Pie Town Pie Festival

On the second Saturday of September, Pie Town holds its Pie Festival around the park pavilion and the basketball court. Pie Town is an unincorporated community on US 60 in Catron County, New Mexico, a few miles from the Continental Divide. New Mexico Magazine puts it 83 miles west of Socorro, and the state tourism department puts it at 84. The festival is run by Pie Town Rising Stars, a nonprofit organized to restore, preserve, and improve the town. The group says proceeds go to infrastructure and community assistance, and New Mexico Magazine adds scholarships and a new playground and pavilion on the festival grounds. The 2026 festival, held September 12, was billed by its organizers as the 44th annual. The next is set for Saturday, September 11, 2027.

From the PiK Run to Wild Whiskey

The day opens at 8:00 with the PiK Run, 3.14 miles at about 7,800 feet on the Continental Divide, open to runners and walkers. Registration starts at seven that morning. After the 2026 run, the mountain runner Anthony Kunkel posted that he had run the course “faster than anyone else in history.”

The souvenir stand opens at nine and sells hats, drinkware, and festival T-shirts made while the buyer waits. Horseshoe players sign up at the pits. Kids’ games run through the late morning, followed by games for adults. New Mexico Magazine lists three-legged, spoon, sack, and horned lizard races among them. On the 2026 schedule, Rita Bliss, Eddie Jacques, and Tyler Lam played sets in the pavilion between ten and half past four. The Pie Festival Queen or King was crowned there at 12:45. At 2:00 came the drawing for a barbecue grill and a quilt, in 2026 the Distressed Sparkle Zia Quilt, and ticket holders had to be present to win. At 2:30 the horned toad race was held on the basketball court. It had no fee, and entrants brought their own toads.

Pie-baking contest entries close at 10:30 and stand briefly on view in the contest tent. The pies are then carried to the pavilion, where winners are announced and every entry goes into a silent auction from 1:45 to 2:45. The 2026 grand prize went to Megan Bartesevich for a s’mores pie. Keith Thomas took first among adult fruit pies with “Back in Blueberry,” and Nadine Mantoyaz placed third with “Lizard Pie.” Jada Reid won the nut division with Buttered Rum Pecan, and Vaneta Galea won the youth division with Apple Caramel.

Pie-eating contestants gather at the basketball court at 3:15 for a 3:30 start, in age brackets from under seven to adult. In 2026 Martin Chaidez won among the adults and Antonio Chaidez among the twelve-to-fifteens. At the 2025 contest, Molly Boyle of New Mexico Magazine watched the children eat under “true-blue skies and gusty afternoon winds,” while one boy lost his blackberry pie into a barf bag.

The 2026 food vendors included Smoke Show BBQ, Apache Grill, 3 Feathers Navajo, and The Saucy Sicilian, which sold pasta bowls and green chile beef bratwurst subs on homemade stirato bread. Among the other tables were Bee Chama Honey, Tatman & Robyn knives, Catron County Search and Rescue, and the books of Uncle River, a writer who came to the area in 1982 looking, he says, for “the least populated place in the country with a nice climate.” The festival weekend begins on Friday night with a playground fundraiser lasagna dinner and dance at the pavilion; Boyle’s account calls it a spaghetti dinner. It ends on Saturday night with a dance in the pavilion from seven to eleven, with music in 2026 by the band Wild Whiskey.

Crusts in the freezer since spring

The 500 pies sold at the festival are made in Pie Town. Penny Carroll, director of Pie Town Rising Stars, oversees the volunteers. New Mexico Magazine reports that they begin making pie shells in June and then run a 24-hour bake the day before the festival. In 2026 the festival’s own posts logged crust days at the Pie Town Community Center from May.

One June session divided the work this way. Lilly and Julie were the butter “Cutters,” slicing one-pound blocks into chunks. Penny, the crew captain, was the “Mixer.” Bev, the “Squisher/Baller,” worked the dough by hand to the right texture. Kelly and Joyce weighed it out at 3.2 ounces, shaped each piece into something like a hamburger patty, and packed eighteen to a zip-lock bag. That day brought the count to 612 patties, enough for 306 pies. At later sessions the patties were rolled into flat rounds, trimmed to size with 3D-printed templates made by a volunteer named Martin, layered in plastic wrap, and returned to the freezer. In July three new volunteers mixed 24 pounds of butter into 354 more patties.

Penny and her husband Jay also own Pie Town RV Park, which has three rules: “Have pie, relax, and enjoy the quiet.”

Norman’s Place on the Driveway

US 60 follows the old Magdalena Livestock Driveway. New Mexico Magazine says that every year from 1885 to 1971, sheep and cattle were driven along this “hoof highway” between the railroads at Springerville, Arizona, and Magdalena. A 2013 history in the Catron Courier, reprinted by Rising Stars, says stopping places grew up about every twenty miles, a day’s ride on horseback. Three of them became Quemado, Pie Town, and Datil.

