Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark: The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Charles Vickrey and Flynn Larson, National Park Service

Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark:
The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

ABOUT THE SALON TALK
The Old Santa Fe Trail Building is a New Deal Era adobe building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Constructed of 280,000 adobe bricks, the National Park Service Regional Headquarters adapts local building tradition to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style which was popularized in the 1930s in northern New Mexico and adopted by building NPS architect Cecil Doty. The building is unique in its expression of organic forms with sculptural massing and locally inspired textures and pigment that blend into the landscape. The Spanish Colonial style is adopted throughout the interior in decorative elements with CCC-crafted wood furnishings, and light fixtures to connect local forms with daily NPS functions. Some changes throughout the twentieth century, however, negatively impacted the building causing several technical issues. In 2018, the National Historic Landmark underwent a rehabilitation project to solve these issues, addressing architectural elements throughout to allow the building to function as originally intended. The project required the team to adapt to the unique needs of an adobe building, reversing years of water damage to protect the original adobe bricks. In this presentation, we will share the Old Santa Fe Trail Building’s journey from construction to rehabilitation, exploring its history and revealing its transformation from 1936 to today.

Find more information on the renovations in the Santa Fe New Mexican articles:
Park Service at work on iconic Santa Fe building, Paul Weideman, Jan. 12, 2019
Depression-era adobe office building to undergo renovations, Tripp Stelnicki, April 15, 2017

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Flynn Larson is a Masters in historic preservation student at Goucher College and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an SCA-Americorps intern with the National Park Service’s Intermountain Historic Preservation Services program working with historic structures throughout Regions 6, 7, and 8 of the National Park System. She is focused on the preservation of historic structures and landscapes throughout America’s national parks. She is also a member of the Historic Districts Review Board in Santa Fe.

Charles Vickrey started his career with the National Park Service (NPS) in February 1991 as a Drafter for the Design and Engineering Division for the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He served in temporary positions with the NPS in subsequent years, until receiving his degree in Architecture in 1997 from the University of New Mexico. In 1998, Charles restarted his NPS career serving as a Project Inspector on the construction of the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center and Multi-agency Center in Grants, New Mexico for El Malpais National Monument. A year later, he joined the Intermountain Regional Office (formerly the Southwest Regional Office) of the NPS, based at the Old Santa Fe Trial Building. In early 2000, Charles served in a term position for the Regional Contracting Office in Santa Fe. In 2002 he moved from contracting to the Design and Engineering Division as an Architect. In 2018 Charles assumed the role as senior Architect for the Santa Fe Office.

Charles has spent much of his career working out of the Old Santa Fe Trail Building, with only brief absences to work in other parks such as Big Bend National Park, Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Hubble Trading Post National Historic Site and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. Charles has worked on small and large architectural projects from Arkansas to Montana for the National Park Service for over 30 years.

Victor Yamada - Confinement in the Land of Enchantment - Salon on Youtube

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Victor Yamada
CONFINEMENT IN LAND OF ENCHANTMENT (CLOE) Japanese Americans in New Mexico during
World War II

About the talk
The CLOE project’s aim is to reach a wide & diverse audience in New Mexico & US about the history of Japanese Americans internment in state; inspire thought & conversation about issues of citizenship, identity, civil liberty. This project is part of a multi-year program discussing the three phases including research of sites in Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Old Raton Ranch (Baca Camp), and Fort Stanton. The second phase includes markers at these sites, outreach publication, and a project website. The third phase includes a traveling exhibition, community forums, and presentations. Yamada will talk about the history of Japanese American internment in New Mexico and the team’s progress. For more information on the project, the team, and the website links, visit the pages below.

Links to Preparatory Resources
Website / Story Map Confinement in the Land of Enchantment: Japanese Americans in New Mexico during World War II (arcgis.com)
Roster of Prisoners Film Documentary, Journey of Discovery, Kori Kobayashi  https://www.las-cruces.org/2417/Big-Read-2021

Victor Yamada has a degree in engineering from University of Washington and business administration from Pepperdine University. He was strategic environmental policy manager for 40 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, consulting organizations, business firms, and utilities. Yamada has volunteered for the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League, Japan America Society of New Mexico, and Asian American Association of New Mexico. He led many key project activities in the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League including the preparation of Confinement in Land of Enchantment traveling exhibition and community forums for Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Fort Stanton, Clovis, and Old Raton Ranch (Baca Camp), prepared oral histories of local Japanese Americans as part of the Asian American Legacy Stories project, and directed Japanese to English translations project including Lordsburg / Santa Fe prisoner letters, and Santa Fe prisoner scrapbook.

Leech/O'Malley Salon El Zaguán on YouTube

Historic Santa Fe Foundation and the New Mexico History Museum hosted a discussion with Cormac O'Malley and Tom Leech on March 24, 2021. This conversation was presented on the occasion of publication of the limited-edition handmade book 'I Call My Soul My Own: Ernie O'Malley and Dorothy Stewart in New Mexico' featuring the writings of Ernie O'Malley and the artwork of Dorothy Stewart.

Contact: Melanie McWhorter at melanie@historicsantafe.org or call 505.983.2567 for more information.

Recording now available on HSFF’s YouTube page

ORDER THE ARTIST BOOK THE GIFT SHOP ONLINE

ABOUT THE SALON PARTNERS
Cormac O’Malley is the son of Ernie O'Malley, Irish author of his autobiographical memoirs, On Another Man’s Wound, and The Singing Flame, military historian and militant nationalist from the 1916-1924. Cormac’s mother was Helen Hooker from Connecticut. Cormac was born in Ireland but came to the USA at age 14 to live with his mother after his father died in 1957.

