GOLD DUST
– Tales from the Ortiz Mountains –
Bill Baxter

Richard C. Kerens and the Founding of Madrid

Everybody’s favorite old New Mexico coal mining town, Madrid, was first incorporated in 1894. But the town’s story actually begins many years earlier.

In 1859, before the Civil War, the New Mexico Mining Company began using a steam engine to power a stamp mill (a machine for crushing ore) at their processing site at Dolores, in the Ortiz Mountains. The forests of the Ortiz Mountains might easily have provided a supply of firewood for that steam engine – the NMMC owned the 108 square-mile Ortiz Mining Grant that comprised all of the Ortiz Mountains – but coal, which was also found on their property just a few miles to the northwest, was cheaper. So the company began to dig coal at the place they called Coal Bank, and Coal Bank became the first industrial coal mining operation in New Mexico.

When, after the Civil War, the NMMC got around to registering their coalmine they commented that people – Geronimo Cordova of La Cienega and others – had dug coal from that location, called el ojito de carbon Piedra, in the early 1850s.

The New Mexico Mining Company seemed always to suffer from bad luck and bad management, and in 1878 two very powerful politicians, Jerome Chaffee of Colorado and Stephen B. Elkins of New Mexico, acquired the struggling company outright. The new owners did not do much better at gold mining, but in 1884 they spun off the 15,000-acre Madrid Tract, placing it under the control of their new Cerrillos Coal and Iron Company. About 10,000 of those Madrid Tract acres came from the northwest corner of the Ortiz Grant and the rest came from the overlapping Mesita de Juana Lopez Grant, where Elkins also held an interest.

In late 1889 Elkins, now a new Senator from West Virginia, managed to get Congress to approve a patent, a quitclaim deed, on the entire 108 square miles of the Ortiz Grant, which put the NMMC (Elkins himself) in a strong position to assert his ownership. He needed that strong position. By 1889 dozens of free-lance miners were all over Coal Bank, digging coal and selling it! And there was no one from the CC&IC on the ground to tell them otherwise.

In 1890 the man on the ground was Elkins’ long-time partner, Richard C. Kerens. Kerens was brought in by Elkins to run the CC&IC and assert ownership (i.e., evict all the squatters). Kerens and Elkins, joint owners of the CC&IC, secretly sold the company to the AT&SF Railroad at the end of 1891. And then, the following spring, Kerens began to evict, buy out, and sell short-term leases to the remaining miners. By that summer the AT&SF’s wholly-owned subsidiary and successor to the CC&IC, the Cerrillos Coal Railroad Company, was in full control of the mines, and a 6.5 mile long standard gauge CC&RC spur was under construction from Waldo on the main line up the arroyo to Kerens’ house at Coal Bank.

On a map in late 1892 the name “Madrid siding” appears next to Kerens’ house. The coal-mining town of Madrid grew up around that siding.

Within ten years the CC&RC was bankrupt, and it is unknown how much, if any, Kerens and Elkins realized from the $600,000 in CC&RC bonds they owned. Kerens went on to become the US Ambassador to Austro-Hungary, 1910-1913, and he died in 1916. Senator Elkins, who served as Secretary of War 1891-1893, died January 1911. It wasn’t until 1906 that George Kaseman acquired the Madrid mines and formed the Albuquerque & Cerrillos Mining Company, and built the town we recognize today as Madrid.

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