Gannaway (written communication, May 5, 2015) who was born in Tokay, recounts the system used to keep track of which miners had worked on any given day. Before going into the mines, each miner took a “washer,” also known as “miner’s brass,” from a pegboard in the office with his unique number on it. At the end of the shift, he returned the washer to the pegboard. In this way Mr. Kinney could make sure no one was left in the mine at the end of the day. Coal production from Tokay increased steadily from 1915 to 1927 as Mr. Kinney opened more mines. However, the Depression and the introduction of lower cost fuel oil and natural gas for heating and power generation took its toll in the late 1920s (Hoffman and Hereford, 2009, p. 412). Tokay lost its major contract with El Paso Gas and Electric Company about 1928 to the El Paso Natural Gas Company; this loss reduced Tokay from a railroad-serviced town to a truck-serviced town (Anonymous, 1968). Commercial mining ceased in the late 1940s. In 1949 Mr. Kinney sold the land and his house to Mr. and Mrs. Dean Fite. Mr. Kinney’s original house is still in use today as the Fite Ranch Headquarters (Fig. 3). The name Tokay lives on as a legacy of New Mexico’s coal mining history and as the formal stratigraphic name of a tongue of the Upper Cretaceous Mancos Shale (this volume, p. 27−46).