Dedicating Ludlow

The site in southern Colorado where striking coal miners and members of their families were slain in 1914 by National Guardsmen and private security guards will be dedicated on Sunday as a National Historic Landmark. That’s according to The Associated Press, which reports that Governor Bill Ritter will be joined at the dedication by United Mine Workers of America International president Cecil Roberts and other union officials in Ludlow, 180 miles south of Denver. The New Yorker, in a review earlier this year of a book by Thomas G. Andrews, “Killing for Coal” (cover pictured), detailed the struggle that, in all, claimed the lives of 75 people, including those who suffocated in a cellar when their tent was set ablaze during the crackdown (via 5280). Ernest Luning, a writer at The Colorado Independent, notes a personal connection to the incident: “When my grandfather’s brother, my great-uncle Lloyd, was but a toddler, my great-grandparents took the family on a camping trip outside Trinidad. During the night, the family slept in a tent, unaware of the commotion over the next hill. The next morning, they woke up and discovered a bullet lodged in the board Lloyd slept on (in those days, babies slept on boards so their heads would properly mature, or so the family story goes). Later they learned the bullet was a stray from the Ludlow Massacre.”