After the revolution

Ciudad Hidalgo

Ciudad Hidalgo is a town about 90 kilometres east of Morelia.

Pomposo Solís e Hijos

In 1886 Pomposo Solis and his associate Aquiles de la Pena installed what was probably the first modern sawmill in Michoacán, which they used to cut sleepers for the original railway spur into Morelia. Once that project was complete, they supplied most of the wood for a new line up to the gold and silver mines in the Sierra de Angangueo and into the mountain town of Zitácuaro, and went on to make a fortune selling railway sleepers during the Porfirian railroad boom. Solis eventually decided to test the Mexico City market, which needed wood for fuel and construction material, and it was estimated that his loggers removed about twenty million cubic metres of wood from the woods around Ciudad Hidalgo during the Porfiriato.

After the revolution the Pomposo Solís e Hijos company continued to employ scores of lumberjacks, who felled trees with hatchets, hauled them to the logging roads and railheads, from where they were transported to the family’s Ciudad Hidalgo sawmill. Workers received their salaries biweekly in scrip, which they were encouraged to use in a company store that added a 15–20 percent markup for its merchandise^{AGN, Departamento del Trabajo, caja 841, exp. 3 report of Pedro Roa V., 18 September 1925}.