The Ludlow Massacre

On this ground, one of the bloodiest chapters in American labor history unfolded. On the twentieth of April, nineteen fourteen, Colorado National Guard troops opened fire on a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families.

The miners worked for John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. They had walked out demanding fair wages, enforcement of mining law, and the right to a union. Evicted from company housing, they pitched a canvas town here through the winter. When the shooting and a fire swept the camp, around twenty-five people died. Among them were two women and eleven children, suffocated in a pit they had dug beneath a tent to hide.

The United Mine Workers bought this land and raised a granite monument to the dead. In two thousand nine it became a National Historic Landmark, a permanent reminder of what the fight for labor rights cost here.