Dave Tomlin | For the Ruidoso News
dave.tomlin74@gmail.com

Wildfire destroyed or damaged a handful of historic structures at Fort Stanton Saturday, but quick response from a multi-agency team of firefighters that grew to about 150, along with three aircraft, prevented damage that could have been far worse.

“They saved the fort, there’s no doubt about it,” said Oliver Horn, regional manager of the Lincoln and Fort Stanton historic sites. Horn said the loss would have been a costly one.

“It’s arguably the most significant post-1848 cultural resource or historic site in the Southwest,” he said. “We lost historic structures, which is a tragedy. They’re irreplaceable. But the core of the site was saved.”

State Forestry Division spokesman George Drucker said in a statement that three buildings sustained serious damage in the blaze, which was dubbed the Camp Fire.

They included “two wooden structures from the 1930s built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and a gymnasium built in 1944 by German sailors who were picked up after their ship sunk,” the statement said.

Horn praised all the firefighters who responded to the 911 call to fight the blaze, starting with Lincoln County emergency services director Arron Griewahn, who was the initial incident commander before additional state and federal crews arrived.

Horn said Griewahn and local volunteers “did an absolutely incredible job diverting the flow of the fire and essentially saved the core of the fort” as more help arrived.

Griewahn said resources deployed at the site included one helicopter and two single engine air tankers. The cause of the fire is under investigation, he said. By Tuesday, there appeared to be no further danger to fort structures, and crews were putting our hotspots and making sure there was no further spread.

Fort Stanton was built in 1855 as part of a system of military outposts established by the U.S. Army to defend settlers arriving to the region in the decades before the Civil War.

“Fort Stanton is one of the most intact 19th-century military forts in the country and is the best-preserved fort in New Mexico,” Drucker said in his statement. “The earliest known firefighters in the area were the Buffalo Soldiers in the 1870s who also contended with wildfires.”

The state historic site website contains these additional details:

“Fort Stanton is situated on 240 acres and surrounded by 25,000 acres of undeveloped BLM land in south-central New Mexico. There are 88 buildings on this historic site, some dating back to 1855. Built of local stone, the sturdy buildings have lasted to this day, but most are in great need of preservation and development.”

It has had several missions since its early days, according to the website.

“After closure as an Army post, the Fort served as a Merchant Marine Tuberculosis Hospital, a WWII internee camp, a training school for the mentally disabled and most recently as a low security women’s prison, and hosted several juvenile, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. It is currently a state monument and museum, visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year.”