FORT DAVIS Administrative History

The staff and volunteers persisted in delivering quality programs for the visitors, which in 1989 numbered 55,098; an increase of slightly more than one-half of one percent. More appealing to the superintendent was the increase in volunteer hours: up 75 percent over 1988 (some 7,000 hours). This figure helped offset the decline in SPMA sales of five percent, down from the all-time high set in 1988. When Cheri drafted the park's application for the 1989 Garrison Gold competition, he could point with pride to several "firsts" in programs and activities. The addition of "viewing boxes" in all quarters allowed visitors to see the structures and their furnishings throughout the year on a "self-guiding basis." The staff also began conducting nighttime tours of the grounds. Called "From Retreat to Tattoo," the moonlight program was designed to provide visitors with "the evening setting, after the work day had finished," with staff and volunteers depicting roles of "enlisted men, officers, officers' wives, servants, and the post trader." The Fort Davis staff took particular pride in developing the "first book, to our knowledge, written specifically for adolescents on the role played by the frontier army in the settlement and development of the American West." They also "encouraged and worked with a volunteer (an accomplished artist) to write and illustrate a color and activity book for children specifically on Fort Davis." [73]

Historic themes and research also occupied much of the staffs time in 1989, as the now-standard interpretive and exhibit features on black history were joined by the commemoration of a month (March) dedicated to women's history. February's black history theme was "The Role of Afro-American Churches in Economic, Political, and Social Development at Home and Abroad." To that end, ranger Randy Kane prepared a site bulletin and a series of newspaper articles on chaplains of black troops. Also sponsored at Fort Davis during Black History Month was a four-part film series devoted to the contributions of blacks to the settlement of the West. Superintendent Cheri took special pride in the park's first black volunteer, Stephen Martin, who "served as an interpreter in the refurnished enlisted men's barracks, a member of the artillery crew, and participated in the campfire program held at the Davis Mountain State Park." Women's history received attention through articles syndicated in west Texas newspapers, as well as "a special publication display, featuring books on 19th century women." The Regional Educational Center of Odessa also came to Fort Davis to put on videotape the park's slide presentation on western women. Alice Grierson's An Army Wife 's Cookbook: With Household Hints and Remedies, came out in its seventh printing with SPMA, as did a new publication, The Colonel's Lady on the Western Frontier: The Correspondence of Alice Kirk Grierson. Archeology also earned a place in the program of historical commemoration that year, as the staff marked Texas Archeological Awareness Week (April 9-15) with an exhibit of artifacts uncovered in the restoration of the park's many historic structures. The Friends also contributed to these historic activities, with a long-range project to restore the front yards along Officers' Row to their 1880s vegetation and appearance. They also raised $5,500 at the annual Restoration Festival to augment the park's budget for items that could not be acquired otherwise. [74]

For the next three years, Fort Davis suffered with its peers throughout the national park system as budget reductions in Washington continued, along with the stagnant economy induced in part by the oil price collapse. Each fiscal year, Kevin Cheri wrote to the regional office to explain how he would manage with reductions in his budget requests of ten percent and more. In October 1990, the NPS suffered the indignity of another forced closure due to failed budget negotiations between Republican President George Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress. These limitations on funding also delayed indefinitely the preparation of a General Management Plan, which embarrassed Superintendent Cheri when Robert Bluthardt, Director of Education at San Angelo's Fort Concho (a National Historical Landmark), asked about Fort Davis' strategy for resource maintenance and enhancement. "Without a GMP," said the superintendent, "we are unable to tell you what will happen in the years to come at Fort Davis." This also complicated Cheri's relationship with the Friends group, who sought a new project to continue their contributions to the park's historical interpretation. Cheri noted that they had their hearts set on restoration of the chapel, which lacked the normal 70 percent minimum of original fabric. In addition, the back wall of the existing ruins would have to be replaced in any restoration project. Cheri instead encouraged the Friends to shift their attention to the post hospital. By refurnishing what he called a "few offices" in the building, the Friends could provide visitors with what Cheri described as "the best extant example of a frontier U.S. army post hospital in the Southwest." [75]

