FORT UNION Administrative History

Figure 10. Carlos Lovato, Ike Trujillo, Benito Lucero, and Dionicio Ulibarri stabilizing the wall of Commissary Warehouse, October 1958.
Courtesy of Fort Union National Monument.

Nineteen fifty-nine marked a watershed in the history of Fort Union National Monument. When it became a national monument in 1956, the abandoned post was still in the wilderness. Occasionally, a few curious visitors drove to the ruins along the ruts of the old Santa Fe Trail. Just three years later, Fort Union had a permanent visitor center and two residence houses with electricity and running water. A paved highway and telephone line had linked the fort to the rest of the world. Even the aged adobe walls had received modern cosmetic treatment such as the silicone coating. Indeed, the monument had finished its first period of intensive development and become a fully functional national monument.

Certainly, it was time to have a celebration. Since the ribbon-cutting ceremony three years before, people had constantly asked for a formal dedication of the monument. However, the Park Service did not think that it was wise to hold this kind of event without the existence of basic service facilities and an operating stabilization program. By the spring of 1959, everybody realized that the situation was mature; Fort Union, Inc., began to organize the pageant, which was scheduled for June 14, 1959. In order to bring as many people as possible, open invitations printed on placards were placed in the windows of most business firms in Las Vegas. [29] As had occurred during the campaign for the establishment of Fort Union National Monument, the dedication again showed the efforts of the community.

Around one-thirty on the afternoon of June 14, the Twelfth Air Force Band started playing while three thousand attendants took their seats between the new visitor center and the old officer's quarters. At two o'clock, four F-100 Super Sabre jets flew over Fort Union as the signal came to hoist the American flag up the replica flagpole. To give a 21-gun salute with a 105mm howitzer, 101 members from the 726th AAA Battalion of the New Mexico National Guard presented the colors. A series of speeches followed. Among the prestigious speakers were President Ross Thompson of Fort Union, Inc., Superintendent Homer Hastings, New Mexico's Lieutenant Governor Ed V. Mead, Brigadier General William C. Kingsbury of the Air Force, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Roger C. Ernst, and Director Conrad L. Wirth of the National Park Service. In his dedication address, Ernst delightedly expressed that he had the double opportunity to dedicate the fort and the visitor center. He paid tribute to those who won the frontier and those who won the monument. [30] Indeed, the ceremony formally ushered in a new era for Fort Union National Monument.

As the decade of the 1960s arrived, the administration of Fort Union properly shifted its emphasis of management from construction to maintenance. Routine operations such as cleaning the water tank, painting the wooden fences, and repairing the visitor center filled the park staff's many working hours. In 1963, funds available at the regional office permitted the addition of another residence at the monument. Cillessen Brothers Company of Albuquerque completed construction during the next spring. [31] Except for this small expansion, no major construction occurred at the place during the early 1960s. Most workers just kept themselves busy with daily maintenance.

Ruins preservation continued. The maintenance crew applied silicone coating to the walls that needed it twice a year. In 1963, however, the collapse of several walls due to high winds renewed the search for more reliable methods of stabilization and preservation. The workers tried a new technique that used Redi bolts and guy cables to strengthen those walls in the greatest danger of collapse. By September 1965, all the adobe walls at the fort had received a silicone coating with the exception of one section of the Post Hospital's wall, which was being tested with sandstone, adobe paste, and epoxy resin. It proved that these new methods were better. [32]

From the mid-1960s, Fort Union National Monument began to try other new ways of preserving the ruins on a large scale. Previously, workers routinely applied silicone coating to the crumbling adobe walls to prevent them from further deterioration. Although silicone temporarily worked as a shield to fend off the sun, snow, and rains, in fact, silicone coating often trapped moisture inside the structures and weakened the entire building. White silicone coating, which reflected more light, destroyed the unique complexion of the ruins, which resembled the reddish color of the soil. Cooperating with the Park Service and the University of Arizona, the Globe Archeological and Stabilization Center in Arizona gradually developed a new technique to preserve the adobe structures. Specialists at the center recommended that Fort Union try epoxy resin and adobe paste on the ruins because they were closer to the original materials. Under the direction of the center, the monument underwent large scale experimentation. [33]

