PATAGONIA: The Sense of Place

Here'a legacy image that someone chose to record for future generations highlighting the precipitation, population and elevation.
You can see the Patagonia Drug Company building in the background with the train depot to the left.
Finest All The Year Climate in the U.S.

Somethings don't change, but some things do

If you have images that speak to future generations about the progress over the decades in Patagonia history, its people, or places of interest then and now, please send them along.

You can also drop into Mariposa Books & more, where the Visitor Information Center is located, between the hours of 10:00 a.m-5:00 p.m.

Patagonia History: PLACES & PEOPLE

Information Wanted

Having plowed through about fifteen books and research articles now, this business has not been notated anywhere so far

PATAGONIA SMOKE HOUSE

H.H. McCutchan, Prop

Other details somewhat fuzzy.

Can anyone help identify anyone in the group, or the possible occasion for taking the photographs?

Reclaiming Patagonia History: PEOPLE

CAPTAIN JAMES HENRY TEVIS

Arizona Pioneer and Confederate Soldier

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What? you might ask ... sometimes historical truth is stranger than fiction, as your blogger would like to bring your attention.

Just one chapter in this man's life places him at Fort Buchanan, now wiped off the map but a military outpost before the Civil War about six miles northeast of Patagonia on the Scenic Patagonia-Sonoita Highway today.

You won't see it there now, but we'll plan to commemorate that milestone in local history in one of the proposed locations for the Heritage Tile Mural Project that your local working group is planning for the Arizona Centennial Heritage Project 2009 . . . bringing what's "hidden" in history echoing and thundering and silenced down the centuries here to reveal the people, places, and progress that bring us where we are today - where we want to go in the future and what legacy we want to leave for future generations.

If you join us and pitch in to uncover and reveal history, we'll get it "shovel-ready" - a paradise it's not, for sure.

A biography of Capt. James H. Trevis, titled "Arizona in the '50's", Revised Edition, edited by Betty Barr and Dr. William J. Kelly, published 2007 by BrockingJ Books is available at Mariposa Books & more ..., or you can contact the author for additional copies online http://www.brockinjbooks.com/

Reclaiming Patagonia History: Vintage Foto #4

Your blogger had just downloaded this foto from an archive of Judith Whitcomb's and no sooner had a print been made, in walks Margie Buyer to Patagonia-Mountain Empire Visitor Information Center to tell me some details: the cowboy on the horse is her son-in-law Dan Skiver, the horse's name is "Howdy", the image was captured at Poco Toro Ranch near Mowry (now "a deserted ghost town"), the fence - un cerco estacado - is made from the oak trees growing on the land constructed in a zig-zag pattern of "a Mexican" tradition, and the calves are an English breed called British White Parks . . . and there see you some of the research details triggered by memories of seeing just one image.
Notice, if you will, one of the calves of a different color and conformation . . . ???

Patagonia People: Vintage Foto #1

7 Dudes on the front porch of one of the town's seven saloons .
Today there is only one
while the Old Wagon Wheel gets some back-of-the-house refurbishing.
Can anybody say and prove Who's Who?
Holding the pose for history: so what's the story?

Places: THE SAN RAFAEL VALLEY: Headwaters of The Santa Cruz River

Images of acreage, purchased in 1999 from private owners, of some of the vast original land holdings in the San Rafael de Zanja land grant when Spain and Mexico assumed jurisdiction and title to the rich grasslands in the geophysical features creating the headwaters of The Santa Cruz River as we know it today.
The myth and popularity of Hollywood-style "cowboys" was created here, but it was preceded by the earlier traditons of Mexican "Vaqueros" and cattle-ranching centuries before.
Today certain private landowners are re-establishing A Life in Balance and a viable, sustainable working landscape that respects all that came before in the progress of time, keeping a sense of place, and looking back at the people who were players in the history of this great place that echoes, and thunders, down the centuries.

Reclaiming Patagonia History: Foto #2

Building on Sonoita Avenue . . . image taken about a week ago.

In comparing this with a photograph from 2005 by Robert Whitcomb - just a few years ago - a mesquite fence has been replaced with a wire one, and a gateway entrance removed.

This is a wider shot to show you the addition of a white picket fence, the installation of a satellite disk on the nearby house, and a trailer wedged under the overhang on that house.

This building, however, remains.

Mute testimony to Patagonia's past for now, but waiting for its story and history to be told.

Reclaiming Patagonia History: Foto #1

This building stands in silent testimony to days gone by . . . alone and white-washed in an unspoken or unwritten history that goes unnoticed today except for the fact that it remains - a remnant of the tapestry of lives lived and things forgotten across the advance of time, woven through the decades of people, progress and places here in Patagonia.
You've probably passed it by many times or perhaps not even noticed it at all.

What story and what history does this building want to reveal as it stands out in stark contrast in a back alley against an industrial backdrop with bars on a two-story high window?

Who knows?
Why was this structure built?
What was done here?
How did it look before? Way back . . . When?