One highlight of the years 1990-1992 at Fort Davis was the effort to produce scholarly work on the park, as well as to continue the NPS's tradition of support for outside research that advanced knowledge about the park's resources. Dr. Lavern Wagner of Quincy College in Illinois asked Fort Davis to recommend him to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant to edit the music of Benjamin Grierson. Mary Williams would offer commentary on an historic resources study on Big Bend undertaken by Arthur R. Gomez, then of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. She did similar work for Fort Davis' own historic resources study written by Robert Wooster, a faculty member at Corpus Christi State University and a rising star in the field of western military history. James Ivey, staff archeologist for the Southwest Region, prepared a Historic Base Map for Fort Davis that permitted publication of the area's Guide to Buildings and Ruins. The park also planned programs and services for several related historical themes of the early 1990s: the centenary of the abandonment of Fort Davis (1991), the diamond jubilee of the creation of the National Park Service (1991), and the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus into the Western Hemisphere (1992). Staff members contributed time and expertise to the living history days celebrated at nearby Forts McKavett, Concho, and Stockton; this in conjunction with Fort Davis' own exhibit and slide show prepared on "Historic Forts of Texas." Elaine Harmon, hired as museum technician in 1989, conducted more work with cataloguing the artifacts at Fort Davis, and lent her expertise to other parks in the Trans-Pecos region. Perhaps the most unusual historical activity, however, was the park's participation in the NPS-wide "Imagine Yellowstone Arts Festival." Two years after devastating fires swept the nation's oldest national park, the NPS had developed a series of projects for schoolchildren to teach them the complexities of nature and its power. Not to be overlooked in the park's 1990 historical programs was the inauguration of the nationwide program known as "Elderhostel." Designed to provide senior citizens with travel programs grounded in educational and cultural experiences, the organization brought bus tours of seniors to Fort Davis twice per month to walk the grounds and study the life of the frontier military. [76]

Once the tourist season of 1990 slackened, Superintendent Cheri decided to take an "intellectual inventory" of sorts of his park. Now that he had almost two years ' exposure to the workings of Fort Davis, and the memories of Dale Scheier's illness and the Davis Mountains study had begun to recede, Cheri turned his attention to the need for a long-range planning document for the park. Mary Williams had reported that she had completed three-quarters of the research toward her administrative history, while Robert Wooster was engaged in last-minute revisions of his contract for the History of Fort Davis. The park had managed to overcome the failure of Texas A&M University to "fulfill the terms of their contract" to draft an historic structures report, as the NPS sent a team from its Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) to prepare the document. What concerned Cheri was that other critical documents and reports needed to form the basis of a General Management Plan were not in place. "The Statement for Management approved in 1976," the superintendent told his Santa Fe superiors, "does not identify any management issues and is presently being rewritten." The 1988 resource management plan already needed updating, as it "underestimates the enormous tasks of cataloguing the backlog of approximately 10,000 objects in the park's collection." Nor did Fort Davis have "a complete inventory of natural resources, including wildlife." The interpretive prospectus that Doug McChristian had complied in 1983 "is also outdated," said Cheri. The park's 223 identified historic structures had no separate maintenance crew, resulting in the regular crew devoting only 30 percent of their time to stabilization and preservation work. From this had come a two-year delay in preservation projects. The aging of the park also meant that the museum and visitors center, once the pride of the Southwest Region, needed updating and improvements. Unfortunately, Fort Davis ranked only "13th amongst the region's priorities to rehabilitate the museum and will not likely have any renovation work started before 1996." Cheri did not need to elaborate the relationship between limited staffing and preservation shortcomings. "With five furnished structures that are fully restored, and two storage areas," he concluded, "it is not possible to monitor all these buildings and maintain the high standards of preservation and accountability" with but one full-time museum technician. [77]

By the time that Kevin Cheri entered his third year as manager of Fort Davis, the momentum had shifted once again from reaction to outside forces to implementation of projects and activities. His annual report to the Southwest Region could rightly claim 1991 as "a banner year for interpretive programs, for improving the stability of cultural resources, and for making the area more accessible for disabled visitors." Fort Davis took a "lead role in implementing a community recycling program," with the park coordinating logistics with the local chamber of commerce, the McDonald Observatory, and the nearby state park. The Prude Ranch also asked Fort Davis to become a partner in its "Prude Ranch Environmental Education Center." The Texas Education Association had encouraged formation of such centers to link classroom learning and field observations in ecology and environmental studies. Some 750 youth from around the Lone Star State came to the Davis Mountains that year for the Prude Ranch programs, with an estimated 2,000 more scheduled for the following year. [78]

