[Prize-winning essay in the Catron County Historical Society Contest, written when Choate was an eighth grader in 1976]
My home is a little village in Catron County called Pie Town. It began about fifty-seven years ago.
After the Armistice was signed in 1919, the rush of veterans brought many servicemen into Catron County (Socorro County, as it was then. Among them was one Clyde Norman.
Clyde was a six-foot four Texan looking for a homestead. He found just what he wanted about half-way between Quemado and Datil. He first filed on a mining claim and, as there were no gasoline service stations between these two small towns, he built one. It was a one-room station and he hauled his gasoline and water in barrels in his model-T jalopy. He also baked and sold pies in his station.
He figured that his idea of a highway that would connect Texas and California was a sane and sound bet, and sure enough, it was. As he struggled to meet the growing demand of tourists, he took on a partner. A Mr. H. L. Craig bought half interest in the little gasoline station. His wife then fully developed the pie trade that Mr. Norman had begun. Mr. Craig saw the advantage of a good location, fine climate and wonderful weather, so he built a hotel and café out of logs, there being an abundance of them just for the taking.
About then, Mr. Norman got a yearning for Texas and Mr. Craig bought his interest in the station, thereby combining it with his other holdings. Mrs. Craig had a pretty good pie trade built up by this time with her delicious home baked pies. They went over really well with the tourists and also with the cowboys, who occasionally came in after supplies, for Mr. Craig eventually added a general store to the station. Next came a post office at this small place. A request for a name was answered by a cowboy who said, “Why not call it Pie Town – that’s what we call it.”
In the early 1930s a new highway was completed, but it missed Mr. Craig’s store by a mere one-eighth of a mile. The post office was moved, and several people leased government land near the highway to build stores and service stations.
A very small new Pie Town sprang up and left the old Pie Town which anyone can find by asking a few questions and obtaining a few simple directions. We still like tourists, but in the lingo of the cowboys, we sure “get on the prod” when one of them makes a “crack” about our town’s name.
To live in Pie Town means to me clean air, blue skies, and nice people. I have lived in Pie Town about eight years now, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. Of course, Pie Town has grown since the time of Clyde Norman. For entertainment we have western dances, pot luck suppers and holiday carnivals. The Pie Town School was closed in 1965, and the children now attend school at Quemado – twenty-two miles away. There are two churches, one General Store and one gas station in Pie Town. Our town also has a good fire department; the men donate their time and service. There are men on the water board to make sure everybody has enough water.
And that’s the way it was, and is, in Pie Town from 1919 to 1976.
[La Crónica de Nuevo México 2 (December 1976): 1. Published by the Historical Society of New Mexico and reproduced with their permission.]