It’s a new decade.
The truth remains as it was.
Located in a grassy area on the south side of the Los Angeles County Superior Court building, Compton Civic Plaza, Compton, California.
Injustice persists.
A day to remember what matters.
© Brad Nixon 2020
Posted in history | Tags: injustice, Martin Luther King Jr., quotations
In my previous post, I related a visit to the Western New Mexico Museum in Silver City and its collection of pottery and other artifacts from the native American Mimbres culture. (click here to read it).
The culture’s unique decorative style features dramatically rendered geometric patterns and sometimes fanciful interpretations of people, animals, fish and birds. Here is an inventively stylized rabbit.
Part of a larger group of tribes called the Mogollon people, the Mimbres inhabited southern New Mexico between about 800 and 1300 A.D. Over the course of those centuries, their communities evolved in ways similar to those visitors see in more commonly visited sites like Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
Beginning with pit houses dug into the earth and roofed by wooden beams, the Mimbres eventually built freestanding, above-ground “pueblo-style” compounds of river rock, adobe brick and timber. There were dozens or scores of small villages along the Mimbres and Gila Rivers and their tributaries. Below is a reconstruction of one Mimbres community, the Mattocks Ruin, just outside the village of Mimbres.
Approximately 200 people lived there on the flood plain of the Mimbres River. They were farmers who used relatively advanced irrigation, but also hunted and gathered naturally growing vegetables, seeds and nuts. Their remarkable pottery began as purely pragmatic wares for storing and carrying water and food. Then, the Mimbres became creative artists of impressive accomplishment, as shown in this fish decoration.
The fish’s four legs are sometimes a symbol of the Warrior Twins, present in many creation stories of the southwestern cultures.
Most of the known Mimbres sites are on private property. Only the Mattocks site is open to the public, and only since 2014. I was delighted to finally have an opportunity to see it this summer.
What’s Been Lost
The Mattocks site is, regrettably, one of a limited number of Mimbres sites that have been systematically excavated and studied. As I wrote more extensively at this link, a significant number of Mimbres village sites were looted for their pottery and artifacts some decades ago, sometimes with the use of heavy machinery, as in this photo from the 1970s.
Looting made those sites virtually useless for systematic archaeological study.
You can visit the Mattocks site, about 27 miles east of Silver City, New Mexico. (See directions below.)
There’s a small museum, operated by volunteers and funded by a variety of programs and donors, located in an 1890s ranch house, known as the Gooch House, after its first residents. The property was later owned by another rancher, Bert Mattocks, hence the name of the Mimbres village there.
Visit the museum, talk to the volunteer on duty, ask questions, and tour the small exhibit space, which includes the village reconstruction shown above.
Also on the site is an older structure, the 1880s Wood House, built by the first European settler on the property, Dr. Granville Wood, a physician.
Dr. Wood planted apple, peach, cherry, pear, apricot and plum trees, grew alfalfa and vegetables and raised livestock. The house is one of the oldest surviving structures from the period of European settlement in the Mimbres valley.
A Walk Through the Village Site
Walk north from the museum, following a paved path, which will lead you into a broad flood plain of the Mimbres River. In the photo below, you look north, toward the distant Gila Mountains.
No. It is not the Pyramids, Stonehenge or the Forum Romanum. The site was extensively excavated in the early decades of the 20th century, and those excavations have provided a significant percentage of what’s known of Mimbres culture from in situ study.
Archaeologists found walls, pottery, tools, weapons and waste fields (middens) — mapping and charting as they went — permitting the reconstructions I picture here. When the field work was complete, the archaeologists followed common practice, covering the ruins to protect them. The standard wisdom is that later studies, benefitting from more advanced technology or informed by adjacent work, will make it possible to derive further information by digging again.
Instead of seeing ruins at Mattocks, you’re going to use your imagination, with some assistance from the Mimbres Culture Heritage organization. Follow the path.
Below, you’re looking east. The trees at the foot of the brown hills mark the course of the Mimbres River, immediately beside the village site.
The community farmed a considerable portion of the flood plain, and hunters ranged far up those hills and the rugged territory beyond, some of which is now the federally protected Gila Wilderness.
Throughout the site, there are display boards describing the portions of the village near you, like this one.
There are also individual reconstructions of living structures that are now beneath the soil.
