Navajo, New Mexico

The opening of the Navajo coal mine by the American Fuel Company produced the camp of Navajo. Small frame houses were supplied to the residents by the company. A store and a hotel operated at the camp for a few years. About 1922, the Gallup American Coal Company sank the shaft at Gamerco, less than a mile west of Navajo, and the center of coal mining activity shifted there. The Navajo Mine closed, but many of the miners stilled lived in the camp while working at Gamerco. In the mid-1930s Navajo reported a population of six hundred. However, before long all of the buildings were moved, leaving nothing but mine dumps and foundations.

Gamerco, New Mexico

The Gallup American Coal Company began sinking shafts into coal deposits north of Gallup in 1920, and two years later the newly formed camp of Gamerco witnessed hoisting of the first coal. Even before mining was underway the town was platted, and the Gallup American Coal Company moved abandoned homes from Heaton, and Navajoe, both nearby coal camps ran by the company, to Gamerco, in addition to new ones that were being constructed. The company town was soon supplied with a company store, a meat market, a hotel, a clubhouse, a shower house for the miners, and an executive office building. Keeping their miners happy, the company also built several recreation facilities, including a golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts and a base ball park. The company also provided a resident physician and a nurse.

The company was diligent in its safety practices, no doubt in an effort to prevent a coal mining disaster such as the one that occurred in Dawson, New Mexico several years earlier which claimed 263 lives. Ninety percent of the underground employees had were certified in rescue and first aid, the men were supplied with electric lamps and only permissible low heat explosives were ever used.

Surface received $5.60 for a seven-hour day, while those working underground were paid more. No one was allowed to work more than five days per week. The five hundred men on the payroll were not unionized and preferred to keep it that way. Strikes had occurred at various mines around Gallup; one in 1917 when the striking United Mine Workers were broken up by the National Guard. Another in 1922, resulting in increased wages and a third in 1933, when the militia was again called to break up strikers of the National Miners Union.

Finally, in the 1960’s, the mines were closed for good and Gamerco died.

In 1975, Gamerco still sported many of its original buildings, a giant steel head frame, and a towering smokestack from the power plant.

Even today the town still has a few hanging on residents, but most of the buildings are gone. However, you can still see the towering smokestack as well as the remnants of several buildings.

The mines were closed during the early 1960s but many old buildings and a towering smokestack from the power plant remain.

Gamerco in on US Hwy 666, 3 miles north of US Interstate 40, exit 20 at Gallup.

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