Painting of Evelyn
“Well, it (Tokay) had, you know, in the 1800s and the ‘20s, there were about 3,000 people lived out there. Because there was Tokay and Carthage and Farley, and they lived in those little canyons and all mined coal. Then out on the open flat country were ranches. But Tokay was a big coal mining operation. And those mines were operated before we even became a state. And there were underground mines and small, and these Mexican men would have to go down and bend down to go in there, and it was dangerous mining, ‘cause it was small veins and they had to tunnel down, way down in there, and it was the coal that they used for smelters. And there was a railroad up there, and they hauled coal to El Paso, to the smelter, and they used that coal in Socorro to heat the public buildings. All the public buildings, the courthouse and the schoolhouses and Tech, were heated with that, furnaces, with coal from Tokay. And it was real black smoky, and it would make the black smoke. You’d see it run down the adobe walls. It was UGLY.
“There was a company store and a school. There were several houses, rows of houses. And then under the hill there was a, they had a little – there’s just nothing but ruins there when I went there. But Tokay still had several houses there. And that long concrete house was a rooming house that we used mainly for storage and things, because it was just a concrete –16 rooms with 16 windows and a chimney outlet in every fourth room. That’s the building that’s the Bed and Breakfast. When I first heard about it, they said it had bachelor guys, they had one room with one faucet in it, and that the end room they had a place where they could take baths. So I think it probably was a rooming house."
