Homesteading and the Town of Blackdom

Blacks did not arrive in large numbers until the passage of the Federal Homestead
Act of 1862. This Act enabled over 100,000 former Black Southerners to stake a
claim in lands in the West. The Act has been called one of the most important
pieces of legislation in the History of the United States. Signed into law by President
Abraham Lincoln after the secession of the Southern states, the Act turned
over vast amounts of public land to private citizens. Two hundred seventy million
acres or 10% of the area of the United States was claimed and settled under this
Act.

A homesteader had to be a head of household and at least 21 years of age to claim
a 160 acre parcel of land. Immigrants, farmers from the East, single women and
former slaves traveled west. The one condition in homesteading was that the
claimants “prove up.” This entailed living on the land, building a home, and making
improvements and farming for five years before they were eligible for ownership.
A filing fee of $18.00 was required.

In the 1870’s Dora, a town in the Cimarron Valley, was homesteaded by freed
Blacks from Texas before the town was overrun by cattlemen. Blacks also homesteaded
near Raton, Las Cruces, and Clayton.

The most famous all-Black community in New Mexico was Blackdom. The story
of the settlement of Blackdom is told in detail in a “Colores” program produced
by KUNM Public Television. Blackdom was a modest town on the plains of the
New Mexico territory. It was the first all-Black settlement in the New Mexico
territory and had its inception at the end of the 19th century. The town was located
18 miles southwest of Roswell.

Frank Boyer’s father, Henry Boyer, a freedman, had been a wagoner with the U.S.
Army during the United States-Mexican War. When Henry returned home to
Georgia, he told his son about the beauty of the West. Frank Boyer grew up after
the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era influenced by such writers as W. E.

B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. Blacks were becoming teachers, politicians,
and businessmen. However, from 1877 to 1900, when the Reconstruction failed,
the times became extremely dangerous for Blacks. Though the 14th Amendment to
the Constitution had been passed, the reality remained that Blacks could not vote;
they were illiterate and largely unable to own land. If they elected to remain in the
South, they had little choice but to become sharecroppers, which led to greater
indebtedness to wealthy landowners. Many, including Frank Boyer, saw the West
as the promise of a fresh start.

Frank Boyer, a graduate of Morehouse University, was a teacher. He met his wife,
Ella Louise McGruder, a graduate from Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia, at a
teacher’s summer school session. Their relationship was based on common religious
and educational values. The couple had four children when Frank set out for
New Mexico in 1896.

Frank was discontented with the way Blacks were being threatened in the south.
He was involved in meetings to influence Blacks to speak out and protest against
slavery. The Ku Klux Klan threatened Frank Boyer so his father suggested that he
go west to “a land where you can have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly
and no slavery.” Some sources indicate that Frank and one of his students, Daniel
Keyes, walked most of the 2,000 mile distance, stopping to pick up work along the
way arriving in Eddy County in 1898. The descendents of the Boyer family state
that Frank traveled west with two of his students, Keyes and another student
named Ragsdale. In 1901 Ella and the children arrived in New Mexico.

At the time Blackdom was settled it was lush with artesian wells. Frank Boyer advertised
in newspapers for Black homesteaders. He invited the new arrivals into his
home and helped them build a house, prepare the land, and plant their first crop.

Blackdom’s heyday was around 1908 when it was home to 25 families with approximately
300 people. The families claimed about 15,000 acres under various
land laws. It had a post office, blacksmith shop, stores, and a hotel. A weekly one-
leaf newspaper was published. The most admired structure, the Blackdom Baptist
Church, which also served as the schoolhouse, today is the main living area of a
home in Cottonwood, New Mexico.

Cowboys in the vicinity of Blackdom helped themselves to provisions if the homesteaders
were not at home. Doors were never locked. Cowboys could come into a
homestead and sleep, eat and leave a note saying they had been there. During
roundup time, these visitors would often return to the homesteads and present their
hosts with a quarter or half side of beef.

Farms in Blackdom produced cotton, cantaloupe, onions, alfalfa, and sugar beets.
Among Blackdom’s residents was Mississippi born W. T. Malone who was the
first Black to pass the New Mexico bar exam in 1914 and practice law.