Seeing a Place That Is No Longer “There”
Even without visible structures, you can imagine the life of an ancient community.
The Mimbres possessed only stone tools — no metal — advanced pottery-making skills, a knowledge of farming, hunting, food-gathering and making clothes. What would it be like to sustain a community with those capabilities and limitations?
What was daily life like? What was it like in winter? How much work did it require to gather and prepare food, collect firewood, build and maintain housing, raise children? Who had the nearly endless task of carrying pots to the river, filling them with water, carrying them back, then repeating the trip?
The Mimbres, like contemporaneous southwestern Puebloan societies, possessed no known form of writing. We have only artifacts, pottery and an understanding of their farming and hunting practices. Although we’ve learned a reasonable amount about their culture, much has been lost through the looting and destruction of many sites.
We can only stand under the western sky, ask and wonder.
Visiting the Mattocks Ruin
The Mattocks Ruin is located on the edge of the village of Mimbres at mile marker 4 on Route 35. From Silver City, take Rt. 180 east, then Route 152, turn left on Rt. 35. The site is on the right, marked by a road sign.
The routes are all paved, progressively narrower and slower as you travel from Silver City to Mimbres, through lovely high desert country.
Tucson is about 3-1/2 hours west. Las Cruces is about two hours southeast.
For more information visit the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site website at this link.
A informative and attractive book for learning more about the Mimbres, with many excellent photographs, is Mimbres Pottery, Ancient Art of the American Southwest, Brody et al, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1983.
Appreciation to the volunteers and docents of the Mimbres Heritage Culture Site who provided valuable information, answered many questions, and deserve credit for their work in preserving the Mattocks Ruin.
© Brad Nixon 2019. Pottery photographed in the collection of the Western New Mexico University Museum, and may not be used for commercial purposes. Excavation photograph by Paul Minnis © The Mimbres Foundation, and may not be used for any commercial purpose. Map © Google.
Posted in history, New Mexico, Travel | Tags: archaeology, Mimbres, New Mexico, pottery
If you wake up early in Silver City, New Mexico on a summer morning, wander over to downtown. Looking north along Bullard Street, it might appear like this:
No, there’s not a lot of vehicular traffic at 5:45 a.m. in downtown Silver on a July morning. Nor was there any traffic on that spot in the year 1100.
But, within a few miles of what’s now Silver City, the nearby Mimbres River valley was home to a remarkable culture. Everyone was awake, hard at work. Southwestern New Mexico was the center of a thriving population.
The 12th century had larger centers of population. Baghdad may have had a million people. Kaifeng, in China, certainly had 400,000 residents. A city that no longer exists, Merv, in Turkmenistan, central Asia, probably had half a million residents.
In 12th century Europe, Constantinople had 300,000 people; Paris, 50,000; London, perhaps 25,000.
In North America, 1,200 miles east of the Mimbres River, the Cahokia complex, east of present-day St. Louis, was one of the world’s largest cities, with as many as 40,000 people.
Back in New Mexico, it wasn’t about large numbers of humans. Along the Gila and Mimbres Rivers and their tributaries, small communities of 100 to 200 people built pueblo-style compounds of mud brick and timber, farming corn (maize), beans and squash with the help of relatively sophisticated irrigation, as well as hunting deer and rabbits.
Like the Cahokia and other native cultures of that era, the Mimbres Culture had no metal tools, only stone and wood. (“Mimbres” is the plural of the Spanish word for “willow,” and the river valley is home to native willows.) They did not have the wheel, nor did they use draft animals. Horses, sheep and domesticated cattle would only be introduced several hundred years later by European invaders, long after the Mimbres had moved on.
Before that, they did something remarkable. To see what they did, let’s go back to Bullard Street in present-day Silver City.
Drive north, turn left on College Avenue and work your way uphill to the campus of Western New Mexico University (WNMU). At the top of the hill, you’ll find Fleming Hall and the WNMU Museum.
Built in 1917, the main floor of Fleming Hall was the school’s gymnasium.
Today, it’s been converted into the WNMU Museum, which holds the world’s largest publicly available collection of the remarkable works of pottery craft created by the Mimbres culture, primarily between 900 and 1200 A.D.
