My father obtained land for the ranch in four ways. First, he homesteaded one section(1 square mile.) Homesteading was a specific government program that allowed people to get one section of land for free if they built a house and lived on it.
(side bar story about homesteading)When my grandparents, Byrum and Addie Pace, were first married they homesteaded some land and built a house on it near Safford. The house was so cold and inadequate that in the winter they moved into town and lived with relatives. Someone "jumped" their claim that winter and thus got the land, the house and everything in it for free. I remember reading all the Little House on the Prairie books to my children and the same thing happened to homesteaders there when they moved into town for the winter. After I retired, and was taking my dad to various funerals and Navajo County reunions, some man came up to us and introduced himself as the son of the couple who got By and Addie Pace's homestead. I wanted to hit him on the spot. I am sure he had no idea how much our whole family resented his parents who had "stolen" my grand parents first home. I don't think By and Addie ever owned their own home again.
The second way my father got land was obtaining a perpetual lease on a section from the school board (given to them by the state to provide funds to support the school in Woodruff.)
Third, he leased land from Candelaria, a New Mexico resident that acquired large amounts of land going back to a Mexican land grant (I'm not certain of details)
Fourth, he also purchased some land. When I was in high school the ranch consisted of 10,000 acres that were used to raise beef cattle. When it rained and made grass, it was great when it didn't rain and you had to buy hay or move the cattle to rented pastures, you had to get a bank loan to tide your family and your cows over. I don't know how big the ranch is now. Some leases were let go, others continue, more land was bought. I know almost none of the details.
The land my father homesteaded did not have a "river running through it." The first thing needed to make a ranch was to get water. My dad hired someone to drill the well, which must go very, very deep before you hit water. You have to have pipe to line the narrow hole that is dug. It is not like the wishing well storybook type well, where you just dig a hole and can lift the water in a bucket with a rope. He obtained 4 telephone poles for the windmill tower. He paid for the windmill parts that were shipped by train to Holbrook. He used pulleys and other engineering tricks to erect the entire windmill by himself. He may have hired someone or borrowed someone's scraper to make the pond to hold the water. He recycled a circular section of something into a holding tank for the cows to drink from and he obtained a steel barrel for holding drinking water which he fitted out with a faucet. Pipes connected all of these things together and gravity was the only force used to get the water flowing where it needed to be after the windmill brought it up from the ground.
The ranch house had two rooms. There was a fireplace in the living/bedroom and a stove pipe connection to the chimney in the kitchen/dining room. There was a big window in the south of the living room and a big window in the east and small window(think over the sink, but there was no sink) in the west of the kitchen. There was a front door to the living area and a back door in the kitchen. He left an opening in one wall of the living room so he could add onto this house in the future, but boarded it up securely until that time. Along the entire front was an open porch. There was no running water, thus no sink or bathroom. There was an iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The fireplace was the heat source in the winter. An outdoor toilet was built a good distance from the house and windmill.
My father told me that as soon as he had the walls up, he put up tarps for a roof and moved the family from the tent into the ranch house while he finished the rafters and the roof. The roof was made of corrugated tin which was very noisy during a rain storm and even worse during a hail storm. The ceiling was made of plywood with battens over the cracks. The walls were plastered with red mud that is so abundant at the ranch. The floors were packed dirt. He purchased the windows, but made the doors himself from planks drilled through with long bolts held by nuts that you could see on the edges of the doors. He made hinged shutters for the windows that closed and locked from the same planks as the doors. He had even made the hinges for the shutters from iron rods.
I have no memories of living in a house with a dirt floor, but I did, because I can remember having to move out, so that a cement floor could be poured. It was probably in the summer of 1936 when I was two years old. I can remember my dad building us a "play house" which really became a tool shed. After it was finished the family moved into it, temporarily, while he poured the cement floor in the ranch house. He made a trough from wood and tin to mix the cement in. (Later, we kids would use this trough as a boat when the flats were flooded.) He mixed the cement with a hoe and hauled it in a wheel barrow. Since he was doing all the work himself, it probably took more than a week to finish, including time for the cement to cure. He also plastered the walls with a thin coat of cement over the mud plaster. As little kids, bored with having to take a nap, sometimes we would rotate our fingernail on the wall until it made a little hole and out would come pouring a little waterfall of red dirt from the mud plaster underneath. Since I have a vivid memory of this, I am sure that I was one of the kids who did this naughty thing.
Furniture for the ranch house consisted of a bed he made himself from the same planks as the front door and painted with the same pink and yellow paint that was everywhere. I think they must have bought a five gallon can of both pink and yellow paint. We even had a horse trailer painted that same pink. He made a folding baby bed on casters, with screened sides and a screen lid for my sister who would be born that fall. It got painted with the yellow paint.
My brother and I slept on folding camp cots. We had quilts of plaid flannel with wool batting that my parents had made when they were first married. My parents had bought two tables at an auction after they were married in 1929. A round oak center pedestal table with leaves cost $2.00 and was our dining table for years. It was never at the ranch. One of my brothers still uses it at this time. The second table was a square drop leaf table on casters for $.50. This fifty cent table was at the ranch for years and then became our kitchen table in the Eighth Avenue house. I have inherited it and it is still in good shape.