In 1916 changes came that would cause the demise of Blackdom. Worms appeared,
there was an alkali buildup in the soil, and slowly the artesian wells dried
up. Men had to work on nearby farms to enable them to “prove up” or make the
necessary improvement to their land in order to fulfill their obligation under the
Homestead Act. Ironically, in 1921 when Frank Boyer legally filed the plan for the
town, the water table had been severely lowered. Families from Blackdom were
already moving to Roswell, Dexter, and Las Cruces. The bank foreclosed on
Frank and Ella Boyer’s house. The Boyers moved to Pacheco and then to Vado,
New Mexico, where Frank Boyer developed another Black community. Two hundred
twenty members of the Boyer family remain residents of the Vado area today.

Ella Boyer, eventually the mother of seven boys and four girls, was “the first
lady” of Blackdom. Ella’s sister Willie Frances was married to Daniel Keyes who
had accompanied Frank on the 2,000 mile trek to New Mexico. Both Ella and
Willie Frances were schoolteachers and had large families. They taught their children
at home. Ella helped with the living, dining and sleeping quarters for new
Blackdom residents. She never worked outside the home but taught her daughters
to cook and care for a home. She was active in religious, fraternal and civic affairs
of the community and state. She served as president of the Women’s Department
of the State Baptist Convention and was Grand Worthy Matron of the Order of the
Eastern Star of New Mexico.

W. E. Utterback writes of Blackdom in Looking Back Seventy-three Years and
describes the early Juneteenth festivities which he calls “Emancipation Day”:
“About five miles west of Greenfield was a place called Blackdom. A number of
Negroes homesteaded this land. They were a bunch of hard working people and
gave no trouble in any way. On Emancipation Day they invited the white folks out
to a big feed. The women were excellent cooks. After the feed, the Negroes challenged
the white men to a baseball game. We got up a team from Dexter and
Greenfield. I caught in that game, and we played on the open prairie with no backstop.
I had to do a good job of catching…By the way, we lost the game.”

Dr. Andrew Wall, former Director of Black Studies at New Mexico State University
considers the meaning of Blackdom. This is his response: “It means people
who were reared as slaves and treated as animals and not considered human—yet
had dreams.”

Personal Account of Albuquerque Resident,
Myrtle Phillips, Heir to Land in Blackdom

Myrtle Phillips, a longtime Albuquerque resident, is the granddaughter of Crutcher
Eubank who walked to Blackdom from Kentucky to homestead after seeing Frank
Boyer’s newspaper advertisements about the all-Black town. Eubank finalized his
homestead claim in 1908. Between 1906 and 1911, he built a small house and
homesteaded his 160 acre tract. He added improvements to the land for each of
five years to “prove up” and fulfill the homesteading requirements. Myrtle recalls
that he raised horses, cows and chickens, and grew feed and garden vegetables
including corn and beans. When he was unable to make a living from homesteading,
he walked 16 miles to Roswell daily to work the land of a White farmer. He
and his wife had eleven children.

Her grandfather left Blackdom and moved his family to Roswell in 1920. She was
born in Roswell in 1914; she never lived in Blackdom. Her father was from Texas
and worked for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. He met her mother
when the train stopped near Roswell. In 1922 her parents moved their family to
Albuquerque for better job opportunities and integrated schools. Her father had a
restaurant on Silver between 4th and 5th. Then he moved to North Arno and
peddled fish that he ordered from Texas. In the early 1930’s he went into the scavenger
business. Later he had a junkyard and service station.

Myrtle Phillips attended elementary school at the First Ward on Tijeras and Arno,
and then Lincoln Junior High and Albuquerque High. She graduated from high
school in 1932 and was one of two Blacks in her graduating class. She married her
husband Rubin in 1968 and became the stepmother of seven children. Her husband
worked for the railroad as a porter. He served in the Navy during WWII despite the
fact that his supervisors preferred that he volunteer for the Army as most minorities
did. He graduated from Phillips Community College in Clovis in 1950 with a business
degree. After the War he worked for Chevron that had a plant at 52 South
Broadway.

Phillips and his first wife purchased property from Brenda Dabney’s mother, Virginia
Ballou, in a two block area that Ballou developed in northeast Albuquerque.
Myrtle Phillips and her husband were active in the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They are lifetime members; at one
time she was secretary of the Albuquerque Chapter.

She and her husband still visit Blackdom nearly every year. She keeps a notebook
of laminated photographs and deeds of her grandfather’s property in Blackdom.
Also in the notebook are plot maps showing the location of the homestead. She
has a box labeled “artifacts” that is full of tin cans, pottery shards, and small
pieces of adobe that she has colleted from the property over the years. There is
also a shiny blue piece of a plate that she finds pleasing. She has inherited her
grandfather’s property and will pass it on to her children. She remembers that
once her grandfather left the homestead, no one in the family mentioned
Blackdom again.