Having studied physical therapy in college, Kevin Cheri took great pride in meeting the mandates of the recently passed Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) . He ordered his maintenance crew to upgrade park facilities with the handicapped in mind. This included modifying walkways and entrances to the historic buildings to accommodate wheelchairs, and receipt of "rehab/repair funds" to remodel the visitor center restrooms for "disabled population access." Work like this performed by the maintenance crew enabled the park to receive a "Maintenance Management System Award" (MMS) for medium-size parks in the Southwest Region, and Chief Dale Scheier served on an NPS task force to draft an MMS training manual. Other fund increases permitted work on drainage and pavement of roads and the parking lot. In addition, the maintenance crew (which included Youth Conservation Corps and Summer Youth Employment and Training Program [SYETP] personnel) worked on hiking trails damaged by torrential rains in the summer of 1990. Plastering of several historic buildings was accomplished with funds from a regional "four-park" stabilization project, and paint used in the original restoration phase was analyzed for its toxic content. [79]

These accomplishments in park performance, when judged in light of the early days of Kevin Cheri's superintendency, led to his own advancement within the ranks of the NPS. In July 1992, Cheri accepted a transfer to Big Bend National Park as its assistant superintendent. Within days of his departure, however, Cheri witnessed one final trauma that seemed to "bookend" his tenure as the Fort Davis superintendent: a tragic automobile accident on the night of July 4 that claimed the lives of two park employees (cooperative education student Darrin Young and volunteer John Bullock), and that injured two others (cooperative education student Arthur Campbell and volunteer Thomas Vanzant). Young and Campbell were students at the University of Arkansas campus at Pine Bluff; a predominantly black institution where Kevin Cheri had recruited in search of black youth interested like himself in park service careers. As Cheri learned from his investigation, Bullock (a student at nearby Sul Ross State University) had offered to drive the party away from town during the evening of the July 4th festivities to "shoot old weapons" in the rocks. Alcohol was consumed by the four individuals, and upon their return down the mountain, Bullock's truck left the road, killing himself and Young. Beyond the trauma of the deaths, the park staff lost four good employees, as Campbell and Vanzant could not return to work for the remainder of the summer. This accident left the park and the town in a state of shock, leading Kevin Cheri's replacement as superintendent, Jerry Yarbrough, to state that Fort Davis "was hurting" when he arrived on duty in September 1992. [80]

As the eighth individual to lead Fort Davis, Jerry Yarbrough brought a new dimension to park management. He was the first native of west Texas to assume the superintendency, having been raised in the town of Andrews north of Midland/Odessa. A veteran of the conflict in Vietnam, Yarbrough had pursued a career in the Park Service as a law enforcement ranger. His most recent posting had been as chief ranger at White Sands National Monument, where he worked with Superintendent Dennis Ditmanson to improve the climate of opinion within the local community of Alamogordo towards the park and its staff. That became Yarbrough's primary concern when he took control of Fort Davis. He recalled three years into his superintendency that his first impression of the park was "how striking were the natural and cultural resources." He also marveled at the extent of volunteer services, and he vowed to increase the number of black volunteers (to "eight or nine" by 1995). These individuals who donated so much time to the park, along with the staff, were the reason that Fort Davis had what Yarbrough called "one of the best living history programs I had ever seen." Yarbrough credited this attitude of cooperation and volunteer support to the work of his team of full-time employees, including his supervisory ranger, Allan Morris, park ranger Mary Williams, museum technician Elaine Harmon, park ranger Carl Friery, and administrative staff members Suzanne Liddell and Paula Jo Bates. [81]

Figure 52. Telephone Pioneers install decking of enlisted men's barracks wooden walkway (August 1994).
Courtesy Fort Davis NHS.

Figure 53.Telephone Pioneers laying substructure of wooden walkway at enlisted men's barracks (August 1994).
Courtesy Tom Hulett.

Figure 54. Telephone Pioneers of America Volunteers
Courtesy Tom Hultgren.