As devoted caretakers of the ruins for ten years, Fort Union's staff won their reputation in the National Park service. In July 1965, three regional offices of the National Park Service (the Southwest, Southeast, and Midwest) formed a joint committee to undertake a survey of seven western forts. [34] Fort Union's management was deemed the best among all seven western forts, and the committee suggested that the other forts learn from Fort Union's experience. "Fort Union, New Mexico," concluded the committee, "was an outstanding example of good management." [35]

One of the chief caretaking operations in the late 1960s was to reconstruct the visitor trail. When the monument opened to the public, the original flagstone walks built around 1877 were repaired to serve as a part of the visitor route. The larger portion of the route was a 4,000-foot path of emulsified asphalt laid in the late 1950s. After ten years, this weather-beaten path started to crack. Because the heat and moisture trapped by asphalt made the trail an increasingly fertile breeding ground for undesirable vegetation, rapid growth of weeds constantly broke the surface of the asphalt path from below. By 1967, Fort Union administrators had to consider the reconstruction of the trail, writing a tentative proposal for a $19,000 project. [36] Awarded the contract, Howard Flanagan of Las Vegas, in the spring of 1968, began to replace some sections of the asphalt trail with flagstones. Before the winter came, he finished approximately 1,700 feet of flagstone walkway. [37]

Extensive repairs of the visitor trail continued in the 1970s. Superintendent Claude Fernandez reported in 1972 that more than 13,000 square feet of the asphalt trail needed either replacing or repairing. Because of the unavailability of local gravel and a considerable amount of money, the park had to postpone the work for three years. In 1975, the regional office appropriated extra funds for the project. Then the monument replaced the remainder of the asphalt path with a rock-crusher waste walkway. [38]

In addition to the new visitor trail, a series of construction projects occurred at Fort Union in the first half of the 1970s. Expecting to provide better service to the public, park staff installed several picnic tables outside the visitor center and interpretive-resting benches along the visitor trail. For its own benefit, the monument acquired two storage buildings for stabilization equipment, general supplies, and maintenance tools. Moreover, all the service buildings, including the visitor center, living quarters, and maintenance shop, received a facelift. In 1973, Superintendent Ross Hopkins reported that all the service buildings were in "a sad stage of deterioration." They needed to be repaired immediately. Carefully assessing the conditions of the structures, the park began to repair them the following spring. That summer, a heavy thunderstorm, which covered the ground with hail up to eight inches deep, caused $4,000 in damages to vehicles and buildings. But the storm did not stop this project. By the end of 1974, all the buildings were rehabilitated. [39]

During the same period, personnel changes occurred at Fort Union. In January 1971, Superintendent Hastings retired after almost 13 years of service at the monument. Although in the last few years of his tenure he became less energetic and creative, everyone felt that Hastings's leaving was a big loss to the park. He not only held the longest tenure as superintendent in the history of Fort Union National Monument, but also acted as superb leader in the early development of the park. In April, Claude Fernandez of Carlsbad Caverns National Park came to fill the vacant position. He remained at the fort for only 26 months, during which severe diabetes limited his performance. In June 1973, he accepted a new job as supervisory park ranger at Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso. Again, Fort Union was looking for a new, energetic, and healthy leader. Fortunately, a month later, Ross Hopkins, a 15-year Park Service veteran came from the Denver Service Center of the Park Service and began his seven-year administration. [40]

As soon as he arrived at the fort, Hopkins injected new energy into the never-ending task of adobe preservation. Although maintenance routines such as filling cracks with soil-cement bricks and capping walls with adobe mortar proceeded as usual, the preservation crew developed a new system to take care of the ruins. Besides emergency repairs following unpredictable severe weather, a regular five-year maintenance schedule was assigned to each wall section because erosion usually began to occur within a five-year period. Designed to beat mother nature, this system made the preservation crew operate more efficiently. Original wood beams were treated with wood preservative, and metal was painted with rust resistant paint on a five-year cycle.

When a spot check of the ruins using photos from the stabilization records showed most of the adobe walls firm and strong, the keen workers found that the stone foundations, which were not included in the routine maintenance process, were in increasingly bad shape. They needed a complete resetting and pointing. [41] The Park Service decided to use the skills and experience of some Indians who were experts in stone building. In the fall of 1973, archeologist George Chambers from the Arizona Archeological Center, with a special grant of $25,000, directed a ruins stabilization unit of Navajos to ameliorate the damage to the stone foundations. During the eight-week project, they focused on the officers' quarters and reset all the limestone foundations. The chosen sections were reinforced with cement. The Navajos did an excellent job. [42]