Blackdom was a real place. I have to make this fact clear because my brother Maison Nelson thought I made it up. No lie. Maison (pronounced May Sawn) recorded my doctoral graduation on December 10, 2015. He flew all the way from the Air Force base where he was stationed in Las Vegas, Nevada, to El Paso, Texas. He took pictures of me holding my University of Texas at El Paso mock diploma (a degree in Borderland History with subfield expertise in African Diasporic Studies and US History). Yet, after my not seeing him for about five years, Maison’s question was, “When you gon’ make some money?”
In 2019, I accepted a seat on a panel at the national conference for the Western History Association in Las Vegas, Nevada, held at the Westgate Vegas Resort & Casino, near the Vegas Strip. Dr. Kenneth Hamilton was on the panel, and I could not pass up the chance to meet him in person. Unknown to Dr. Hamilton, he had become an intellectual father to the Blackdom Thesis and an all-around icon for me. Maison drove from his house in the Northside of Vegas to meet me at the conference. At first sight, again, “When you gon’ make some money?” Forgive me for belaboring the point, but Blackdom was a real place. Audible to the people sitting around Maison in the conference room of my panel, he said, “Oh. I thought he made that up.”
Official Replacements for the Old Public Blackdom Narratives
Blackdom Townsite and Company (1900–1930): A Brief History
In the early 1900s, the Pecos Valley Region of Southeastern New Mexico Territory experienced an economic boom because of an influx of settlers into the area. African American families were among those settlers. They built Blackdom, the only all-Black town in the territory and situated it about twenty miles south of Roswell in Chaves County. Today little remains of this ambitious frontier scheme that within a twenty-year period became an oil producing town.
In September 1903, thirteen black men led by Isaac W. Jones and Francis M. (Frank) Boyer, signed the Articles of Incorporation to establish the Blackdom Townsite Company to build the town. Blackdom was located on a direct route to the Dexter train station to the East, and Artesia, another New Mexico Territory boomtown twenty miles south. West of Blackdom was Apache land.
A few of the early founders were former soldiers in the all-Black 24th Infantry which served throughout New Mexico Territory in the 1880s and 1890s. Frank Boyer was the most influential of them having trained as a minister at Atlanta (Georgia) Baptist College (now Morehouse College) following his discharge from the military. Boyer and his wife, Ella, also brought black Freemasonry to the county establishing the first Masonic lodge in 1914. A frontier town relying on dry farming proved difficult to maintain. Survival depended on rain that often didn’t come. Between 1909 and 1916, however, the rains came and Blackdom was prosperous. In 1917, Blackdom saw many of its young men conscripted into the military as the US entered World War I.
When oil was discovered in 1919, Blackdom residents created the Blackdom Oil Company. The single largest investor, however, was Mittie Moore Wilson, an African American brothel owner in nearby Roswell. Blackdom Oil contracted with the New York–based National Exploration Company to drill wells in the area. Current research doesn’t provide exact numbers of working wells, but a 1947 interview with Frank Boyer revealed that some Blackdom residents still received royalties from Gulf Oil for producing wells on their property.
Frank Boyer in a 1947 interview recalled a peak of about 800 black residents in the town and surrounding township in the early 1920s. US Census records, however, revealed that only 400 African Americans lived in Blackdom and Chaves County by 1930. Many of those residents owned a home in town and a desert homestead (ranch). Others resided exclusively outside the town limits. In fact, town leaders ran ads in state and national newspapers and The Crisis magazine that said: “farmers preferred.”
In 1927, the town gathered and celebrated Juneteenth, where they hosted their white neighbors with a baseball game and barbecue. Despite the continuing oil revenues for some residents, the 1929 Stock Market Crash and Great Depression effectively ended Blackdom’s future as an independent town. Town leaders dissolved Blackdom in 1930.
Blackdom Oil Company (1919–1930): A Brief History
In 1919, ironically, Blackdom Oil Company started during Red Summer in a year of nationwide violence against Black people. Blackdom was New Mexico’s only all-Black town that entered contracts with National Exploration Company and Mescalero Oil Company. Oil exploration began in Southeastern New Mexico during the 1910s earning the region the nickname “Little Texas.” Commercialization allowed Blackdom to fully engage the regional economy during the Roaring Twenties.
Oil was first discovered in New Mexico in 1907 and commercial wells began in 1922. In 1919, Blackdomites benefited from the speculation bubble when the homestead class incorporated the Blackdom Oil Company. Leaders in the collective were led by engineers and Freemasons of prominent families (Boyer, Ragsdale, Eubank, Gates, and Collins, to name a few) who agreed to deposit their land with the Roswell Picacho Investment Co. at a bank twenty miles North.
Blackdom had begun in September 1903 when thirteen African American men, led by Isaac Jones and Frank Boyer, incorporated the townsite company. The early years were plagued with droughts in a dry-farming agricultural society. By 1918, for those slow to prove up land, prospects for an oil boom in the region increased urgency. Women of Blackdom increased their land holdings, led by Ella Boyer, who completed her 160-acre patent on land adjacent to Blackdom’s forty-acre townsite (land patented by her husband Frank).
The year 1919 saw the first significant African American participation in the region’s oil boom. In September of that year, Mittie Moore Wilson homesteaded a square mile of land three miles south of Blackdom. She struggled to meet proving up requirements until she received help from a few influential people of the town. Moore, a bootlegger who ran a house of prostitution twenty miles north of the town, was one of the area’s wealthiest citizens.
In January 1920, Blackdomites placed a “Will Drill at Blackdom” announcement in the Roswell Daily Record, inviting wildcatters and other oil speculators to participate in the boom that promised riches for Blackdomites who had lands made available for oil drilling. The fury of advertisements for Blackdom Oil peaked in the summer that year as local residents signed contracts with oil exploration companies from New York to California. On September 1, 1920, The Roswell Daily Record reported an unidentified California syndicate had, “Made Location at Blackdom.” How many wells and barrels produced by Blackdom’s enterprise is currently lost to history.
Lasting prosperity materialized in Blackdom’s outposts that were sustained by inter-commerce amongst families within a vast regional network of Masonic lodges and churches. During the 1920s, the town itself withered even as Blackdomites in the region garnered oil royalties. Eustace and Francis Jr., of the Boyer family, were a part of a WWI cohort of military men who proved up homesteads during the postwar period and grew their families. Committed to an Afrotopia underwritten by oil royalties, Frank Boyer left Chaves County, where Blackdom was located, and resettled in Vado, Doña Ana County, New Mexico after completing the townsite’s official plat in May of 1920. Following the departure, the Ragsdale family maintained an influence through their business dealings in windmills as well as oil pumping on their land.
By 1930 and the start of the Great Depression, Blackdom’s townsite ceased to exist. Blackdom Oil, however, continued to produce royalties for the homestead class. Local newspapers reported that the Blackdom Oil Company drilled exploration wells at least 1,600 feet deep. Frank Boyer, in a 1947 interview, said that royalty payments to Blackdomites flowed well into the post–World War II era.