Rugby, A Colorado Coal Camp Named for England

Rugby, Colorado is a ghost-town name in Las Animas County, tucked into the coalfields southeast of Trinidad. A post office operated here during the early twentieth century, roughly the life of the coal camp. The community is said to be named for Rugby in England, a pattern seen in other camps where British and Welsh supervisors stamped familiar names onto new American camps.

No population figures for the camp survive in widely available records, and that detail is thin and worth flagging. What is clear is the pattern: a company dug a mine, company men named the town after somewhere they missed, workers from a dozen countries moved in, and when the coal ran out, the camp dissolved back into the grassland.