Pottery vessels were of primary importance to native American cultures. They held water and food, served as cooking vessels, and also — it’s believed — had important ceremonial roles. Here is a man carrying a basket on his head in the distance, surrounded by butterflies in the foreground. Is this a story? A parable? A fable?
The pottery is unlike anything ever seen before or since. The “classic” Mimbres period, from about 900 – 1150, incorporates astonishingly inventive figures, like this snake emerging from the body of a bird that may be a turkey.
The artisans who created those ceramic vessels were, almost certainly, women. Men had the tasks of building and maintaining structures and hunting, while farming was likely a collaborative effort. Contemporary southwestern native potters today are, primarily, female, and it’s likely that prehistoric pottery was also the work of women, like this black-tailed jackrabbit, instantly recognizable to any resident of today’s southwestern desert.
In a hard land, where work began at the break of every day and continued past dark, with starvation always a threat, a few thousand humans found the means to express something ineffable in how they’d decorate a bowl, with artfully designed figures that reflected the world they lived in: lizards, rabbits, snakes, turtles …
A year of drought would put the community at risk. Two years? There’d be no water for crops, game would become scarce, requiring weeks instead of days of hunting. Still, some essential urge of the human spirit inspired the artisans of a threatened world to express something about what they saw, what they knew about the world around them.
What do these figures represent? Are they merely records of the nature the Mimbres encountered? They’re carefully observed and — to a great degree — accurately represented. Did they have totemic, symbolic significance, or were they mere decoration?
At least one legend from that day has come down to us: Kokopelli, the flute-playing fertility symbol. A trickster god, the hunch-backed Kokopelli is a familiar figure throughout the American southwest, endlessly repeated in local crafts in the form of pendants and decorations. A thousand years ago, he played many roles in cultures from the Hohokam in southern Arizona to the Mississippian cultures far to the east, and it’s impossible to define just what he meant to the Mimbres. Yes, he was there.
We can’t say what those images signified. The Mimbres — like most prehistoric native cultures in North America — possessed no writing. Theirs was an oral culture, passed from person to person across generations. Now, their culture is lost to us, except for these artifacts.
The artistry of the pottery was passed along in the same way: person to person, mother to daughter. In the the WMNU collection is a remarkable piece. A scholar has suggested that the execution of the artwork indicates it was done by a child of 5 or 6 years old. An almost heartbreakingly beautiful moment in the life of what it might mean to be a child, learning to paint pottery in the year 1100.
Mountain lions. Rarely seen, even then. What would Grandmother say? Did you get it right? Keep working.
There, in one glimpse into another world, is a moment that resonates with our time. A mother or grandmother, teaching a child how to decorate her pot. “Make your brush like this. Dip it into your paint. Paint like this.”
If you spend a couple of hours in the WMNU museum, as I did, you’ll encounter a stack of pull-out drawers in one of the basement rooms. In them are artifacts retrieved from Mimbres sites. Among them are axe- and spearheads, arrow points, awls and tools made of bone. There are preserved fragments of fabric, and sandals, intricately woven of yucca fiber more than a thousand years ago. And this, a sandal made of soft deerskin, once worn by a tiny child, with my finger as an indication of the scale.
Only a few inches long, it once held the foot of a child, perhaps a year old. The world turns on, long after the Mimbres left.
A world immeasurably distant from ours. And, yet, the same world we inhabit today. They left to us to carry on. What do we see? What will we leave?
Finally, this. One of many pieces in the collection labeled “provenience unknown,” unlabeled. As a kid who grew up in the American Midwest, if that is not an owl, then I can only say that I have nothing in common with the people who walked across the land I grew up on on. But I think they knew an owl when they saw one, and captured it there, painted into enduring pottery, a thousand years before I was born.
Whooo?
Western New Mexico University Museum
Silver City is in southwestern New Mexico. The museum is in Fleming Hall on the university campus. While the address of the university is 1000 West College Ave., you can drive to the museum from 10th Street, parallel to College, one block north. College becomes Louisiana St., and the entrance to the museum parking lot is on the right.
The museum is open 7 days a week, but hours vary. Entrance is free, but donations are suggested to support this impressive collection. More details at museum.wnmu.edu.
© Brad Nixon 2019. Items pictured are in the collection of the University of Western New Mexico, photographed in July 2019.
