Tag: Los Alamos Real Estate Market (Page 3 of 12)

Check out this description from a Spring 1917 brochure for the Los Alamos Ranch School written by S. F. Bemis:

Los Alamos Ranch: An Outdoor School for Boys

The principle aim of the school is to take advantage of the unexampled natural features of the best part of the great Southwest in a way to build up the constitution of boys from eastern cities by an active but well-guided outdoor life. The climate of Los Alamos is particularly favorable to this; its altitude is especially conducive to strengthening the circulatory and respiratory organs; the clean pure ozone that drifts down from the peaks of the Rocky Mountains is the greatest natural revivifier to be found anywhere on the continent.

…It is hoped that the time spent at the Los Alamos Ranch: (1) in natural development of the body by such exercises as horseback riding, mountain climbing and other recreation in this truly wonderful country; (2) attracting the boys’ attention to the mind-quickening activities of outdoor life, such as marksmanship, exploration, map-making, the study of the habits of wild animals, the floral and mineralogical features of the land, will on the whole produce that perfect health that is the aim of the school, and that elevation of spirit which is essential to future success. A good digestion, a bounding pulse, and high spirits are true elements of happiness that no external advantages can out-balance.

This brochure excerpt can be found in the book, Los Alamos: The Ranch School Years by John D Wirth and Linda Harvey Aldrich. As I was reading this excerpt, I couldn’t help but think about a conversation I had the other day with a friend of mine who is a mental health provider. We’d spoken of this general sense of the “blahs” infecting almost everyone these days. Folks are depressed and anxious, but are finding it difficult to put their finger on exactly why they’re feeling this way or how to make it better.

Sure. The world is a pretty crazy place right now. But beginning with quarantine sometime in 2020, it strikes me that many of us have stopped being active. In the beginning we weren’t supposed to leave home. If you did, you were asked to wear a mask outdoors and indoors. The digital world is pretty darned enticing like that too. It’s possible to open an app on your phone and dive down a rabbit hole of videos, memes, and social media posts as well as news and entertainment information. Hours later you might suddenly look up and realize you’ve lost the entire day without moving off your couch!

Back in the nineteen hundreds, folks in large cities often stayed indoors doing little to nothing in the way of outdoor activities or physical pursuits if they could. This became a habit because of the poor air quality. Young people often had lung problems or were chronically ill or seemed “sickly” because of the lack of physical movement, sunlight, and outdoor activities. You couldn’t even see the sun on most days due to the fog of pollution hanging over cities!

Imagine what it must’ve been like for those boys to come to Los Alamos. Our sky is brilliant blue. Our air is clearer here than in many other places. Even after several forest fires the scenery is stunning and there are so many places to hike, bike, walk, run, and enjoy the outdoors.

After a very wild winter full of big temperature swings, a good amount of needed precipitation, and way too many cloudy days, we ALL need some sun, fresh air, and activity! If you’re feeling sluggish or having a lot of “blah” days, get out and enjoy our lovely community! Take a hike. Check out the county’s trail maps or find a nature walk to enjoy. Hit the Mainstreet Los Alamos page and look for new activities coming up outdoors. Start training for a 5K run or walk. Get outside and ENJOY Los Alamos!

And if you’re ready to join our community or you’re looking to buy or sell your home here in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’m a hometown Los Alamos girl and I’d love to chat real estate in Los Alamos with you!

Advertising is both simple and complicated these days. Sure. Almost anyone can do some basic graphic design and slap an ad on social media. Making a 3 minute video is easily accomplished on your phone. But trying to actually get the word out to a specific market when folks are being flooded with so much information every second of the day takes thought.

How much more thought would it have taken to advertise an exclusive boarding school for boys? Then add in the fact that the Los Alamos Ranch School was in the middle of nowhere. We are still in the middle of nowhere. But life before Google Maps, satellite imagery, and in an age when newsprint ads had to be physically sent to a printing office would have made things even more difficult!

So how did the Los Alamos Ranch School get the word out? Brochures. Lots and lots of brochures. While some of these have survived time and are preserved deep inside the Los Alamos History Museum Archives, Ashley Pond Junior’s first brochure in 1917 carried the title, “An Outdoor School for Boys”. And that is how they sold the school.