Tom leech inside the Palace of the Governors Gates, 2021.

Over the last 30 years Cormac has helped preserve his father's literary and historical image by republishing his earlier works including the well-known books and newly discovered manuscripts. He has co-edited two volumes of his father’s letters from 1922-1957 and in recent years has published a multi volume series of his father’s military interviews with survivors of the War of Independence and the Civil War, entitled The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley Interviews. These now include Kerry, Galway, Mayo, West Cork, Clare and the Northern Divisions.  His 2015 book was Western Ways, a book of photographs by his parents on Mayo in the 1930s. In 2016, he edited Modern Ireland and Revolution, Ernie O’Malley in Context. In 2017, he published Nobody’s Business: Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley. In 2019, he helped put on a joint exhibit of his mother’s photographs in the National Library of Ireland and the Gallery of Photography Ireland and publish A Modern Eye: Helen Hooker O’Malley’s Ireland. In 2020, he produced a documentary film on his parents’ artistic journey in Ireland, A Call to Arts.

Cormac now lives in Stonington, Conn.

Tom Leech is the Director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. A curator at the New Mexico History Museum since 2001, Tom has organized a number of successful exhibits, including The Saint John’s Bible; Jack Kerouac and the Writer’s Life; Gustave Baumann and Friends: Artist Cards from Holidays Past; Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar; and Album Amicorum, which also traveled to Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey.

In 2019 at El Zaguán, Tom exhibited fifty Palace Press poetry broadsides, and in 2020 he and Patricia Musick showed their marbled paper and calligraphy collaborations in the exhibit Something Wicked this Way Comes.  A number of Tom’s marbled and handmade papers are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Palace Press titles include award-winning Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys and O’Keeffe Stories, and also Doctor Franklin and Spain, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and most recently, Gustave Baumann’s Indian Pottery Old and New.

Tom is a 2013 recipient of the Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, and the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting and sculpture from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions, and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project that reintroduced the ancient art of papermaking to Lhasa and rural areas of Tibet.

More historic presses fill the shop, and while each one has seen years of service in the noble art of printing, they all stand ready if called on to get out the news.

Dr. Frances Levine lecture on Women of the Santa Fe Trail

In August 2020, Historic Santa Fe Foundation partnered with School for Advanced Research (SAR) to host Dr. Frances Levine for an online lecture on Shaping the American Frontier: Women of the Santa Fe Trail. We are pleased to share this lecture throught the SAR YouTube channel. Find the description for the talk and Levine’s bio below.

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The Santa Fe Trail linked two frontiers—the far northern frontier of the newly formed Mexican nation with the westward expanding American nation. Because it was as much a road of military expansion as mercantile commerce, it is not often associated with stories of frontier women, but women of many cultures found their place on the trail alongside the men they were accompanying. The stories about the families in these frontier regions are fascinating, if seldom told in the usual canon of American history. In this Online Salon, Frances Levine examines the history of several women in particular from the Santa Fe Trail, including María Rosa Villalpando Salé dit Lajoie and María de la Cruz Carmen Benavides Robidoux, who along with others traveled between Missouri and Santa Fe between 1828 and the 1880s. There, from the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, when the midcontinent was governed by French, Spanish and Americans, women contributed to the mixture of customs, traditions and laws that defined the expanding frontier.

Furniture, crates and barrels were loaded on steamboats on the St. Louis levee, ferried up the Mississippi River to the Missouri River, then transported over the Santa Fe Trail. The ties between St. Louis and Santa Fe were forged by commercial enterprises in both cities, military history and family relationships.

Emile Herzinger’s Drawing of  Helene LaJoie LeRoux, 1863, daughter of  Maria Rosa Villalpando Sale dit Lajoie. Missouri Historical Society Collections, St. Louis.

Maria Rosa was captured by Comanches in Taos in August 1760, and eventually brought to St. Louis in 1767 by one of St. Louis’s original settlers. Her family history illustrates the long and deep ties between New Mexico settlers and St. Louis, as well as the often tragic circumstances of women who were themselves trafficked in the fur trade.

This online event is free and open to the public.
We hope you will consider making a suggested donation at any level to help us continue to offer remote programs like this one. Watch here.

Generous funding provided by the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Foundation.

Frances Levine. Photo by Daniel Quat.

Dr. Frances Levine became the President and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society and Missouri History Museum in the spring of 2014.   She was previously the director of the New Mexico History Museum from 2002 until spring 2014.  Her museum positions have given her a unique perspective on the history of the American West, having seen it from both ends of the Santa Fe Trail.

A native of Connecticut, Frances received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.  She was the Division head for Arts and Sciences at Santa Fe Community College (in Santa Fe, New Mexico). She is a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the American Society for Ethnohistory, and the Santa Fe Trail Association. She has served as an evaluator for the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation review process for museums in the US and Mexico.

Dr. Levine is the author, co-editor or contributor to several award-winning books including Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries (1999, UNM Press), Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (2008 MNM Press, with MaryAnne Redding and Krista Elrick), and Telling New Mexico: A New History  (2009 MNM Press, with Marta Weigle and Louise Stiver) as well as a chapter in All Trails Lead to Santa Fe (2010 with Gerald Gonzalez, Sunstone Press), and the recently published Frontier Battles and Massacres: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives (with Ron Wetherington, editors). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2014), and  Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A New Mexican Drama (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

She has served as co-producer of several historic documentary films on New Mexico history with Michael Kamins, Executive Producer of the NM PBS Colores series.