With an interest in history and a love of the NPS, the new superintendent addressed the need for a General Management Plan, a better data base of history and cultural resources, and the necessity to guide the community and the Friends group as both sought more restoration work at the park. Residents of Fort Davis and the surrounding area were pleased to meet the new park manager, but Yarbrough detected some concern that he would not remain long in the position. Coming after the traumas of the Kevin Cheri era, Yarbrough soon realized that he needed to make a long-term commitment to the park, as well as to the community. To that end, he advised regional director John Cook that he wished to make Fort Davis his one and only managerial position, and he invested much time and effort with various civic groups. Among these was the Chamber of Commerce, which in 1994 named him its "Citizen of the Year." Yarbrough's accomplishments included organizing the group, "Preservation Fort Davis," designed to provide local residents with more information about the blessings and curses of growth, in particular the wisdom of preserving old buildings rather than destroying the historical fabric of the town. The superintendent, whose skill as a carpenter also served him well, contributed to structural enhancement by working with the Fort Davis maintenance crew to rehabilitate the "church camp" in Hospital Canyon. There they completely refurbished the interior, which had deteriorated over the years through neglect, and created with donated materials and labor an attractive if spartan lodge and meeting center for groups and scholars coming to the park for extended visits. In the winter of 1993, the park acquired and installed a Rally Building for archival storage and protection. [82]

This desire for better community relations would consume much of Jerry Yarbrough's early years as Fort Davis' superintendent, with both committee work and negotiations with the Friends group the central features of park outreach activity. Yarbrough negotiated with the Friends to redirect their attention away from structures with less than 70 percent original fabric, and found a useful project for them in the building of the wooden boardwalk along the enlisted men' s barracks. Utilizing volunteer labor (from the Telephone Pioneers of America Permian Basin Chapter), grant money from the National Park Foundation, and Fort Davis's own maintenance crew, the park in 1994 received yet another benefit from the committed individuals who admired the park's story and wished to enhance its telling. Unfortunately for the Friends group, they realized by the mid-1990s that they had competition from other Labor Day weekend venues, which led to reduced gate receipts for non-budgetary items that the park needed. Yet the park did not suffer completely from a loss of interest in volunteer support, as the University of Pennsylvania sent out to Fort Davis in the summer of 1993 a group of graduate students from its Architectural Conservation Laboratory to work for two weeks on "stabilizing historic plaster" in several of the structures. This was the first year of a three-year program that culminated in 1995. This activity inspired the staff in June 1993 to conduct a week-long "Ruins Stabilization Workshop" on site, with NPS employees and state parks personnel from Texas and New Mexico in attendance. [83]

One issue of structural maintenance that concerned Yarbrough and the staff in 1993 was the need for a new pedestrian bridge across the south flood diversion ditch, between the parking lot and the administrative offices of the park. The original bridge was some 100 feet upstream from the proposed new structure, and the placing of its abutments in the streambed had rendered it vulnerable to flooding, both for its exposure to surging streamflows and the erosion caused by water coursing around the abutments. By constructing a new bridge, the park would not only reduce the harm to the structure and the streambanks. It would also guide patrons more efficiently to the visitors center without the need to realign the existing dimensions of visitor access. When Jerry Yarbrough became superintendent, he and the staff discussed the merits of the planning for the bridge, and decided that these needed amending. They preferred a wooden structure, even though steel had first been suggested for its durability. In addition, the staff wished the bridge to remain at its original location. To that end, bids were delayed until the ramifications of these change orders could be calculated. Jerry Yarbrough's logic in this situation served as a guide to his thinking in other matters of historic preservation. "Fort Davis is a highly sensitive historical site," he wrote in the "Scope of Work" on the bridge proposal. "Any planning, design, or construction," declared Yarbrough, "must be accomplished in such a manner as to avoid or minimize impacts on the historic scene or fabric." [84]

Yarbrough' s attention to detail with the park's historic resources echoed his commitment to quality in interpretive programs and personnel management. In April 1993, Yarbrough, Mary Williams, and Friends treasurer Jerry Johnson traveled to Austin to attend the Texas Historical Commission's s annual preservation conference. There the Friends received the prestigious "Driscoll Award" for "having the most successful preservation story in the State of Texas." This prize came to Fort Davis for the overall program of preservation conducted over three decades at the park. Yarbrough wanted the Driscoll Award to serve as an guide to other historical projects, and to that end he supported the work already underway for the 1992 Columbian Quincentennial. Fort Davis also organized two traveling educational trunks for elementary students, each focusing upon "Spanish Colonial Explorations." There was in addition a "Columbus art contest" for area schools, with the submissions displayed on the lawn of the Jeff Davis County courthouse during the 4th of July celebration. The staff assisted the Lou Reda Production company in their filming of a documentary entitled, "Crossed Sabres: The History of the U.S. Horse Cavalry." They also commemorated National Historic Preservation Week in 1992 with an exhibit on adobe construction, as well as showing visitors a video entitled, "From the Ground Up: West Texas Adobe." Black history received attention, as Yarbrough invited Bob Snead of El Paso to bring his one-man show on Lieutenant Henry Flipper to the Friends Restoration Festival. Then in April 1994, the park took great pride in hosting the unveiling of the U.S. Postal Service's "Buffalo Soldier" stamp, complete with dignitaries and speeches about the importance of black units to the settlement of the West. [85]