There was no doubt that attendance was a major concern of the ranch school. The program was certainly worth the pricey tuition. In 1935, Los Alamos was the first western boarding school to have an examiner on the College Board. Art Chase was the first to serve on the English Board, followed by Harry Walen. In 1926 and again in 1936, a graduate of the Los Alamos Ranch School was ranked #1 in the freshman class at Princeton.

Anecdotal tales from graduates of the ranch school recall the individualized educational opportunities. “Virgil in the Wilderness” when students trekked into the mountains to learn Latin or read poetry. When they were encouraged to expand their minds while using their hands. Laboratory equipment was in short supply, but the Los Alamos Ranch School Masters were young, intelligent, and always finding ways to demonstrate concepts in the real world with equipment handy around the ranch.

School Masters were recruited from the best graduating college classes around the country. Men like Lawrence Hitchcock and Art Chase set a precedent for Masters to continue studies in their field. They would leave the ranch school for a semester or two, or perhaps a shorter time, and do advanced work in their field. Then they would return and share what they’d learned with the students. It was a varied curriculum, and yet the very way this was set up advertised the Los Alamos Ranch School from coast to coast. Our graduates were showing up in college lecture halls with robust health, great minds, and a desire to learn and put that education into practice. It made for the best kind of advertising!

And the rest of the advertising was done via photographs. Photos in magazines Large photo spreads in newspapers and brochures. Photos of the ranch students were sold and used as postcards and holiday greeting cards. And why not? This is still happening today! How many times do you travel up or down our Main Hill Road and see folks in the pullouts taking pictures with whatever device they can lay hands on?

Most of the photos used to advertise the school featured the boys outdoors in dramatic scenery. Most were student photos or those taken by the Masters while out on patrols or camping. All are absolutely stunning.

So next time somebody wants to know what’s so great about Los Alamos, just whip out your phone and take a picture for them. Our dramatic scenery, amazing history, and long standing tradition of outdoor pursuits makes this a special place to live. I feel lucky to be a part of this community and when you’re ready to join me, give me a call. I’m your hometown real estate broker and I’d love to talk Los Alamos real estate with you!

Ashley Pond is something most of us take for granted. It’s a place we gather. It’s a huge part of our community and it’s the central focus of quite a lot of life in Los Alamos. Sometimes we just call it “the Pond”. Truthfully, were it not for Ashley Pond the person, (Ashley Pond Junior of course!) we wouldn’t be living here on the Pajarito Plateau enjoying a not necessarily unusual snow day in March.

I’ve been digging into Los Alamos history a lot lately because we all seem fascinated with it and I find myself intrigued about exactly how our wonderful town seems to exist when it would be almost impossible to simply stumble upon this area on accident. This has led me to some rather interesting parallels between Ashley Pond and Los Alamos and the Pajarito Plateau as a whole.

Ashley Pond Junior was the only surviving son of Ashley and Harriet Pond. That’s not all that unusual for the time period. Children’s health was a national and global concern at that time. Ashley Junior had health issues from the beginning, but his parents were determined to throw their considerable resources at his health issues to give him the best chance to be their surviving child.

Ashley Senior was a lawyer. When Ashley Junior was born in 1872, his father was a director of the Michigan Central Railroad. He was also the chief midwestern counsel (lawyer) for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Ashley Senior was said to be stoic, businesslike, and totally lawyer like in personality. His surviving child was the polar opposite. He was honest, eager, gregarious, and often became the target of unscrupulous business schemes because he had a core belief in the inherent honor and fair play of others. His personal philosophy was that everything in life could be boiled down to two things. Right or wrong. This was a philosophy he brought with him to New Mexico and the Los Alamos Ranch School.

The fact that Ashley Pond Junior was the polar opposite of his stoic, lawyer like father is only one reason why the journey he made through his life is so very parallel to the one that Los Alamos itself has made.

Ashley Junior’s first experience in New Mexico happened around 1899 or 1900. In 1898 he joined up with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and had hopes of going to Cuba to see action. Instead he wound up taking care of the horses in Tampa, FL because he became deathly ill with typhoid fever and was considered too sickly for active duty. His father sent him to a ranch near Catskill, NM. Catskill is now on the register of historic places in NM.

The only thing remaining of the original town in Colfax County are 25 brick structures shaped like beehives. These charcoal ovens are the only remainder of an enormous charcoal manufacturing operation. Charcoal had to manufactured in large quantities for metal smelting operations going on across the nation. There were 9 lumber camps in and around the Catskill area and the pine was cut down to fit inside the ovens as part of the charcoal manufacturing process. I can only imagine how the wild terrain, enormous lumber operation, ranching, and the connection to steel mills back east affected Ashley Pond Junior.

