The Railroads Build a Town: Early Industry

Winslow grew and remained stable in the first half of the 20th century because its location made it an important shipping point for livestock, trade goods, and lumber, with the Santa Fe Railway carrying those goods to markets across the country and helping diversify both the town’s economy and population. Ranching expanded in northern Arizona Territory in the 1870s and 1880s as cattle were shipped in to meet rising demand for food, but by the 1890s overstocking, overgrazing, and drought devastated local sheep and cattle herds, leaving the industry dependent on railroad connections to Midwestern and California markets; although sheep ranching declined more sharply, cattle ranching survived in part through careful stewardship of land and animals. Trading posts, important to the economy of the American West from the 1860s through the 1970s, grew after Navajo people adopted some new household staples during their confinement at Bosque Redondo, and traders exchanged those goods for Navajo wool, blankets, jewelry, and livestock; by 1930 more than 150 trading posts on or near Navajo lands served major commercial and social functions, and families tied to Winslow worked at nearly thirty locations across the region, building distinctive relationships with Navajo and Hopi artists and families. Logging also flourished in northeastern Arizona because of the Ponderosa pine south of town and the economical shipment of finished lumber on the Santa Fe and Route 66, and Winslow’s mills and logging camps employed workers from companies including the Duke City Lumber Company, Nagel Lumber & Timber Company, and Ramsey Logging Company, with many Mexican American and African American workers among them.

Winslow, Arizona · United States