Posted in Art, history, New Mexico, science environment conservation, Travel | Tags: archaeology, Mimbres, museum, New Mexico, pottery, prehistoric, Silver City, Western New Mexico University.
In 1961, a science fiction TV series titled “The Outer Limits” debuted in the U.S.
The program was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the groundbreaking “The Twilight Zone,” including an atmospheric graphics-and-music introduction (which you can see on YouTube: click here). It begins:
Male Voice-Over: somewhat ominous, nascent with implied threat, under graphics [“GFX”]:
[GFX: White electronic oscilloscope waves on black]
“There is nothing wrong with your television set.”
[GFX: Single white dot glows on black screen]
“Do not attempt to adjust the picture.
We are controlling transmission.
We will control the horizontal.”
[GFX: dot expands to horizontal white line on black screen].
“We will control the vertical.”
[GFX: dot expands to vertical white line on black screen]…
In 1961, controlling horizontal and vertical meant a variety of things in technical terms, because the state of broadcast technology was primitive. Simply getting a picture into a cathode ray tube in living rooms could be problematic.
Television pictures were horizontal: wider than they were tall. If you still own a TV set, that’s the case today.
However, there are some tens or hundreds of millions of people walking around with devices perfectly capable of recording vertical-format video. They’re called “phones.”
As a result, despite several generations of orientation to the fact that video and films are shown in horizontal format, the airwaves, the Internet, your email, social media and everywhere else is replete with video shot in vertical format, which looks — to use a technical term — doinky when shown on a TV screen that’s 1.77 times wider than it is tall.
Has everyone forgotten that?
No. Please don’t leave a comment. I get it. A majority of people access their electronic worlds on those hand-held vertical screens now.
I don’t. I have a horizontal television and the computer on my desk has a horizontal monitor screen.
Often, it doesn’t matter so much what format the video’s in. But, is it so difficult for someone to look at the scene they’re recording — like a group picture or perhaps a wide landscape — and simply turn the device so the screen format matches the shape of the scene?
Tall building? Yep, that’s vertical. One or two people posed in front of a statue? Maybe vertical. Your cousin’s too-cute-for-words kids running across the yard? No.
Turn your phone sideways. If for no other reason, do it so I won’t have to keep harping on it. And do not expect me to go to the theater to see a movie shot in vertical orientation. I’ll stay home and read the book (which is probably better than the movie).
© Brad Nixon 2019. “The Outer Limits” introduction is almost certainly copyrighted material, quoted here as editorial “fair use,” and should not be used for commercial purposes. 1952 television set with test pattern by Eckhard Etzold – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4230239. Retrieved December 2, 2019.
Posted in Media, Media, technology, technology | Tags: technology, television, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, video
In the U.S., we’ve just observed the annual Thanksgiving holiday.
On the day before Thanksgiving came the news that writer, critic, poet and raconteur, Clive James, had succumbed to the terminal leukemia and emphysema with which he’d been diagnosed nearly ten years earlier.
Only 80 at his death, he worked on until nearly the end.
Born in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, he moved to the UK in 1962 after completing a psychology degree from the University of Sydney and working a short stint at The Sydney Morning Herald. He lived in the UK for the rest of his life.
He earned a degree from Pembroke College, Cambridge. By every account, including his own, he invested little time on course material. Instead, he pursued his own autodidactic bent, while tirelessly producing poetry, criticism, essays and journalism.
Always, ceaselessly, there was reading. James taught himself to read several languages and developed a daunting command of the canon of western literature. His curiosity seems never to have failed him. He once wrote, “A cafe table stacked with books has been my university now for 40 years.”
Widely published as literary critic throughout his career, James became a television critic in 1972, a role he filled for 10 years at The Observer. His scathing wit and willingness to investigate every sort of televised programming was as relentless as he was with everything he essayed. He became a fixture on British television, himself, beginning in 1982 with “Clive James on Television,” then, in 1989, a travel program, “Clive James’ Postcard From,” and an 8-part documentary for BBC, “Fame in the 20th Century.”
Although he’s remembered by many viewers in the UK as an unfailingly captivating and perceptive television personality, there was a lot more to Clive James.
He was a songwriter and producer of six musical albums in the 1970s. He wrote four novels and, over the span of several decades, a 5-part autobiography. He never ceased writing poetry, essays and literary criticism.
Unfailingly, there was reading, and he read voraciously.