It didn’t take Pond very long to embrace life in New Mexico to the fullest. 30 year old Ashley Pond Junior fell in love with the 17 year old daughter of a Watrous rancher named Hazel Hallett. The couple married in 1903 and Peggy Pond was born right away. She was the eldest of three Pond children and the most well known here in Los Alamos because of her enormous contribution of photographs, books, information, and other history of our area.

The Pond family didn’t last long in Watrous. Ashley Junior was all set to start a school on ranch land he’d purchased in the area, but a flood on the Mora River wiped him out. This brief setback caused him to return to Detroit where he accepted a position as a vice president for Pontiac.

It’s hard to reconcile the idea of our Ashley Pond running a company like Pontiac. Marriage to Ashley Junior was difficult. Hazel often took the kids and went to live with her family as Ashley tried one venture or another. Most of his dreams collapsed and almost all of them involved New Mexico.

He ran a farm in Roswell, NM, which sounds a bit ambitious if you’ve spent much time down there in the wind, sun and sand. The family lived in a metal building which Hazel tried to spruce up with family antiques and imported rugs.

Meanwhile, Los Alamos wasn’t in much better shape. The Ramon Vigil Land Grant encompassed 32 thousand acres of grass and wooded land on the Pajarito Plateau. This land grant itself has come under scrutiny multiple times, (this eventually affected the building of Pajarito Acres too!) the grant had been purchased by midwestern based investors in the 1880s who essentially stripped the land of its resources through lumbering and overgrazing cattle. In 1900 Harry Buckman logged the same land for his lumber company, establishing the town of Buckman in White Rock Canyon as a shipping point. By 1903 the landscape was mostly tree stumps. Homesteaders had been on the Pajarito Plateau for decades by then but Harold H Brook and several investors purchased the land grant but never got around to doing much with it before going broke and dumping the land on a Santa Fe bank.

This is when Ashley Pond Junior and the Pajarito Club came on scene. (more about that HERE) Ashley Junior was determined to make the Pajarito Plateau his haven in New Mexico and he did everything possible to make that happen. It’s so incredible how similar the journeys of the land and the man seem to be. Ashley Junior’s Los Alamos Ranch School grew and thrived for twenty-five years. Compared to the others who owned or worked the land before he came on scene, that was an enormous amount of time.

Ashley Junior’s determination, passion, and dreams were the thing that caused Los Alamos to bloom. Historians have credited his willingness to think outside the box, his ability to charm those around him with his genuine enthusiasm and honor code, and his networking capabilities as the reason behind the school’s success. He integrated himself and the Los Alamos Ranch School in the community of the Pajarito Plateau. Homestead families were a huge part of the ranch school’s day to day running. The families in the Espanola Valley were part of that community as well and in return they became invested in the future of Los Alamos as well. As they still are today.

I think it’s really important to remember that Ashley Pond and his right hand man AJ Connell didn’t close the Los Alamos Ranch School because it failed or because it had run its course. The Parker Schools, Ashley Junior’s inspiration for the Los Alamos Ranch School, are still in operation today. It’s entirely reasonable to think that had Robert J Oppenheimer not been just as obsessed with New Mexico as Ashley Pond Junior, he never would’ve picked the ranch school as his Manhattan Project site. Had Oppenheimer not picked Los Alamos, the ranch school might very well still be in operation. How is THAT for an alternate timeline plot?

In short, what this means is that the longest standing traditions and purpose in Los Alamos are health and learning! No wonder we’re a top contender for the healthiest place to live in America. It’s just who we are! And when you’re ready to join our community, give me a call! I’m a hometown Los Alamos girl and I’d love to talk Los Alamos housing with you.

There has always existed an ongoing argument here in Los Alamos regarding whether or not the Laboratory defines the existence of the town. If LANL closes (LASL back in the day) does that mean there is no Los Alamos? Or is it that without a town to provide basic necessities and services for a workforce, LANL could not exist.

It’s almost like a chicken and egg question, right? Which comes first? The Laboratory or the town? You don’t have to be a member of our community for very long to realize that our location is remote. This was deliberate. For the Atomic Energy Commission, yes. But honestly, it was also deliberate for the Los Alamos Ranch School. The whole point was the pull those city boys out of their overcrowded lives and let them experience raw, visceral life.

