8/19/2019
Ludlow Massacre Memorial, Colorado
This is one of three closely grouped sites I visited in 2018 that are remembered and memorialized in very different ways. The other two are the town of Ludlow Colorado and the site of Hastings Colorado.
The Ludlow Massacre Memorial marks the site where National Guard troops and private armed guards opened fire on a tent encampment of striking miners and their families in 1914. About 20 people were killed by gunfire or suffocated or crushed attempting to escape the gunfire. The Ludlow Massacre came at the end of a years long struggle in the Colorado coal fields between miners and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company which was owned by the Rockefellers. The miners had camped near Ludlow after being evicted from their company owned homes in the surrounding mining towns. The violent suppression of the miners in the 1913-1914 strike took over a hundred lives and uprooted thousands of people in the coal fields west of Trinidad. Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War by Thomas G. Andrews is an excellent book on the subject.
The way events are memorialized at the locations of those events varies wildly. Monuments, plaques or other memorials that connect historic events or people to places are not automatically installed. The existence of any kind of permanent memorial requires money and control of the land. Public money is rarely spent installing historic monuments or memorials. When it is, it is because people with political influence agitated for a specific site to be memorialized in a specific way. Any kind of memorial is an interpretation of an event. Memorials connect the abstract idea of a past event to real present space. They do this by telling some fragment of the story of that event. The story telling might just be a simple symbol or a name. In some cases memorials include lengthy narrative stories. In any event, they attempt to bring some part of past events into present space. Memorials mostly seem to fail at doing this, but they do say a lot about what people in the present think is important. They also show what powerful people think everyone else should think about events in the past.
The Ludlow Massacre Memorial is one of the best appointed labor memorials I've been to. It was built and is maintained by the United Mine Workers of America. The Ludlow Massacre was the beginning of the end of the 1913-14 coal strike which resulted in a bitter defeat for the UMWA. The union purchased the land where the tent colony had been just two years after the massacre in 1916. A monument was erected shortly after that in 1918. An event space with rest rooms and sheltered picnic tables was added in more recent history. The monument is protected from vandalism by a high steel fence. Interpretive panels surround it. The whole site is clean and well maintained. It's in a remote area about 16 miles from Trinidad but it's just off the I-25 freeway and signs mark its' exit. It appeared to get regular visitors. The site of the town of Ludlow just a mile away had no memorial of any kind and no visitors. The site of the Hastings Mine Disaster where 121 miners died in an explosion in 1917 was marked with a simple gravestone two and a half miles from the Ludlow Monument.
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