Aguilar: From Trading Post to Coal Town

Aguilar traces its roots to a trading post called San Antonio Plaza, where Spanish-American farmers and travelers stopped as early as eighteen sixty-four. In eighteen seventy-nine, José Ramón Aguilar bought the land. He was a state legislator, and when the town incorporated in eighteen ninety-four it took his name.

The Peerless Coal Mine had opened in eighteen eighty-eight, and the railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-two, and those two facts changed everything. Within a decade, Aguilar had four hotels, a bank, multiple churches, and fourteen saloons. Its population peaked at roughly two thousand five hundred during the coal boom, with miners of more than a dozen nationalities living in the canyon camps ringing the town.

The coal ran out across the nineteen forties and fifties, and most of those camps disappeared. Aguilar stayed. About four hundred fifty people live here today, the quiet center of what was once a roaring coalfield.