Pie Town

 In October 2020 we drove through the Very Large Array in New Mexico on our way from Maine to Arizona.  About thirty five miles further west on Route 60, while crossing the Continental Divide, we passed through a curious little outpost called Pie Town.  I recently came across this photo of Pie Town, taken in June 1940 by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration, at the Shorpy Archive and decided to find out more about the town.

Pie Town is an unincorporated community with a population of about 180, founded in the 1920s, and the subject of a feature article in the February 2005 edition of Smithsonian Magazine.  It turns out Russell Lee took about 600 photos of the town and its inhabitants which are preserved in the Library of Congress archives.  The town was primarily settled by Dust Bowlers in the 1930s and during its peak in that and the next decade, was home to about 250 families.  By the 1950s the climate had become drier and a place always tough to live in became even tougher and folks started moving away.  The Smithsonian article, by Paul Hendrickson, tells how the remaining inhabitants survive.  He also describes how the name came about:

The town had been around as a settlement since at least the early 1920s, started, or so the legend goes, by a man named Norman who’d filed a mining claim and opened a general store and enjoyed baking pies, rolling his own dough, making them from scratch. He’d serve them to family and travelers. Mr. Norman’s pies were such a hit that everybody began calling the crossroads PieTown. Around 1927, the locals petitioned for a post office. The authorities were said to have wanted a more conventional name. The Pie Towners said it would be PieTown or no town.

The Daily Pie Cafe was still operating in 2005, and we saw it last year on our drive.  Hendrickson writes of it:

And then there was the Daily Pie. I’ve been to some restaurants where a lot of desserts were listed on the menu, but this was ridiculous. The day’s offerings were scrawled in a felt-tip pen on a big “Pie Chart” above my head. In addition to regular apple, there was New Mexican apple (laced with green chili and piñon nuts), peach walnut crumb, boysen berry (that’s the spelling in Pie Town), key lime cheesecake (in Pie Town it’s a pie), strawberry rhubarb, peanut butter (it’s a pie), chocolate chunk crème, chocolate walnut, apple cranberry crumb, triple berry, cherry streusel, and two or three others that I can no longer remember and didn’t write down in my notebook. The Pie Chart changes daily at the Daily Pie, and sometimes several times within a day. A red dot beside a name meant that there was at least a whole other pie of that same kind back in the kitchen.

When we back our trip to see the Very Large Array we'll definitely be making a stop in Pie Town.

From Smithsonian: