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07-06-2007, 09:42 AM
<center>Non-Profit Group Found Historic Pie Town Photos <br>In Library of Congress Archives <br>by: Steppin Out Staff Reporter <br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34148r.jpg border=1 align=center> <br><font face="Arial Narrow" size=2><b>In the 1930's, Pie Town was literally painted red, white and blue...</b></font></center> <br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34109r.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>Pie Town, New Mexico: Criswell Development Group – a non-profit organization based in Pie Town - recently obtained and published on their new web site a historic series of over 6 dozen color photos taken in Pie Town 71 years ago by Russell Lee - a photographer commissioned by the Roosevelt Administration in 1940 to document life in Pie Town during the homesteading days that accompanied the Dust Bowl era of the 1930’s. <br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34107r.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>Criswell Development Group (a.k.a. CDG) – was formed several years ago to provide information and support to the widely distributed landowners who own 40 acre plots on the Criswell Open Range. The Criswell Range area - known at the BLM as the Criswell Allotment - covers an area of nearly 40 square miles in northeast Catron County. The land in this region was part of the George Criswell Ranch from 1928 to 1970 at which time the land was acquired by a bank. It was later sold off in 40 acre plots to unsuspecting buyers back east for $40 an acre. Those buyers paid just a few dollars down and $29 a month for years until they finally paid off the mortgages on their land. However, most of the land sold this way was never surveyed. So the buyers eventually learned they couldn’t access or build on the land they’d bought because there were no roads to it and without a survey, there was no way to determine exactly what land they owned.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34102r.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>CDG was formed to help remedy those problems and as their new site reflects, they’ve made considerable progress toward that objective – completing surveys of some sections, learning how to use a GPS to find and mark the corners of each 40 acre plot and designing a cabin that can be hauled out to the Criswell in several trips with a small truck and assembled there by one or two people. Adding to their success, this year CDG bought a used roadgrader with money contributed by their members and they are beginning to map and cut roads and driveways in some Criswell sections.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34150r.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>According to Tucker McHugh a CDG member and local spokesman for the group, CDG opened its information office in Pie Town late in 2006. Recently, McHugh discovered the Russell Lee photos of Pie Town languishing in the archives of the Library of Congress and decided to acquire copies of them and feature them on the Pie Town pages of their new web site as a tribute to the history of Pie Town.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34098r.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>Needless to say, there were not many photos taken in Pie Town during the painfully-impoverished years of the 1930’s. It was a tiny village populated largely by dust-bowl refugees and homesteaders along an unpaved dirt road that would eventually become U.S. Highway 60. In fact, until Russell Lee came to Pie Town, there probably wasn’t a single camera in all of Catron County – which even now is home to less than 4,000 residents spread over a land area of 7,200 square miles. Then suddenly, there was a government paid photographer in town who unbelievably was shooting dozens of photos of practically every building and family living in the Pie Town area.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34096r.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>One learns much about life in Pie Town in the 1930’s by looking through this photo set. For example, it’s hard not to notice that most of the buildings in the center of Pie Town were painted red-white-and-blue in those years. After some investigation, Steppin’ Out learned painters from the Standard Oil Company came to town to paint their local gas-station red-white-and-blue. When the painters left, the unused paint was used to paint all the downtown buildings until the thrifty citizens of Pie Town had used up every drop.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34101r_web.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>Russell Lee's photos are quite remarkable as a historic collection of color images documenting what life was like in Pie Town and Catron County in the nearly-forgotten years when whole families of refugees escaping from the Dust Bowl traveled to Pie Town hauling everything they could carry in cars and trucks or with horses, mules and wagons and laid claim to 160-acre plots under the homestead laws for just $3 per quarter-section.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34146r.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>Those were harsh and difficult years for everyone in Catron County and Russell Lee’s photos make the struggle to survive and the deep poverty of those years quite evident. One can clearly see the evidence of that struggle in the living conditions and in the faces of the people as well. Yet, the citizens of Pie Town stood tall and proud as Lee shot photos of them – recording their desperate struggle and immortalizing them all at the same time. They were clearly not defeated. They were just fighting to survive. Lee’s remarkable photos make that fact quite obvious.<br><br>The photographs in this historic exhibit cover just about every aspect of life in Pie Town during those years. They include images of local fairs, rodeos and community picnics, of women cutting up dozens of pies to feed the community dinner, of kids singing at the local school, of crowds gathered outside local churches, of families praying together, of cars buried up to their axles in mud being pulled out by teams of horses, of farmers working the fields, examining their crops, or trying to shoot chicken-stealing hawks from the sky, and of “dug-out" log cabins buried deep in the rich soil of Catron County with just their top few feet showing above ground. Today one can only speculate that those cabins were buried that way because logs were expensive and in short supply and perhaps because cabins were cooler that way than they would have been if they had been placed entirely above ground.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34137r.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>In short, this remarkable and unforgettable photo collection documents life as it was in Pie Town 70 years ago. It does so uncritically and boldly with no hint of judgment or sentimentality. CDG deserves the credit for bringing these historic photos back to Pie Town and displaying them proudly for the community and the rest of the world to enjoy. They represent a remarkable bit of historic heritage for this tiny western New Mexico village whose main claim to fame has been the delicious pies they’ve been baking and selling there for over 80 years!<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34142r_web.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>Steppin Out readers who'd like to see the full set of Lee's Pie Town photos can do so by visiting the CDG site at www.SaveTheRange.com (http://www.savetherange.com/). The photos can be found on the Pie Town pages of that site. There are several ways to find those pages. You can, for example, use the site's search engine to hunt them down. Or for fast access, hover your cursor over the [Main Menu] button near the top of the Home Page and then click the Pie Town link on the menu that appears. After that page, the very next page contains the Russell Lee slide show. (Tip: Click "Next Page" at the bottom of the Pie Town page.) <br><br>Our advice is take your time and wander through the SaveTheRange.com site for a while. There's much to enjoy there. New Mexico readers will especially like the two stories about Bernice Ende the "Long Rider" (www.EndeOfTheTrail.com (http://www.endeofthetrail.com/)) who visited Pie Town last winter during her 5,000 mile horseback ride through the western U.S. It's a fascinating tale about a modern Woman who has been traveling the west all alone in a way that hasn't been done in over 100 years and the few chilly days she spent in Pie Town. We highly recommend that story! <br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34152r.jpg border=1 align=right hspace=3>That reminds us, Pie Town's Annual Pie Festival is set for Saturday, September 8th. this year. On that day and throughout the weekend, thousands of visitors from New Mexico and Arizona and many Criswell landowners from places much farther away will converge on Pie Town to enjoy their annual festival of delicious pies and local fun. Some of them -- hopefully only those with 4 wheel drive vehicles -- may even take trips up the long dirt road to the Criswell Range where the land is still as open and unfenced as the whole western U.S. was one hundred and fifty years ago.<br><br><img src=http://sonewmex.com/images/pietown_1a34149r.jpg border=1 align=left hspace=3>The Criswell Open Range is one of the few places left in the west where that's still true and Criswell Development Group is fighting hard to keep it that way. Our hats are off to them as they continue their effort to "Save The Range" and to the village of Pie Town whose remarkable history has come home to stay at last. The best part is that history is just as delicious and memorable as the pies Pie Town has long baked so well. <br><br>[Credit where Credit is Due: All photos featured in this story were shot in Pie Town in 1940 by the late photographer Russell Lee. They were provided to Steppin' Out by the Criswell Development Group and are part of a publicly accessible archive available at the Library of Congress. Steppin' Out appreciates CDG's cooperation and assistance in the preparation of this story.]