He was a stern critic of his own work, as well as that of others. Although he has been declared by some the greatest Australian poet of his day, his own assessment was that he wrote some good lines, surrounded by many bad lines, and his only goal was to reduce the number of bad lines. That was James being James, sparing no one, including himself.
I have not read nearly enough of Mr. James’ seemingly endless range of work, which reflects an impressive intellect coupled with a fierce dedication to clear and compelling writing.
He was merciless in his condemnation of superficial thinking or slipshod writing. He once rejected an editor’s suggested revisions to a piece by saying, “If I wrote like that, I’d be you.”
Cultural Amnesia
Nothing, in my opinion, will give you a clearer understanding of his far-reaching intellect than Cultural Amnesia, from 2007. In it he examines the work of more than a hundred 20th century artists, musicians, filmmakers and intellectuals, but, primarily, writers and poets.
If you’re familiar with the work of all the individuals Mr. James included in the book, I salute you. Many of the writers were entirely unknown to me, while others were merely names about whom I had a vague or general understanding, and had never read them. Many I thought I knew, but James shed new light on their work.
Once you’ve read the Introduction and the “Overture,” approach the book in any way you prefer. It’s organized alphabetically, so you may start with Anna Akhmatova and read through to Stefan Zweig. Alternatively, scan the table of contents for names you recognize — or names you do not — and start there.
James’ focus is the challenge of preserving culture — our shared humanism of artistic expression. To him, the history of the 20th century was one of wars, racism, pogroms and prejudice, directed to suppress the individual thinker. Many of his profiles describe lives of dire poverty pursued by artists outside whatever was the mainstream of their time or culture, often leaving behind only a few pieces of work.
If they are lost, goes his argument — if we fail to explore them — we suffer from a dire critical amnesia that will cost us dearly.
In a lifetime of determined searching through libraries, bookstalls or wherever he could find them, James tracked down the works of these writers and countless others, often long out of print, and often only available in German, Russian or French editions decades old. He read them, wrote notes in the ones he owned (a practice he heartily endorsed) and not only remembered what he read, but synthesized a great deal of it into Cultural Amnesia.
Throughout, he makes the case that there is more to be found in literature, art and music than we can ever grasp, but he sets a towering example of how far one might reach toward an understanding of it.
The book made a terrific impact on me. It’s inspired me to track down the work of some number of the writers he portrays, although I’ll never exhaust the list of what I’ve yet to read.
In the book, James said, “A painter can leave you with nothing to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”
I invite you not to mourn but — here at this time of giving thanks — celebrate what Mr. James left us, by reading what he wrote.
He once said, “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
Hail and farewell, Mr. James.
Have you read some of Clive James? What say you? Please leave a comment.
© Brad Nixon 2019
I collected the biographical details and quotations from obituaries and appreciations published on bbc.com and the New York Times. All were published November 27, 2019 and retrieved November 28, 2019 from the following links:
BBC Obituary; BBC Announcement/Appreciation; BBC, “Clive James in His Own Words“; New York Times Obituary; New York Times: “Clive James, a Tireless Polymath Who Led with His Wit,” by Dwight Garner
Cover of Cultural Amnesia © Mcmillan Publishers Ltd., 2007. Photograph by Brad Nixon, 2019
Posted in Books, Books, Reading, Writing, Language and related, Reading, Writing | Tags: books, Clive James, reading, writing
Although it’s 10 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, San Luis Obispo is considered part of California’s “central coast.” A city of 45,00 people, it was founded in 1772 as one of the original California missions, San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.
The thriving town, 190 miles north of Los Angeles, was once a center of farming and cattle ranching. Today, it’s the home of prestigious California Polytechnic State University. It also hosts an extensive Saturday farmers’ market, and a is a base for exploring the semi-arid California coastal range. Now that you’re acquainted, you can refer to the city as Californians do: SLO, and you can ride the local public transportation service, the ironically-named SLO Transit.
The town is replete with interesting local architecture. In addition to the old mission, as I’ve written here before (click on links), there’s a former Carnegie library building, now a museum, and an office building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright A small gem of a place, easily missed, is by Julia Morgan, whose long, successful career as California’s first female architect is defined by her work on William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon — Hearst Castle — about 40 miles north of San Luis Obispo. Her 1933 Women’s Monday Club building still houses its founding organization.
