NW New Mexico News

From November 26, 2022 post.

By the time he died in a fiery 1929 plane crash, Amasa B. McGaffey had become one of the richest men in New Mexico. Some might consider him to be a robber baron and Farmington played a key role in his rising business fortunes. 

In May 1905, McGaffey purchased the most impressive building in Farmington. The Hyde Exploration Expedition (HEE) building had been built in 1901 and 1902 by Benjamin Talbot Babbitt Hyde and his younger brother, Fred Hyde, Jr. The two young New Yorkers were heirs to the Bab-O soap fortune and had first been drawn to the Four Corners by the extensive Indian ruins. They funded excavations at many of the ruins and in 1898 they began entering the mercantile trade and trading post business. The brick HEE building in Farmington was a general mercantile store. They also owned eight trading posts, including one in Farmington. They had a large store in downtown Albuquerque as well. 

Talbot Hyde was the more intense working partner, while Fred was intermittently interested. Side trips to Paris, London and elsewhere kept him distracted. Their consistent common pursuit was working through the family fortune at a prodigious rate. By the time they completed the Farmington building, family members were growing alarmed. This was coupled with growing interest by the federal government and the state’s newspapers about the Hyde’s archaeological work. Santa Fe’s New Mexican railed against what they saw as the despoilation of the state’s Indian ruins and the export of artifacts out of state by the Hydes. Fred Hyde told a federal investigator that in no case had they ever sold ancient artifacts. The Hyde brothers did sell Navajo rugs, jewelry and other items at their stores in Philadelphia and on New York City’s Times Square. In 1903, Talbot and Fred sold the bulk of their New Mexico businesses to a syndicate headed by J.W. Benham, a former Arizona cattleman. 

Amasa McGaffey, who had been the manager of Albuquerque’s HEE store, retained his position under Benham. McGaffey had been to Farmington in connection with his work for the Hyde brothers. He was born in 1870 and raised in Lyndon, Vermont. In 1884, his older brother Luke left Vermont, moved to Los Lunas, and began raising cattle. In 1892, he moved to Roswell where he became the postmaster and entered business. Their father died in Vermont in 1891 and soon after that, twenty-one-year-old Amasa McGaffey moved to Albuquerque. Unlike the Hydes, Amasa was not born with silver spoon in his mouth. He took employment in the local Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad office. On October 9, 1894, he married a local Albuquerque girl, Mabel Fox. The newlyweds went to Vermont and Amasa looked for work, but after a few months he decided his prospects were better out west. A Vermont newspaper noted that he intended to enter the insurance business. In 1901, he assumed management of the Hyde store in downtown Albuquerque.  

After J.W. Benham purchased the Hyde’s businesses, McGaffey began a meteoric rise in fortunes. In 1903, he purchased what had been the HEE trading store in Thoreau. It was experiencing a boom as the American Lumber Company had started a large logging operation nearby. McGaffey’s partners in Thoreau were William Horabin and A.G.O. Cooke. They operated trading stores, general merchandise stores and entered the lumber business. Their operations were far flung and McGaffey sometimes passed through the Farmington area to check on their sheep flocks in the Mancos area. In 1904, the company snagged the contract to provide railroad ties for the extension of the D&RG’s line from Durango to Farmington. With the railroad coming to Farmington, McGaffey sensed opportunity. He made the most of his connections and made an offer to buy the two-story brick HEE building. That deal also included several other buildings in Farmington, some vacant town property and Aztec’s fruit evaporator and flouring mill. It was a massive purchase as the HEE had been the largest payer of property taxes in San Juan County.

Within a year, McGaffey sold the HEE building to Franklin Pierce of the Pierce Mercantile Company. Across the street from the HEE’s brick building was a small nondescript building which was known for years as the McGaffey building (see photo below). It had, no doubt, been one of the buildings involved when McGaffey purchased the large HEE store. In May 1913, the Durango Semi-Weekly Herald reported that the McGaffey building was being fitted for use as a cheese factory by J.S. Palmer. A tinsmith was installing vats and other fixtures. In 1917, it was being re-fitted to hold the wholesale stock of the C.H. Algert Company of Fruitland. In 1921, H.W. Gibson opened a cash and carry store in the building. In 1925, it became J.W. Hadley’s general merchandise store. After that, the McGaffey building disappears from newspaper accounts.  