In this day and age we moan about the fact that very rarely is Prime shipping actually next day as it would be in most metropolitan areas. Back in the early days of the Los Alamos Ranch, the only vehicle was an ancient Dodge truck unless you wanted to go by ox cart or horse drawn wagon. If we think the Main Hill Road is intense now, can you imagine before there WAS a road and they were trucking supplies up the old ox cart roads in Bayo Canyon?

The Pajarito Plateau was never anything but isolated. The Los Alamos Ranch was incorporated for the sole purpose of supporting the school. Nearly 800 acres of owned land and access to thousands of acres of leased land. This was the only way to support the two hundred head of cattle, dairy cows, bulls (for breeding), work horses, riding horses, ranching horses, pack horses and mules, hogs, geese, chickens for meat and eggs, turkeys, and rabbits.

One of the selling points of the Los Alamos Ranch School was the fact that the boys were only fed food grown and raised entirely on the ranch or brought in from the surrounding farms and ranches. Of course, this took quite a lot of work from the boys, but there were also over a hundred employees who worked at the ranch.

AJ Connell didn’t take long to realize that he could not hope to manage the ranch without the help of the already well established homesteading community on the Pajarito Plateau. From the beginning of the school in 1917, he began to rely heavily on the surrounding communities. Until 1921 there were only three main buildings at the school. The “Big House”, a master’s cottage, and the infirmary/guest house. There were separate bunk house like lodgings for the cooks, houseboys, laborers, the ranch foreman, and the poultry man. There was also a large barn, a silo, a water tower, smokehouse, sheds, corrals, and a commissary to provide shelter for school activities and daily living.

The early years of the school only saw around 9 regular students. By the closure of the school there were 48 students. They were eating vegetables from the garden, beef from the school’s cattle, drinking milk from the dairy, eggs from the chickens, and getting their fruit from the Espanola Valley.

Gradually, the school began to grow. Teachers and workers had families. Cabins were built to house these additions. A public elementary school sprung up to teach the staff’s children. Connell had a habit of employing multiple members of one family in order to strengthen the relationship between the school and the surrounding ranches.

It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? When Oppenheimer speculated about the needs of the Manhattan Project he talked about “housing for a dozen scientists”. This soon caused a steady influx of personnel and their families who had needs. The community grew to meet those needs. The family members took jobs as support and staff personnel, teachers, clerks, librarians, assistants, and so many other important roles that sustain and create a community. One feeds off the other until we have a growing, thriving city perched atop a plateau in the middle of nowhere…

Another incredible perk of attending the Ranch School in Los Alamos was access to men like Bences Gonzales. Gonzales ran the Trading Post and cooked during the summer camps. He was considered a listening ear who could shoot and would often teach the boys to fish. Gonzales was one of dozens of strong Western characters who both entertained and educated the Ranch School students.

Ted Mather was the horse wrangler. The boys were said to beg for his stories, which were straight out of a Western dime novel. He taught them to ride and handle horses, and shared his knowledge freely with the students. The Womelsduff brothers, Lloyd, Frank, and Jim were also vital to the ranch students. Floyd was the ranch mechanic and loved teaching the boys about mechanical and electrical things. Frank was the elementary school teacher for some time, and Jim was the ranch foreman. They spent hours with the boys helping them navigate the practical outdoor skills that created a basis for the outdoor education at the core of the school’s philosophy.

If you’ve ever been to a sports practice, a school concert or performance, or a Boy Scout meeting here in Los Alamos, you’ve probably witnessed the incredible amount of mentoring that goes on between adults and kids. Adults who are at the top of their fields, teaching and helping the next generations of talented people. A good number of adjunct professors at UNM-LA are LANL or contractor employees. What an amazing learning opportunity we have here. Just head to the Mesa Public Library and check out the latest talks, exhibitions, demonstrations, or other creative, scientific, or historical learning opportunities. I like to think of the Ranch School Students hitting the Trading Post, the barn, the machine shop, and the Arts & Crafts building after their classroom time was done for the day. Not unlike a summer day spent at ScienceFest.

There is no doubting the interconnected nature of the Laboratory and Los Alamos. But perhaps it helps to realize that there has always been a need for community up here on the Pajarito Plateau. And when you’re ready to join the community of Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to talk real estate with you!