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| Milton, Rayna,& Alleen in front of the original ranch house. You can see the windmill, the corrugated tin roof and the front porch before it was closed in. The girls have on homemade sun bonnets.. The horse is Old Blue, a very tame and gentle horse. She was a blue gray color when she was young and then she became almost white with a few grey specks when she got older, but her named remained the same, Old Blue. I delivered newspapers on her in 5th and 6th grade. |
I can remember once, at the ranch we were riding on Old Blue and it started to hail. We ran under the open porch. My dad was holding Old Blue's reins and the noisy tin roof sounded just like gun shots. It spooked Old Blue and she bolted. My dad explained that she was always shy of gunshots, because of something to do with her previous owner. I don't remember the details.
Eventually the front porch was enclosed to make two bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls. This meant that the kitchen window looked into the boys bedroom and so the kitchen was quite dark with only the small window to the west. We also added a narrow table with a two burner portable kerosene stove in the kitchen. There was a small table in the corner for a big water pail and a dipper for drinking was hung on the nearby wall.
The well had a barrel of water where we drew our drinking water. The overflow from the barrel went into the trough which was used as a cooler for many food items. The overflow from the trough went into the pond, which was stocked with fish. My father installed a valve and clay pipes to drain water from the tank to water the trees and a garden. One time we arrived at the ranch and a man, that knew my father or worked with him, was there with several boys, and they had dug up all the clay pipes and were taking them. I don't know the details of this, but no fights or harsh words were spoken. I asked my dad about this before he died, and he remembered it happening, but couldn't remember why this man felt he could just take it. He told me the man paid for it, but all the labor to install the underground pipes was lost. I don't think it was ever totally replaced.
Some time later, my dad dug a deep hole, made forms, and poured a cement basement or cellar to the northeast of the house. It was half below ground and half above ground. He first used it as a smoking chamber for ham and bacon and later it was used as a root cellar and storage for bottled fruits and vegetables.
The second year after we moved to Phoenix, My dad built a rock room above the cellar for a girl's bedroom. He put a "safe" in the wall and hung a picture over it. The safe was really just a mason jar embedded in the wall, but it's the first thing that little kids talk about when they go to the ranch. To get from this room to the house, you had to go outdoors and down a few steps to get to the kitchen door. A later summer, dad added a roofed area open on the north and west that we used like a patio, eating, or playing cards. This kept us out of the rain from the kitchen to the cellar and to the girls bedroom. Of course, it eventually got enclosed at some point, just like the front porch did.
We had a removable car seat from a station wagon as a swing near the pond and another swing hung between two trees, that was made from a bed springs. There was a rock garden where petrified wood and other rocks of "value" were placed. For a few years when the rain was sufficient my dad cut grass on the hay flats north of the ranch house and had haystacks of grass hay for the cows the next winter. He made a mouse-proof grain storage shed, barns, garages, and various other enclosures. There was even an ice house made of railroad ties and sawdust for storing ice cut from the pond in winter and it would still be frozen during the summer. They eventually added another bedroom and a bathroom and kitchen sink with running water.
Whenever we had something extra or a little old and didn't need it any more, it would be recycled to the ranch. Old towels that were a little worn, unmatched glasses, odd chairs, broken water heaters that could become watering troughs, an old car, and just any junk that was too good to throw away were all sent to the ranch. Eventually my father had to fence in this junk yard to keep the cows from getting entangled.
The one thing that my children liked the most among all the accumulated stuff at the ranch was the "Gizmo." It was some kind of large machine that originally had been working, I think. It came to the ranch after I was older, so I don't remember ever seeing it work. To this day I don't know what it does, but over the years it has given many hours of pleasure to several generations of kids.
After my brother took over the ranch, he had to hire someone to clear away all this junk that was waiting to be recycled into something useful, but he left the "gizmo" for another generation to enjoy.
He also added another whole two story house onto the west side of the ranch house. They put in a piano for sing-a-longs. He erected a high water tank so as to get water pressure for the indoor toilets and shower. He bought a generator for electricity. They ran a telephone wire to the ranch, just prior to the common use of cell phones. He has added a big shade for family reunions and picnics They have moved their family swing set to the ranch and they have motorcycles for riding. But no horses!
There have been a lot of kids, grand kids, and great-grand kids who have a lot of memories of this ranch. I would guess that there will be a lot more grand kids and lot more memories in the future.
Your last question about how he learned the skills necessary to build the ranch is not easy to answer. He never had any training as such, but was always curious and watched people do things. He was not afraid to ask questions. I have overheard many times when he is asking someone how this or that goes or what you have to fix something. I don't think his father had skills along these lines, but maybe his grandfather, Levi Mathers Savage, did. Someone built a wooden house out at Dry Ranch for my father's family and perhaps he learned from watching them.
He had all these interests early on, because one of his sisters once wrote a little essay about the future of their family and she had my dad becoming an engineer. He only finished 9th grade and luckily took a shop class with a drafting component. where he learned to do the italic like lettering like they use on construction plans. This helped get him the job working for the highway department where he kept the books and oversaw what the contractors were doing. Just before he got married, he took a wood-working class at Phoenix Technical High School in the evening and made my mother a cedar chest.
Although he was never around him until much later, he had an uncle, who was a registered architect, and who, signed off on my dad's house plans for the Portland house. I don't know where he learned to draw house plans, but he did. He and my mother built a small Spanish style house in Mesa when they first got married. This was before they built the ranch house. He also probably learned a lot from the engineers at the highway department and from the contractors they hired to build the roads. He never worked for anyone in an apprentice sort of way, but it was taken for granted that people knew how to build things. People built barns at barn raisings since pioneer times. I imagine that as a young boy in Woodruff, he probably watched people build houses but I don't have any recollection of him talking about it. I grew up with him knowing everything about such things and it never occurred to me to ask him, how he knew it.
