The National Park Service is providing more than $150,000 towards preserving the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. The grant was announced last week as part of the American Battlefield Protection Program.
The Colorado National Guard attack on mine workers north of Trinidad is considered a turning point in the history of the U.S. Labor movement. In 1914, United Mine Workers of America members camped in a tent colony in what is now the ghost town of Ludlow and declared a strike over working hours and mine safety.
In response, on April 20th, National Guard troops aligned with the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company attacked the approximately 1,200-member colony in an attempt to break the strike. The troops killed 21 people, 11 of them children.
That attack ignited a ten-day armed conflict now known as the “Colorado Coalfield War.” Strikers retaliated by destroying coal camps and taking over nearby urban areas, like Trinidad, according to a University of Denver archaeological project on the period.
President Woodrow Wilson eventually ordered federal troops to establish peace across the strike zone. The U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations would go on to place much of the blame on John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his inaction as manager of the site. A union was established within the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company the following year.
The grant funds announced last week go to the United Mine Workers of America, who will oversee the preservation and interpretation of the site, which became a National Historic Landmark in 2009.
