Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940: Two Hundred Homestead Claims in Real Color
The film of this episode premieres November 15, 2026 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
In September and October 1940 the government photographer Russell Lee spent several weeks at Pie Town, New Mexico, with Kodachrome film.
Transcript
Faro and Doris Caudill
R001 Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Washington had already put in print why this kind of farming ends badly. Four years later it sent a photographer.
R002 Dugout house of Faro Caudill, homesteader with Mt. Allegro in the background, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Faro and Doris Caudill lived here. A room dug into the ground, roofed with logs and earth.
R003 The Faro Caudill family eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Russell Lee photographed the family eating dinner inside it.
R004 Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Faro Caudill drew their water up out of a hand-dug well.
The colour is real
R005 Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico. And nothing in this film has been colorized.
R006 Filling station and garage at Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Lee was carrying Kodachrome. These are the colours that came off his film in 1940, and the originals are free to download from the Library of Congress.
Two hundred claims
R007 Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt that she made, Pie Town, New Mexico. A community settled by about 200 migrant Texas and Oklahoma farmers who filed homestead claims ... Mrs. Stagg helps her husband in the field with plowing planting, weeding corn and harvesting beans. She quilts while she rests during the noon hour.
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The caption on this photograph says what the place was.
D01 Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt that she made, Pie Town, New Mexico. A community settled by about 200 migrant Texas and Oklahoma farmers who filed homestead claims ... Mrs. Stagg helps her husband in the field with plowing planting, weeding corn and harvesting beans. She quilts while she rests during the noon hour. (detail)
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
A community settled by about two hundred migrant Texas and Oklahoma farmers who filed homestead claims.
R008 Main Street, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
They called it Pie Town.
R009 General Merchandise store, Main Street, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
One street, and a general merchandise store on it.
R010 Pinto bean warehouse, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And a warehouse for the crop the whole place ran on. Pinto beans.
What Washington had already written
Four years before Lee arrived, a federal committee had reported to the President on the Great Plains — the country most of these families had just come out of.
Settlers, it said, mistook a rainfall which happened for a period to continue above the critical twenty-inch margin, for the permanent climate.
The report says plainly whose fault that was. Newcomers were invited to homestead hundred-and-sixty-acre tracts, although we now know that a farm of this size is far too small to support a family.
They were required to put this land under the plow, regardless of whether or not it was suited for cultivation.
Thus the homesteader often had to plow when plowing was harmful to the land, and he was sometimes forbidden to plow when plowing might have been profitable and beneficial.
Chapter five of that report is titled Attitudes of Mind.
The families
R011 Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Pie Town is not in the Great Plains. It is high country in western New Mexico.
D02 Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico (detail)
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Catron County — six thousand eight hundred square miles, with fewer than five thousand people in them.
R012 Les Thomas, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
It is where some of the people from the Plains went. They filed under the same homestead law.
R013 Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family. Five children.
R014 Jack Whinery, homesteader, with his wife and the youngest of his five children, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Whinery with his wife and the youngest of them.
R015 Jack Whinery and his family, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The same family again, outside.
R016 Garden adjacent to the dugout home of Jack Whinery, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The garden next to their dugout.
R017 Jack Whinery, homesteader, repairing fence which he built with slabs, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Whinery repairing a fence he had built out of slabs.
R018 Mr. Leatherman, homesteader, coming out of his dugout home, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Mr. Leatherman, coming out of his dugout home.
R019 Mr. Leatherman, homesteader, with his work burros in front of his barn, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Leatherman with his work burros, in front of his barn.
R020 Mr. Leatherman, homesteader, shooting hawks which have been carrying away his chickens, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Leatherman shooting hawks, which have been carrying away his chickens. That is what the caption says.
R021 Mr. Leatherman, homesteader, tying up cauliflower, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And Leatherman tying up cauliflower.
R022 Home of Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Jim Norris's house. Logs, a picket fence, and a bare pole standing over it.
R023 Bill Stagg, homesteader, in front of his barn, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Bill Stagg in front of his barn.
R024 Field of beans and farmstead of Bill Stagg, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And Stagg's whole place from the field: the bean ground in front, the buildings at the far edge of it.
Beans and corn
R025 Pinto beans, main crop at Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Pinto beans. Main crop at Pie Town, New Mexico.
R026 Bill Stagg, homesteader, with pinto beans, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Bill Stagg, holding a bunch of the plants up out of the row.
R027 Bill Stagg turning up his beans, Pie Town, New Mexico. He will next pile them for curing
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Stagg turning up his beans. He will next pile them for curing.
R028 Bill Stagg turning up pinto beans, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The same work again, in a different light.
R029 Harvesting new corn from the field of Jim Norris, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Corn came off the fields of Jim Norris.
R030 Harvesting corn, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Cut by hand, hauled on a sled behind a horse.
R031 Harvesting new corn from the field of Jim Norris, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
A white horse and a dark one, working the same row.
R032 Son of Jim Norris, homesteader, tying corn into bundles, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Norris's son, tying corn into bundles.
