Hidden up New Mexico State Road 14 (also know as the Turquoise Trail) between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is the small eclectic town of Madrid. The town presently is home to several shops, restaurants and a museum, but almost eighty years ago this small wasn't all that small at all. During Madid' heyday the town was home to the largest coal mining companies west of the Mississippi, a professional baseball team and Christmas celebration that drew thousands of people from around the world.
Indeed Madrid, New Mexico is a town with an amazing history. There aren't many towns anywhere that can claim that it was once a boomtown, a literal ghost town, and experienced new found fame all in the matter of a handful of decades.
Let me tell you how I wondered into Madrid some thirty plus years ago. I had a day off from work and nothing to do so I packed up my camera and jumped in my car for a solo day trip into the mountains. I set out east from my home in Albuquerque on Interstate 40. At Tijeras I turned onto highway 14. Instead of taking my usual route on the 536 toward Sandia Peak I decided to continue on the 14 to see where it might lead.
Eventually my travels would lead me straight into Madrid. The town back in the day was much more like a ghost town than it is today. At the sight of an almost perfectly preserved frontier I hit the brakes and pulled over.
What a perfect place to practice my photography!
The town was literally like some sort of time capsule, a place that looked like it's residents just walked away from it and left everything they owned right where it was. There was tons of old houses, old cars, mining equipment and surprisingly a vintage Santa Fe steam locomotive.
Being the train nerd that I am, stumbling upon a old steam locomotive hidden deep in the New Mexico mountains was something delightfully unexpected.
I spent the day photographing pretty much everything I saw in Madrid, again it was like a living museum and there were just so many interesting items to take pictures of.
In the years after that I would take several friends up to Madrid from Albuquerque who honestly, like myself, had no idea that it existed.
Eventually I would move away from New Mexico and relocate back to my native California and my memories of Madrid slowly faded to the back of my rather cluttered mind.
Interestingly enough we took our granddaughter out for a road trip down to Lafayette (Louisiana) yesterday and while the wife and child slumbered away on our voyage back home thoughts of Madrid popped into my consciousness. To be honest it was just images from the town that showed up. I actually couldn't remember what it was called.
A search of Google maps once we got home revealed that the town I was thinking of was indeed Madrid and I recognized the name immediately.
Being the research nut that I am, I proceeded to find out more about this mysterious New Mexico town that had once sparked curiosity some three decades earlier.
What I found out really surprised me.
During it's heyday Madrid had a population of over 4,000 people and was the home of the largest coal mining operations west of the Mississippi River due to the vast amounts of substance deposited in the adjacent hills and the Santa Fe railroad's need of it to power it's massive fleet of coal fired steam locomotives in the western United States.
Surprisingly the coal miners of Madrid formed a professional baseball team that drew fans from all around the region. The Madrid Miners, as the team was known, was so good that it featured players that would eventually end up in the major leagues and their stadium was the first in the west to have electric lights so that they could play games at night.
As they say, what goes up must eventually come down.
The town of Madrid's prosperity hinged solely on the Santa Fe's need for coal so when the railroad phased out their coal hungry steam locomotives in the 1950s for diesel powered ones the mine shut down and the town's population moved away leaving it virtually abandoned for decades.
As I mentioned, today Madrid is very much alive again with shops, restaurant's and a museum featuring items from the town's mining history.
This is a must see location for anyone visiting central New Mexico!
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