New Mexico Office of the State Historian : El Vado

El Vado

There is not as much as a historical marker to indicate that from 1904 until 1908 and again from 1914 to about 1923 the town of El Vado was a noisy, bustling railroad and lumber center served by narrow-gauge lines running off in all directions.

Today, the only visible evidence of the long-buried community is out on a low peninsula at the north end of the lake. At this point one can see the remains of a large cemetery. Nearby, on the lakeshore, like a twentieth century Stonehenge, are the massive concrete foundations of a water tank, and some heaps of weathered boards left from a collapsed cabin. There is nothing else. Like most company-owned mining camps and sawmill towns, once the main source of supply was gone, the town vanished, leaving little of record for the historian. As it was entirely a company town, there are no census figures.

But still, enough clues remain to tantalize the history buff, starting with the name. El Vado is Spanish for “The Crossing,” referring to a place where the Chama River was wide enough and shallow enough for a pack train to cross, or a wagon, or a man on horseback, long before there were any roads in this thinly settled region. Some historians say an old Spanish trail may have crossed here, although another crossing a few miles to the north at La Puente seems more likely.

Modern history started in El Vado soon after the turn of the century. Having devastated the forests on both sides of the Colorado border, lumbermen turned their attention southward starting about 1903 toward the vast, unbroken pine forests of northern New Mexico, along the Chama and its tributaries.

It takes quite a stretch of the imagination to picture the half-barren, juniper-studded hills around El Vado Lake as they were then, densely cloaked with ponderosa pine up to four feet in diameter and 150 feet in height. Only a few remnant pines are still to be found in the remote canyons and on inaccessible ridges to hint at the grandeur that once flourished here. Lumbermen built a narrow-gauge railroad south from the Denver & Rio Grande’s line at Lumberton, near Dulce, between Chama and Pagosa Springs, in order to tap the new timber bonanza. The spur line, which came to be known as the Rio Grande & Southwestern, was absorbed by the Denver & Rio Grande in 1907.

El Vado became the terminus of the R.G & SW line, which soon branched out in all directions like a great octopus, thrusting its steel tentacles and skid roads into distant canyons and up improbable zigzag grades to mesa tops, wherever timber was standing. Undeterred by conservation rules or concern for the future of the terrain, the loggers took everything, clear-cutting with vengeance. The results are painfully apparent today in the deeply gullied wasteland, which they left behind as a legacy.

According to one historian, the railroad was its own best customer in the early years even though its locomotives burned coal from a deposit near Lumberton. Every mile of track required 3,000 crossties, plus another 1,000 for spares. Timber went into trestles, bridges, culverts, lining for tunnels and was used for roundhouses and whole communities of wooden houses. As the ties were not creosoted in those early years, they rotted out and had to be replaced every five to seven years.

Old photos and one contemporary account written about 1917 describe El Vado at the height of its activity: the main sawmill with its four tall steel stacks belching smoke, the mill pond where the logging trains dumped their harvest, the huge heaps of sawdust and slabs. There was a box factory, drying kilns for finished lumber, switching yards, a roundhouse and a machine shop for steam locomotives, and a big company store.

Old-timers say there were the usual saloons, one or more churches, an opera house and a boxing arena. At least part of the time there was a US post office. Old photos show a dreary line of tiny, unpainted shacks on a muddy street: the company provided housing for the laborers, who were mostly Mexican-Americans and Jicarilla Apaches.

Timber cutting out of El Vado dwindled to a halt in 1923. The following year, the New Mexico Lumber Company, by then the sole proprietor of the place, moved its entire plant to Dolores, Colorado. Presumably, much of the population went with it. Four years later, the D. & R. G. pulled up its rails back as far as the coal beds below Lumberton.

The remaining buildings fell down, burned down, washed away, or were hauled away by local ranchers. Until recent times, the remains of railroad ties washed up on the shores of the lake to be gathered for firewood.

Between 1933 and 1935 the scene changed again. As a work relief project of the Great Depression and to provide irrigation and flood control, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District with the cooperation of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built El Vado Dam.

Sources Used:

Taken from an Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department brochure