Sources give the founder’s name differently. The Courier calls him Clive Norman, a World War I veteran who settled at one of the stops in 1922 and tried mining before deciding that supplying travelers paid better. His sign read “Norman’s Place,” and his store sold gasoline, kerosene, and groceries. He served coffee and donuts bought from Helen McLaughlin’s bakery in Datil until Mrs. McLaughlin told him to “start making your own donuts.” His donuts were terrible, so he turned to the dried fruit pies he had learned to make in Texas as a teenager. New Mexico Magazine calls him Clyde Norman, a Texan prospector who sold dried-apple pies after his mining claim failed in the early 1920s. One state tourism page gives the name as Norman Smith. The magazine reports that by 1927 the name “Pie Town,” which he had stenciled on a sign, became official with the designation of a U.S. post office. Authorities had pressed for a more conventional name, but the residents held firm.

In 1924 a red-headed Texas cowboy named Harmon L. Craig bought a half-interest in Pie Town for “one dollar of good and lawful money and other good and valuable considerations.” According to the Courier, he added a spicy chili con carne to the menu and in time opened a mercantile store, a gas station and garage, a café, and a pinto bean warehouse. That same year he married Theora Baugh, who had been cooking for cowboys at the W Bar Ranch. She and her daughters turned out up to fifty apple, cherry, or raisin pies a day. “He cussed a lot, but he cussed nice clean cussing,” she told American Heritage in 1980.

Beans, dugouts, and a trunk of cameras

The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 offered settlers a full section of 640 acres. After World War I homesteaders came to the plateau in a trickle, almost all of them from Texas, and between 1930 and 1932 the trickle became a rush. “Come on out! This is a poor man’s country,” Mrs. L. M. Bolton’s aunt and uncle wrote to her in Lamesa, Texas, and so she “drifted down into Pie Town.” Byron K. Baldwin left Paducah, Texas, in the spring of 1935 with heart trouble. Five of his chickens suffocated on Texas dust the morning his family left. On May 17, their first night in Pie Town, ten more froze. Faith Morley Reed, who ran the Navaho Lodge in Datil, remembered how the settlers arrived: “They came with the damndest things … cows tied behind their Fords, wash tubs strapped on top, strawberry plants.”

The Taylor Grazing Act of June 1934 withdrew most land from homesteading, but settlers kept arriving by other means. The homesteaders grew pinto beans. Roy McKee recalled that he and his brothers once “sacked fifteen thousand sacks of pintos in one year.” In 1937–38 settlers learned from the Navajos how to harvest piñon nuts, picked them with Navajo help, and shipped thirty-seven carloads out of Magdalena at eight dollars a hundred pounds. In 1939 Craig built and donated a meeting hall for the Farm Bureau. By 1940 New Mexico Magazine counts a population of 250; the Courier counts 250 families.

Russell Lee arrived in 1940 with his wife, Jean, and a trunk of cameras. The Courier lists what the town had then: a hardware and feed store, a café, a curio shop, a hotel, a baseball team, an elementary school, and a taxidermy business. A daily stagecoach also came through, a woody station wagon with a uniformed driver and luggage roped to the roof. The Magdalena News of June 6, 1940, reported that “Mr. Lee of Dallas, Texas, is staying in Pie Town, taking pictures of most anything he can find.” In September he wrote: “Arrived here about noon today and found Pie Town getting all set for its annual fair. It is a small one but there is a fine spirit here.” His Farm Security Administration photographs, 620 Kodachrome and gelatin silver prints, are held by the Library of Congress.

The weather then turned against the farmers. A severe drought in 1950 and 1951 finished almost all of the remaining bean farmers. McKee hung on until 1957, the year US 60 was paved.

A sign on the trading-post porch

In 1995 Kathy Knapp drove out from Dallas with her mother, Mary Munden, to taste pie in Pie Town. They found a post office, a tax office, and the run-down Thunderbird Trading Post. A sign on its porch read: “There used to be pie in Pie Town, but there ain’t no more — FOR SALE.” “My mom felt it was just wrong to have a place called Pie Town without pies,” Knapp said. The two moved to Pie Town and turned the trading post into the Pie-O-Neer. In 2007 Knapp, Don Kearney, and Nita Larronde, whose home became the Toaster House hostel for Continental Divide Trail travelers, received the Adventure Cycling Association’s Curry Trail Angel Award.

Knapp retired in 2020. New Mexico Magazine says the Pie-O-Neer shut its doors that year after 25 years; the state tourism site says the business passed to new ownership. Rising Stars canceled the festival in 2020 and 2021 because of uncertain COVID restrictions.

In 2021 Sarah Chavez bought the 85-year-old clapboard building from Knapp. Chavez had moved to Pie Town in 2018 to live off the grid and had opened a secondhand shop on the highway. When pandemic shutdowns threatened the town’s supply of pie and hot meals, she took up pie-making. She is also an EMT. Her Pie Town Pie Company sells up to 75 pies a day, and Lee’s 1940 photographs hang on its walls. “You might not have much in the checking account this week, but everybody got paid,” Chavez says. “The lights are on, and we’ll make it happen like we always do.”