R033 Gathering corn in the field, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Gathering it in the field.
R034 Jack Whinery and Jim Norris, homesteaders, looking at roots of stalk of corn, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Jack Whinery and Jim Norris, looking at the roots of a stalk of corn. Two men reading the ground.
R035 Jim Norris, homesteader, cutting a head of cabbage, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Norris cutting a head of cabbage.
R036 Mrs. Jim Norris with homegrown cabbage, one of the many vegetables which the homesteaders grow in abundance, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
His wife with the cabbage. One of the many vegetables which the homesteaders grow in abundance, Lee wrote.
R037 Mrs. Norris with homegrown cabbage, one of the many vegetables which the homesteaders grow in abundance, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
He wrote it twice, on two different frames.
R038 Wife of Jim Norris with canned goods, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And here is what that abundance was for. Mrs. Norris, with the canning.
What they built together
R039 Church at Pie Town, New Mexico. This building was a cooperative community enterprise
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
They built a church. The caption calls it a cooperative community enterprise.
R040 Church, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And here they are standing in front of it.
R041 School at Pie Town, New Mexico is held at the Farm Bureau Building
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
There was no schoolhouse. School was held in the Farm Bureau building.
R042 The school at Pie Town, New Mexico is held in the Farm Bureau building, which was constructed by cooperative effort
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Which they had also put up themselves, by cooperative effort.
R043 School children singing, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Lee went inside and photographed the children singing.
R044 School children singing, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Then he moved in close.
R045 Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt which she made, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Mrs. Bill Stagg, with a state quilt she made herself.
R046 Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
She helps her husband in the field with plowing, planting, weeding corn and harvesting beans, the caption says. She quilts while she rests during the noon hour.
R047 Team pulling a car out of the mud; the roads near Pie Town, New Mexico are not improved
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The roads near Pie Town are not improved. When a car went down, a team pulled it out.
The fair
R048 Many automobiles were parked in the grove at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
That October, they held a fair. Many automobiles were parked in the grove, Lee wrote.
R049 Group of homesteaders in front of the bean house which was used for exhibit hall at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The exhibit hall was the bean house.
R050 Exhibit of crops and vegetables at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair.
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Inside it, the crops and vegetables, laid out to be judged.
R051 Fruit wagon at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair. There is no fruit grown in this section and the people depend on outside truckers to bring it in
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
There is no fruit grown in this section, Lee noted, and the people depend on outside truckers to bring it in. So a fruit wagon came.
R052 Friends meeting at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Friends meeting at the fair.
R053 Initial pin souvenirs at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
A table of souvenir pins, sold by initial.
R054 Pie Town, New Mexico, ... at the fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
A stand selling bottled drinks, with the Coca-Cola crates stacked under the counter.
R055 Rodeo at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And a rodeo, run out of a pole corral.
R056 Driving calves into the corral for roping at the rodeo of the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Driving calves in for the roping.
R057 Tying a ribbon on a calf's tail was one of the feature attractions at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair rodeo
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
One of the feature attractions was tying a ribbon on a calf's tail.
The free barbecue
R058 Getting ready to serve the barbeque dinner at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Then they fed everybody, for nothing.
R059 Serving pinto beans at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair barbeque
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Pinto beans, ladled out of a big black pot.
R060 Cutting the pies and cakes at the barbeque dinner, Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And the pies and the cakes, going down the length of the table.
R061 Saying grace before the barbeque dinner at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Grace was said before the barbecue was served.
R062 Men of the community of Pie Town, New Mexico eating at the barbeque
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
The men of the community, eating on the ground.
R063 Homesteader and his children eating barbeque at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
A homesteader and his children, doing the same.
R064 Homesteader feeding his daughter at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair free barbeque
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And a man feeding his daughter off his own plate.
R065 Homesteader feeding his daughter at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair free barbeque
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Lee took that one twice as well.
Nineteen fifty
The 1936 report had a recommendation for places like this. Over much of the Great Plains, it said, many farms are too small to yield an adequate family living.
Buy them, consolidate them, and relieve — the phrase is the government's own — many families in stranded circumstances.
Nothing like that reached Pie Town. What reached Pie Town was the census. In April 1940, six months before Lee got there, Catron County held four thousand eight hundred and eighty-one people.
Spread across twenty-two election precincts. Two of them are shown with no figure at all for 1930.
R066 People at the Fair, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
In 1930 there had been three thousand two hundred and eighty-two. The county grew by forty-nine percent across the decade of the Depression.
Then the next census. Three thousand five hundred and thirty-three. A drop of twenty-seven point six percent.
Trechado precinct went from two hundred and eighty people to eighty-seven. Cow Springs, from a hundred and eighty-five to forty-four.
An older way of holding this ground
R067 Llano de San Juan, New Mexico, Catholic Church
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Lee drove north that same year, and photographed this. The Catholic church at Llano de San Juan.
R069 Llano de San Juan, New Mexico, Catholic Church
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Adobe walls, a wooden bell tower, and the graveyard fenced in white.