As the Southern Pacific Railroad built its first rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1890s, the steepest and most demanding portion of the line passed through rugged country to the south before reaching San Luis Obispo. The original station buildings were replaced in 1942 by a modern structure which still serves passengers traveling along Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and Coast Starlight trains.
The somewhat austere Spanish Colonial Revival style is as good a representation as any of the Southern Pacific’s consistent attempts to fit its operations into the local vernacular. Here, seen from the track side.
Inside, the original wooden benches and something of the original ambience of the waiting area are extant. Yes, there’s an Amtrak ticket window with an agent to book your ride.
The Competition Appears
When SP built the San Luis station, the great days of American rail travel were near their end. Interestingly, the harbinger of the decline of rail travel had already taken root right there in San Luis Obispo, 30 years earlier. Automobiles and highways would come to dominate the way we travel across America. The world’s first roadside motel, the Motel Inn, had been in business along U.S. Route 101 since 1925. Now a ruin, here’s how it looked more than a dozen years ago.
No, one can no longer book a room at the Motel Inn (although SLO offers plenty of modern accommodations). One can, however, board the Pacific Surfliner at SLO, its northern terminus, southbound for Los Angeles or San Diego, or catch the Coast Starlight to Portland or Seattle. I was there to see a train pull in, disembarking students returning to classes at Cal Poly.
Visiting
The San Luis Obispo station is at 1011 Railroad Ave. There are connections to SLO Transit buses.
Is there a classic railroad station in your town, or one that Under Western Skies readers should see? Leave a comment.
© Brad Nixon 2019
Posted in Architecture, California!, history, Railroad, Travel | Tags: architecture, California travel, Railroad, railroad depot, San Luis Obispo, train station
I’ve recently described some highlights from this summer’s visit to Tucson, Arizona, including the Carnegie library building, the Santa Fe train station, historic architecture on the University of Arizona campus and Saguaro National Park (follow links to those posts).
At least one more portion of Tucson is worth at least an hour or two: the oldest section of the city, established by the Spanish.
In 1777, the Spanish army began constructing a fortification enclosing 11 acres that are now part of the city’s downtown. The Presidio San Augustin de Tucson was completed in the 1780s, enclosed by adobe brick walls ten feet high, with two towers, each 20 feet tall.
Few remnants of the original wall exist, although the perimeter of the Presidio is marked in a number of public areas by lines inscribed in various pavements. A portion of the wall is being reconstructed, but was not ready for viewing when I visited.
There’s a museum, housed in some preserved structures from that era. We started our walking tour early, to beat the midsummer heat, and were there before it opened. I can give you a glimpse into a recreation of the courtyard that would have housed stables and work areas.
It’s worth noting that the Presidio was a base of operations, as well as both a defense against and a show of force to intimidate the native inhabitants of the area, who’d occupied the Santa Cruz River valley for perhaps 12,000 years. Some “American history” is Eurocentric, and overlooks some harsh realities.
Pima County Courthouse
Next stop on our walking tour was the 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival county courthouse.
As you can see, renovation to the building prevented us from getting a good view, seeing the interior, or even the attractive courtyard on the opposite side, which is the front of the courthouse.
Still, we could admire the sculptural portal and the blue-tiled dome, glowing in the desert sun.
The courthouse sits astride the northern perimeter of the original Presidio wall, at least one portion of which is built into the structure. Once reconstruction is complete, visitors should again be able to walk through the courtyard and central tower of the courthouse.
Plaza de las Armas/El Presidio Park
A wide, paved area west of the courthouse was originally the largest open space within the Presidio, used for military drills and formations. Later, it became the site for public gatherings and fiestas. Now, as you can see, it’s a rather formalized public space, which sits atop a large parking garage that serves the courthouse and nearby government buildings.
The sculptural fountain is by Charles Clement, 1970. Whether or not it has water at any time, it did not during my visit.
The plaza is a nexus for a number of surrounding buildings, including Tucson City Hall Tower, built in 1967 on the plaza’s western edge. Not the worst of ’60s civic architecture.
No public space is complete without statues, and Presidio Park has its share.
Soldado de Cuera (Leather-Jacket Soldier)
(Click on either photo to enlarge.)