These accomplishments also permitted Superintendent Yarbrough to move the discussion forward on a General Management Plan. In June 1994, he had invited to the park a team of NPS professionals to conduct a survey of the park's needs and potential. From this came in October 1995 the "Fort Davis Historic Site Strategic Plan." As evidence of the need for a GMP, the team and Fort Davis personnel explained that the Davis Mountains were growing with residential and commercial development, as well as with tourism. One example of this was news that the McDonald Observatory, already an attractive site to visitors, would construct the world's second-largest viewing telescope (some 400 inches in diameter, or four times the size of the existing largest telescope at the observatory). This would generate as many as 200,000 or more visitors to the area, which at best had 100 motel rooms and only one-half dozen restaurants. Another issue impinging upon Fort Davis was the "pressure for reconstruction/restoration from the community and the Friends of Fort Davis." Such activities, said Yarbrough, "tend to focus staff, funding, and visitor attention on those buildings rather than place energy and limited funds on original fabric." [86]

While the park identified its needs and concerns in its strategic plan, events far from west Texas in the fall and winter of 1995-1996 threatened both the funding base of the park and visitor access to the historic treasures within its boundaries. A major restructuring program swept the NPS in 1994 and 1995. This reflected both the Clinton administration's program for "Reinventing Government," and the Republican party's "Contract With America" to shrink even further the obligations, duties, and costs of federal service to the nation. This process not only placed in limbo the ideas that Superintendent Yarbrough had planned for his park as a result of receiving long-overdue budget increases in 1994 and 1995. It also led to forced closures in November and December 1995, and January 1996, denying the staff the ability to provide the visiting public with the level of cultural resource management that had garnered so much praise for Fort Davis. These draconian measures came on the heels of efforts in Congress to "de-commission" smaller parks, with Fort Davis on a list of 200 NPS units suggested for closure by Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt if the nation's lawmakers made good on their promises to shrink the size of government.

When federal employees returned to their workplaces in mid-January 1996, there would be doubts and concerns about the continued commitment of Washington and the taxpayers to the maintenance of Fort Davis and its peers in the national park system. "Downsizing" had become the code word of the day, and hopes had dimmed for additional funds for a GMP or for any other program. Thus in an ironic historical twist, the National Park Service of the late twentieth century faced conditions and uncertainties not unlike those of the U.S. Army, which had found itself in the 1890s with surplus properties like Fort Davis when the American people no longer needed soldiers to ensure the "winning" of the West.

Were Senator Redfield Proctor to return at the close of the twentieth century to the high mountain valley of west Texas that he had visited ten decades earlier, he might be surprised that the military post that he had ordered closed had survived the ravages of time and the elements. Yet he would also recognize the commitment and care extended by the Fort Davis staff and management to the stone and adobe buildings that once housed the frontier troops. Proctor might conclude that teamwork had been the guiding principle for success from the days of Barry Scobee and the Davis Mountains local sponsors, to Robert Utley and other park service planners, through the restoration process of the 1960s and the living history initiatives of the 1970s. Once these forces had played out at Fort Davis, the staff in the 1980s looked to consolidate the gains of the first generation of park management. This they found in private sector support of the activities of Fort Davis, especially the barracks restoration project. Just as in the 1890s, when the nation questioned the wisdom of public service, and faced the challenges of a new century, so did the NPS seek to renew and invigorate the "finest frontier military post in the Southwest" to appeal to a new era of visitors and scholars. The ghosts of Redfield Proctor, Benjamin Grierson, and the hundreds of soldiers and support personnel who crossed the parade grounds of Fort Davis symbolized both an earlier century's desire for expansion and development of the West, and its refocusing of attention away from the Davis Mountains once that task was completed. Yet the staff and management of the National Park Service, from Michael Becker to Jerry Yarbrough, saw to it that future generations of Americans would see the past as Proctor, et al., knew it, and ensured that the history of the frontier Army would not again slip from the nation's collective memory.