R068 Door and window in a Spanish-American home, Costilla, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
And a door and a window at Costilla. A Spanish-American home — on ground held for generations before any homestead act reached it.
R003 The Faro Caudill family eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico
Russell Lee · 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI colour transparency. View the original.
Every frame in this film is a government photograph, free at full resolution from the Library of Congress. If your family filed one of those claims, the comments are open.
Sources
- Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information colour transparencies, Pie Town and Catron County, New Mexico, September–October 1940. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Color Photographs (`LC-DIG-fsac-*`). https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/
- 68 frames are used, out of the 75 Russell Lee colour frames the collection holds for New Mexico: 72 at Pie Town, 2 at Llano de San Juan, 1 at Costilla.
- These are period Kodachromes, not colorized. No machine colour was applied to any frame in this episode, and it carries no altered-content disclosure. The masters are 3,000 px and larger and are free to download at full resolution.
- Masters came from Wikimedia Commons, which mirrors the fsac transparencies (`Special:FilePath/<file>?width=3000`); two frames absent from Commons were pulled from the LOC master TIFF at `tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/fsac/`.
- Every caption quoted on screen is Lee's own FSA/OWI agency caption as the Library records it. The long caption quoted in scene 7 is on https://lccn.loc.gov/2017877749 and reads in full: *"Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt that she made, Pie Town, New Mexico. A community settled by about 200 migrant Texas and Oklahoma farmers who filed homestead claims … Mrs. Stagg helps her husband in the field with plowing planting, weeding corn and harvesting beans. She quilts while she rests during the noon hour."* The ellipsis is the Library's, not ours.
- *The Future of the Great Plains*, Report of the Great Plains Committee, December 1936, U.S. Government Printing Office. Federal publication, public domain.
- Page images are from the Google-digitized University of Michigan copy (`books.google.com/books?id=qMkDAAAAMAAJ`), which renders at 1,936 × 2,500 px. The Internet Archive copy (`tdl.43628-…`) is only 1,317 px on the long edge and will not carry a document plate.
- Quotations were read off the page images, never off a text layer. All three are on printed page 3, right column: - *"…farmers and ranchers mistook a rainfall which happened for a period to continue above the critical 20-inch margin, for the permanent climate."* - *"Newcomers were invited to homestead 160-acre tracts, although we now know that in most parts of the Great Plains a farm of this size is far too small to support a family. They were required to put this land under the plow, regardless of whether or not it was suited for cultivation."* - *"Thus the homesteader often had to plow when plowing was harmful to the land, and he was sometimes forbidden to plow when plowing might have been profitable and beneficial."*
- Chapter V, *Attitudes of Mind*, opens on printed page 63.
- Printed page 75, right column: *"The acquisition of under-sized farms and the consolidation of them with others, would tend to relieve many families in stranded circumstances and assist them to find better opportunities elsewhere."*
- Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, *Population*, Vol. I, New Mexico (Bureau of the Census). Table of counties by minor civil division: Catron County 4,881 in 1940, 3,282 in 1930, in 22 election precincts. Precinct 21 (Prairie View) and Precinct 22 (Midway) carry no 1930 figure. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-volume-1/33973538v1ch07.pdf
- United States Census of Population: 1950, Vol. I, New Mexico, Table 5 — Area and Population of Counties, Urban and Rural: 1930 to 1950, page 31-6: Catron, land area 6,898 sq mi — 1950: 3,533 · 1940: 4,881 · 1930: 3,282 · 1940–1950: −27.6% · 1930–1940: +48.7%. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-34.pdf
- Table 6 on the following page, precinct level: Trechado 280 → 87, Cow Springs 185 → 44 (1940 → 1950).
- Both tables were read off 300–400 dpi page renders, not off the text layer. The percentages check against the counts: 4,881 ÷ 3,282 = +48.7%; 3,533 ÷ 4,881 = −27.6%.
- The report is about the Great Plains, and Pie Town is not in the Great Plains. The episode says so on screen, in scene 15. The connection it draws is the one the record supports: Lee's caption identifies these settlers as Texas and Oklahoma migrants, and they filed under the same federal homestead law the 1936 report condemns. No claim is made that the committee studied Catron County.
- Which precinct contains Pie Town is not stated, because neither the 1940 nor the 1950 census lists a precinct of that name and nothing in hand settles it. The episode names Trechado and Cow Springs, which are in the table, rather than asserting a Pie Town figure that does not exist.
- No founding date or naming story is given. The often-repeated account of a man selling pies on the highway could not be traced to a source that meets this channel's standard, so it is not on screen.
- No claim is made about what became of any individual family. The census moves; the Caudills, Whinerys, Staggs, Norrises and Leathermans are left where Lee found them.
- Several draft lines were cut for describing things the captions and the frames do not carry: a windmill (the pole has no wheel), a claim that Pie Town had no water to irrigate with, "the last thing he photographed here", and a dating claim about the church at Llano de San Juan.
- Elevation and the Continental Divide were dropped from scene 15 rather than asserted from memory.