The statue represents one of the elite mounted Spanish frontier soldiers of the late 1700s. Their multilayer leather vests (cuera) could stop an arrow. According to Wikipedia, their armament included a musket, pair of pistols, a bow and arrows, a short sword, 10-foot lance, and a bull-hide shield. They had the reputation of being fiercely accomplished horsemen.
Mormon Battalion Monument
This monument commemorates a unique passage of American history. In 1846, Church of Latter Day Saints president, Brigham Young, had yet to begin the congregation’s migration to present-day Utah. Much of the congregation lived near the edge of the frontier, in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, where they experienced considerable prejudice from other settlers. A delegation from Young to the U.S. government in Washington arrived just days after the U.S. had declared war on Mexico, the Mexican-American War.
In exchange for federal assistance and land concessions to the west, the church agreed to provide a contingent of several hundred volunteer soldiers to fight for the U.S. in the war. A volunteer unit of more than 300 Mormon soldiers (and four women, engaged as laundresses), led by U. S. Army officers, marched west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, headed for San Diego, California. They marched across demanding territory, reaching Tucson on December 16, 1846. Their arrival scattered a smaller Mexican force, resulting in the first American occupation of Tucson.
Mexico reclaimed the city soon after the battalion’s departure, although Tucson became a permanent part of the U. S. in the 1854 Gadsden Purchase.
The Mormon Battalion completed its arduous 1,900-mile (3,057 km) march to San Diego in late January, and served another five months defending occupied areas against Mexican incursions in a number of locations, including Los Angeles. The sole example of a religious unit serving in the U. S. military.
Your Walking Tour
Presidio Park is adjacent to modern downtown Tucson, including shops and restaurants along Congress St. and Broadway. A useful walking tour map is available at tucsonaz.gov/files/preservation/turquoisetrail.pdf. Note that the top of the map is west, not north.
There is some metered street parking in the area, some of it free on weekends. My recommendation is to park in the large public garage beneath the Plaza, 165 W. Alameda St. $2 for 2 hours, $1 per additional hour. Shaded!
The Presidio San Agustin del Tucson Museum is at 196 N. Court Ave. Click on the link for hours, admission prices and additional parking information.
I welcome additional comments about these and other downtown Tucson highlights.
Licensable, high resolution versions of many photographs in this post, and select images from other Under Western Skies posts are available on Shutterstock.com. Click on the linked photos, or CLICK HERE to view the Underawesternsky photo portfolio.
© Brad Nixon 2019. Acknowledgment for some details to the City of Tucson website and Wikipedia. Saguaro NP photo © M. Vincent 2019, used by kind permission.
Posted in Architecture, Arizona, Art, history, Travel | Tags: architecture, Arizona, courthouse, history, Mormon Battalion, park, plaza, Presidio, statue, Travel, Tucson
You’ve seen them. In cities, towns and villages, all across the United States, they’re all but ubiquitous.
In Jacksonville, Oregon …
… Centralia, Washington:
… Tehachapi, California:
I wasn’t looking for those buildings. I found them by accident.
As I travel, I enjoy photographing and writing about interesting buildings. I’ve focused on public architecture — including libraries, post offices, train stations, courthouses — plus more than a few residential structures, large and small.
On a recent trip to Tucson, Arizona, my list of local buildings to see included the city’s Carnegie library building, the campus of the University of Arizona and the historic Presidio area.
I found a bonus downtown. Call it a “target of opportunity:” the 1919 International Order of Odd Fellows hall.
All these photos show lodges and meeting places of fraternal organizations — the Freemasons, International Order of Odd Fellows, and Redmen, although there are others.
If you live in the United States, it’s likely there’s at least one of these imposing brick or stone structures in your town or somewhere near you.
“Found” Architecture
After years of encountering them — everywhere — I’ve begun photographing them. Here’s an Odd Fellows Hall I passed on Main Street in Springfield, Oregon, built in 1909.
One can’t make endless detours to photograph every interesting building. I don’t intend to pursue these buildings indefatigably: There are simply too many of them. The organizations who built them were an integral part of the towns and cities of America, as demonstrated by their presence, everywhere.
Here is a sampling from around the west, with a few details about the organizations that built them, in case they’re unfamiliar to you.
