WPA left its mark in eastern New Mexico

Somewhere in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration between "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" in 1933 and "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy," came the Works Progress Administration.

Somewhere in the late years of the Great Depression, the WPA left its stamp on Tucumcari, quite literally, and not once but hundreds of times.

Just about everywhere in town, pieces of sidewalk have the letters "WPA" and the date they were made engraved into the concrete.

Nobody knows this better than Randi Eidsmoe and Emily Priddy, who have made it a project to record the location of all the WPA stamps in the city.

The WPA stamps were from a "really dark time," Eidsmoe said, and they demonstrate how Americans "took care of our own" during the Great Depression.

Priddy added if the locations of the WPA stamps can be documented, "they are less likely to disappear.'

Priddy also sees the trove of engraved concrete from the Depression era as a "Heritage Tourism" opportunity for Tucumcari, a city whose tourism base is already based on history and nostalgia, based on its association with the heyday of Route 66 in the 1950s and 1960s.

Both Eidsmoe and Priddy were drawn to Tucumcari because of its connection with history and nostalgia centered around Route 66. Priddy moved to Tucumcari in 2017 because of its historical roots.

"We hope this project will help show what a special place Tucumcari is," she said.

Eidsmoe and her husband moved to Tucumcari from Ohio in November as a location for their vintage clothing and book business called Rockabilly Raven Vintage. The store is operating online, Eidsmoe said, while they look for a site in Tucumcari.

The name of the store is Rockabilly Raven Vintage, she said. In recent years Tucumcari has hosted events centered on a revival of rockabilly music, which evolved into rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, and has been reborn in new forms in the past decade or so.

Priddy and Eidsmoe were conversing online before Eidsmoe announced she was moving to Tucumcari.

The WPA stamp project became a New Year's resolution for both, Priddy said. They hope to fix the location of every WPA stamp in city sidewalks.

So far, Priddy said, the pair has found and recorded the locations of 111 such stamps dated between 1939 and 1941, "and we've just scratched the surface."

As they find the stamps, Priddy said, they record the address where possible, and cross streets and nearby landmarks where street numbers fail.

They have blocked out the city to ensure they cover the streets without duplicating their efforts, Priddy said.

Eidsmoe said the city has 17 miles of sidewalks to explore.

Priddy said their walks on city streets have revealed no pattern in where the WPA stamps will turn up.

Eidsmoe said her interest in the stamps began when she discovered three such stamps in the middle of the block of Third Street where she now lives.

Eidsmoe and Priddy have found WPA stamps in front of walkways and in obscure corners of the city.

In one day, Priddy said, the pair found a stamp in front of where a house had burned down on Aber Street. They found another in front of a house on the same corner, and more on a nearby side street, eight in all.

Priddy said her own neighborhood, dominated by houses built in the 1950s, has quite a few of the Depression-era stamps in its sidewalks.

On the other hand, a few streets lined by older homes, including turn of the 20th-century Craftsman homes, have none.

When Eidsmoe and Priddy complete their coverage of city sidewalks, the final product is likely to be a Google map with all the WPA stamps, color-coded by the date stamped on them, Priddy said.

The map could lead to the development of walking trails and would help the city preserve the stamps should they be in the path of future street and sidewalk construction and repair projects, she said.