{"id":1757,"slug":"dawson-dawson-new-mexico","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Dawson, in Colfax County northeast of Cimarron, was the largest company-owned city in the Southwest. Coal was found on rancher John Barkley Dawson's Maxwell Grant acreage in the 1890s; the Dawson Fuel Company opened the first mine and built its own railroad in 1901, and Phelps Dodge bought the whole operation in 1906 for the coking coal its Arizona smelters needed. The company built a real city — hospital, hotel, opera house, even a golf course — and filled it with immigrant miners: Italians and Greeks in the largest numbers, beside Mexicans, Slavs, and Americans.","Then the mountain took its price twice. On October 22, 1913, a dynamite charge fired during full operation ignited coal dust in Stag Canyon Mine No. 2; 263 men died in what remains among the deadliest mine disasters in American history. On February 8, 1923, a derailed car sparked the dust in Stag Canyon No. 1 and killed 120 more."]},{"heading":"The cemetery that outlived the town","paragraphs":["What finished Dawson was not disaster but substitution: as petroleum displaced coal, Phelps Dodge closed the mines in 1950, evicted the company town it had built, and sold the site — the buildings were razed or hauled off within a few years.","What survives is the cemetery: a slope of roughly four hundred white iron crosses for the men of 1913 and 1923, maintained still, and the site of a biennial reunion when former Dawson families are let through the ranch's locked gate. The file keeps it as the record insists — private land, closed except by permission — a town that died twice by explosion and once by market, reduced to its dead."]}],"name":"Dawson","aliases":[],"type":"GHOST_TOWN","type_label":"Ghost Town","cats":["GHOST_TOWN"],"groups":["ghost-towns"],"desc":"Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage.","full_desc":"A ghost town in Dawson, New Mexico, Dawson is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. It is the sort of entry the archive keeps because the ground and the telling both survive.","address":null,"city":"Dawson","county":null,"state":"New Mexico","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":null,"lon":null,"coord_kind":null,"status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Pass 1 discovery. Inclusion is for ghost-town heritage; no haunting claim is implied. Parcel access and coordinates remain unverified.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":49.3,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Coal mining and a railroad arrived in 1901. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. Sources including 'New Mexico Ghost Towns' carry the record. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"New Mexico Ghost Towns","url":"https://www.newmexico.org/places-to-visit/ghost-towns/","publisher":"New Mexico Tourism Department","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"New Mexico Ghost Towns","url":"https://www.newmexico.org/places-to-visit/ghost-towns/","publisher":"New Mexico Tourism Department","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}