Similar Memberships, Goals
With the exception of the Freemasons, those organizations originated in the United States in the 1800s. They are, to some degree, secret societies, with rituals, uniforms and traditions, some of them quite complex. They espouse a variety of civic-minded values, philanthropic goals, and some ethos intended to foster fellowship, loyalty, promotion of the public good.
All originated as solely male organizations, although they all have “auxiliary” organizations for women, and usually junior branches for girls and boys. Some have begun accepting female members.
They were at once social organizations, civic boosters and, often, promoters of some degree of religiosity, which could be as general as a belief in a “supreme being,” or more specifically a type of patriotic Christianity.
Membership in most of the clubs has declined since peaking in the early 20th century, although all are still extant.
Some Western Examples
Masons
The Masons are probably the most familiar to most readers, even internationally.
Here’s a Masonic lodge building close to me in Redondo Beach, California.
With traditions related to the stonemasons’ guilds of the 14th century, the Masons are the oldest and largest of these groups.
Although international in scope, rituals and rules of membership are determined locally. There isn’t a worldwide central organization that directs all Masonic practices (despite persistent theories about worldwide Masonic conspiracies).
The current Masonic order took shape in the early part of 18th century, including in America.
Knights of Pythias
Founded in 1864, the organization takes its name from the legendary friendship of Damon and Pythias, and the Knights’ charters and rituals stress loyalty, honor and friendship.
Here’s a now-unused Knights of Pythias lodge in Lordsburg, New Mexico, built in 1927. Originally, the lodges were referred to as “castles.”
Once boasting nearly a million members, there were about 2,000 lodges worldwide in 2003, with approximately 50,000 members.
International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF)
The I.O.O.F. was founded in the U.S. in 1819, outgrowth of an English Order of Odd Fellows, which dates from the 1700s.
That “Odd” in the title reportedly originated when an early skeptic said an organization dedicated to helping the poor must be some “odd fellows.”
According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 600,000 members in 10,000 lodges in 26 countries.
Another look at that Streamline Moderne former IOOF in Tehachapi, California, also seen above, built in the early 1930s.
Woodmen of the World
Here’s a building I happened to drive past in Eugene, Oregon.
The inscription above the door of that rather Art Deco structure reads, “W.O.W.”
It’s the only Woodmen of the World building I’ve encountered — or at least noticed.
Founded in 1890, the Woodmen’s focus was on a variety of philanthropic and civic programs, with an emphasis on providing mutual support for fellow members, including financial support.
In a process involving several structural and name changes, the organization’s evolved into — if I have this correct — a not-for-profit insurance company for approximately 700,000 members.
That Eugene building was erected in 1936, and is now a community center.
Improved Order of Redmen
Perhaps the most problematic of the names and practices of any of the organizations is that of the Redmen, founded in 1834.
While the membership was entirely Caucasian and male, its titles and rituals derived from odd notions of the names and regalia of Native Americans, including local chapters named “Tribes” that met in “Wigwams.” It remained “whites-only” until 1974.
Membership peaked at about half a million members in the mid-1930s, but has shrunk to perhaps 15,000.
Here’s the Redmen’s Hall, 1884, on Main Street in Jacksonville, Oregon.
More in Jacksonville
The small town of Jacksonville, Oregon demonstrates the pervasive presence of the fraternal organizations. It was once the the county seat and a thriving, principal town of southern Oregon. Today it’s a picturesque small town full of interesting old buildings.
A single block of Jacksonville’s historic downtown includes three historic fraternal lodge buildings, including the Redmen’s Hall, at the far left in this view of Main Street.
At the north end of the block is the 1877 Masonic Lodge, 1877.
To the right of that photo, on Oregon Street, is the former I.O.O.F. temple, built in 1856.
Not all fraternal lodges are in historic buildings, and many are in smaller structures. Perhaps I’ll visit some of those in a later post.
Is there a lodge in your town? Do you belong to one? Leave a comment.
Licensable, high resolution versions of editorial use photographs in this post, and select images from other Under Western Skies posts are available on Shutterstock.com. Click on the linked photos, or CLICK HERE to view the Underawesternsky photo portfolio.
© Brad Nixon 2019
Posted in Architecture, Arizona, California!, history, Oregon, Photo Essays, Travel, Washington | Tags: architecture, fraternal organization, IOOF, Knights of Pythias, Masonic, Odd Fellows, Redmen
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