As for Amasa McGaffey, after selling Farmington’s HEE store in late 1905 or early 1906, he turned his attention to becoming a major force as a railroad tie and pole contractor. Wherever the rails went, so followed telegraph and telephone lines. He had some ready cash obtained from the sale of his Farmington property. He and three other Albuquerque men, including W.S. Hopewell, formed the Santa Barbara Tie and Pole Company. They began purchasing timber rights and timbered properties throughout the territory. Their first acquisition was the Santa Barbara Land Grant, which included the well-timbered slopes of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains east of Taos. They began cutting trees at an alarming rate. Sawmills on site made the ties and poles which were then floated down the Rio Grande to the train station near Santo Domingo Pueblo. There they were loaded on rail cars and transported to the “pickling plant” in Albuquerque where they were treated with creosote. By 1910 the Santa Barbara Company was sending a half a million ties down the Rio Grande. The Santa Barbara Land Grant still bears evidence of this massive logging effort. McGaffey had other irons in the fire. 

From his trading store at Thoreau, he had lusted after the forested slopes of the Zuni Mountains, south of Thoreau and east of Gallup. As early as 1905 he and William Horabin had established their first Zuni Mountain lumber camp. Before the decade was out Amasa had partnered with his brother to obtain additional lumber interests in the Zunis. The brothers had a large warehouse at the railroad siding in Thoreau and shipped Navajo rugs and Navajo silverwork across America. In June 1912, the Albuquerque Morning Journal reported that the Santa Fe Railroad had agreed to construct a twenty-five mile line, at their expense, from the Perea siding east of Gallup to the new sawmill the McGaffeys were building. A town sprang up around the mill and it was known as McGaffey. They even had their own school and a town baseball team, the aptly named McGaffey Lumberjacks. 

Not long afterward Amasa and his wife moved to Los Angeles, although many newspaper accounts continued to identify the family as living in Albuquerque. By this point the couple had three sons and a daughter. McGaffey retained his New Mexico holdings and spent a huge amount of time riding the rails between southern California and Albuquerque. In 1928, McGaffey purchased the rights to harvest a half a million board feet of timber from the Fort Defiance Plateau on the Navajo Reservation north of Gallup. Plans were made to build a sawmill twenty-six miles north of Gallup and McGaffey was to build a railroad to the sawmill. McGaffey would not live to see this project to fruition. 

He had grown tired of the time consuming train trips to and from New Mexico and on Tuesday, September 3, 1929, he embarked on his first plane flight. Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight had occurred two years earlier and commercial airliners were in their infancy. St. Louis based Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) was an early entrant in commercial passenger flight. The TAT flight flying out of Albuquerque carried only eight people; five passengers, a pilot, co-pilot and a courier. The airliner, known as the “City of San Francisco,” departed at 10:20 AM, headed west. A line of squalls had developed in the Grants area and the Ford Tri-motor was soon in the soup. A heavy rainstorm enveloped the airplane and lightning flashed all around. Pilot J.B. Stowe and co-pilot Edwin Dietel were confident they could pass through the storm. They were wrong. Visibility was down to zero and at 11:00 AM the TAT airliner plowed a path 150 yards long through the forest and crashed into the side of Mount Taylor. The wing fuel tanks erupted in flames incinerating all of the plane’s occupants. With Mount Taylor shrouded in clouds, no one saw the smoke and flames and the fire was soon extinguished by the downpour. 

The plane was scheduled to stop in Winslow and when it failed to arrive or radio, the TAT staff there grew quite concerned. Search planes were soon sent out from Albuquerque and Winslow. Before evening fell, reports had come in that the crashed plane had been found south and west of Gallup, about 80 miles from Mt. Taylor. The next day over 200 searchers combed the area based on this false information. Charles Lindbergh who assisted TAT in establishing its routes was called in by the company to help manage the search. Lindbergh flew into Winslow, the search headquarters, from New York City on Saturday, September 7th, but the Mt. Taylor crash site had been located a few hours before his arrival. 

A recovery operation was quickly organized. Local cattlemen served as guides accompanied by several  physicians. Pack animals accompanied the group. They drove to San Fidel and then rode eight miles before dismounting and walking to the crash site. There was no need for physicians, the remains were unrecognizable and were initially identified by their watches and other jewelry and later by their dental work and other forensic measures. Amasa B. McGaffey was fifty-nine years old at the time of his death. A large funeral service was held in Albuquerque at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. U.S Senator Sam Bratton gave the eulogy. Future U.S Senator Clinton Anderson was a pallbearer. Governor R.C. Dillon, former Governor James Hinkle, congressman Albert Simms and C.C. Manning of Gallup were among the honorary pallbearers. McGaffey’s remains were later interred in Los Angeles. 

Written by Mike Maddox. Note: Franklin Pierce operated out of the two story brick Hyde store until February 27, 1914. In the early morning hours that day a raging conflagration destroyed the building. Four years after the fire the remnants of the brick walls were reduced to rubble, erasing what even today would be one of the most impressive buildings in downtown Farmington. Also of note, on January 6, 1912, Amasa McGaffey and his wife were among a small number of New Mexicans in the White House who witnessed President Taft sign the New Mexico Statehood bill.

Original source can be found here.