The Railroad That Built Gallup

Gallup did not exist before the railroad. In eighteen eighty-one the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, building its transcontinental line westward along the thirty-fifth parallel survey route, set up a construction paymaster's camp here in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico. Paychecks were distributed by a railroad clerk named David Gallup, and the workers who had to travel to collect their wages called the stop Gallup's camp. The name stuck.

The line was absorbed into the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway within a few years, and the Santa Fe made Gallup a division point, meaning the town got a roundhouse, repair shops, and a steady payroll of railroad workers. That infrastructure was the economic spine of early Gallup. The railroad also brought in workers from Mexico, Eastern Europe, and East Asia to lay track and later to mine the coal seams the surveyors had identified in the mesas east and south of town.

The coal fields around Gallup produced fuel for the Santa Fe's steam locomotives for decades. By the early nineteen hundreds mines at Mentmore, Allison, and Gibson were supplying the railroad with coal. The mines drew immigrant labor from Italy, Greece, Austria-Hungary, and Mexico, creating an unusually polyglot working-class community at the edge of the Navajo Nation. Many of those families are still in the Gallup area today, their surnames mixing with Diné and Zuni names in the school directories and on the storefronts of downtown.

The Santa Fe main line still runs directly through the center of Gallup. Dozens of freight trains a day pass through, making the crossing at Route Sixty-Six one of the most active grade-level railroad corridors in the American West.