Company Government National Guard Events Locations Commemorations Berwind is a mining ghost town in Las Animas County, Colorado, nestled in Berwind Canyon 3.1 miles (5.0 km) southwest of Ludlow and 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Trinidad.

A neck of the Colorado and Southern railroad ran to the town, connecting it with nearby Ludlow and the coking furnaces in Tabasco.

During their operation, the communities shared amenities, including a schoolhouse named the Corwin School that once served 65 students at a time.

[10]: 26  The first miners at Berwind were Welsh and English men who introduced their methods and unionization under the Knights of Labor, though such organizing was prohibited.

[18] Supported by the national organization and Mother Jones, CF&I coal miners in southern Colorado established a local United Mine Workers of American (UMWA) chapter and declared a strike on 23 September 1913.

[19] Violence between the strikers and CF&I–with its support from mine guards, detectives, local police, and the Colorado National Guard–began before the end of September and escalated into October.

[20] On 24 October 1913, following a mass deputization in Walsenburg to bolster their numbers against the strikers, a group of about 20 deputies and other militia led by Karl Linderfelt went to guard a section house in Ludlow only to come under fire from Berwind Canyon.

[8] As the winter intensified, violence became less frequent and the majority of the National Guard withdrew north to Colorado Springs and Denver, leaving only some militia and guardsmen behind in a series of encampments, including one led by Linderfelt at Berwind, another led by Patrick Hamrock at Ludlow, and a third more distantly at Cedar Hill.

[10]: 216 On 20 April 1914, the day after the celebrations of Eastern Orthodox Easter, fighting began between strikers and the militia encamped at Ludlow.

At Empire, strikers laid a 21-hour siege against trapped company-aligned mineworker families that was only broken by the negotiations of a minister and the mayor from Aguilar, also in the Berwind area.

[24][25] This new system, called the "Rockefeller Plan," led company towns like Berwind to gain the favor of miners over independent outfits from 1915 onward.

[18] In the 1990s, the University of Denver began a series of surveys and excavations at both Berwind and Ludlow as part of a wider historical investigation known as the Colorado Coal Field War Project.