Past Meets Present at Fort Stanton

“We’re trying to change that,” Horn says. Since taking over operations in 2023, he has managed $8 million in state and federal funds to restore the aging infrastructure and keep it a viable space for living history. The upgrades include modernizing water and sewage systems and giving many historic buildings a facelift with fresh paint, new stucco, and repaired woodwork. “We’ve done more work over the last couple years than at any point since the New Deal,” Horn says.

But preservation isn’t just about fixing old buildings—it’s about reviving the stories they hold for new generations. Fort Stanton offers a rare opportunity to step directly into multiple eras of New Mexico’s past, to stand in the same rooms and walk the same corridors where soldiers, patients, prisoners, pioneers, and Indigenous people once lived. By restoring these long-overlooked spaces, Horn hopes to create a more vibrant and immersive experience for visitors—one that sparks curiosity and drives greater appreciation for the site. 

“We’re arguably the most significant historic site in the Southwest,” Horn says, “and a hidden jewel in Lincoln County.”

A SHARP WIND PICKS UP AS HORN LEADS me from Fort Stanton’s museum and visitors center, housed in an 1855 barracks building, across the original parade grounds. “This is where the Buffalo Soldiers regimental band would practice,” he says, referring to the all-Black 9th Cavalry, one of the most legendary units of the American frontier.

Surrounding the well-manicured field, more than a dozen buildings stand as testaments to the fort’s storied past. Horn gestures to a recently painted white building with green dormers and a gabled roof. “Lieutenant John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing lived there in the 1880s—before he got famous chasing Pancho Villa down in Mexico,” he says. 

A few doors down, the site’s only other visitors this morning—a snowbird couple from Illinois—step out of the former Commanding Officer’s Quarters. There, historic photographs and period furnishings, faded and brittle with age, hint at a time when the fort hosted men who, for better or worse, shaped the New Mexico Territory’s future, including Colonel Kit Carson, Union Captain James “Paddy” Graydon, and briefly, while in police custody, outlaw Billy the Kid. 

I stop in front to read an interpretive plaque that says it’s the only building on site that’s remained relatively unchanged both inside and out since 1855. “Isn’t this amazing?” remarks the gentleman of the couple, who proudly tells me he’s an Army veteran.

Between the structures, scraggly Siberian elms stand in urgent need of attention. “They’re an invasive species the USDA planted during the Dust Bowl,” Horn explains. Thanks to a FEMA grant secured last summer, Horn’s team and the state’s forestry department will soon replace the dying elms with native evergreens and deciduous trees. It’s part of a broader effort to restore the site’s historic landscape while making it more resilient to climate change—an especially pressing concern following last year’s devastating wildfires in nearby Ruidoso. 

“We’re at the forefront of fire mitigation projects at state cultural sites,” Horn boasts. Other recent initiatives include replacing the visitor center’s highly flammable wood-shake roof with a synthetic, fire-resistant version. “We’re trying to get another $8 million FEMA grant to do that site-wide,” he says. 

At the parade grounds’ northwest corner, Horn sorts through a comically laden key ring to unlock Officer’s Quarters No. 13, a two-story stone building. Inside, construction dust coats wooden floorboards that creak underfoot as if voicing the weight of history. Sunlight filters through the thick-paned windows, casting shadows on peeling plaster and exposed beams awaiting another major restoration project. 

The historian motions to a wall section, explaining that, like most of the property, this building was burned by Confederate soldiers in 1861, during the Southwestern campaign of the Civil War. When Carson and the New Mexico Volunteers reoccupied the fort after the Union’s victory at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in 1862, the primarily Hispano force repaired the charred stone walls with adobe—patches of which are still visible. 

“It’s cool because you can see the architectural layers,” Horn says, also pointing out Art Deco details on a fireplace installed in the 1930s. “Stanton is the most intact military fort in the Southwest.” 

Like the invasive elms that have taken root among its crumbling structures, time has tried to reshape Fort Stanton. But its history refuses to be erased.

Surrounded by golden grasses and towering cottonwoods that stretch toward the rugged peaks of the Capitán Mountains, the fort lies in the heart of the homeland the Mescalero Apache call zúuníidu (beautiful land). After the Mexican-American War, Josecito, leader of the Sierra Blanca band of Mescalero Apache, proposed that the U.S. government establish a military post to help maintain peace and trade relations between the tribe, Hispanos, and encroaching White settlers. Once it was constructed in 1855, however, the fort—named for Captain Henry W. Stanton, who was killed nearby by Mescaleros earlier that year—became a staging ground for Indian subjugation. 

In 1862, Brigadier General James Carleton ordered the capture or killing of hundreds of Mescaleros. Five hundred survivors were forced to relocate to the Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner, where they endured horrific conditions alongside the Navajos infamously interned there. Around 350 Mescaleros escaped in 1865, returning to the Sacramento Mountains and sparking continued conflict with Fort Stanton troops until the tribe’s eventual surrender in the early 1880s.

The Buffalo Soldiers, whose largest garrison was stationed at the fort, were one of the most effective U.S. forces during the Apache Wars. They also played a key role in the Lincoln County War, supporting law enforcement in suppressing Billy the Kid and the Regulators. 

“It was a hard assignment,” Horn says, “dealing with Apaches, Confederate bandits, political instability from Mexico, and institutional racism.” 

Durwood Ball, an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico and author of Army Regulars on the Western Frontier (2001), notes that Black regiments in the American West were often stationed in the most desolate and difficult areas. “White settlers around Fort Stanton blamed the Black troops for Apache raids,” he says. “But, at other times, they’d praise them—it was a complicated relationship.” 

The soldiers constructed several of Fort Stanton’s existing structures, including the Laundress Quarters, where many of their wives worked. They grew their own food, raised cattle, and helped facilitate settlement in the region. Their regimental band performed in local communities, including at the Santa Fe Plaza’s Fourth of July celebration. “This was a Black community,” Horn says. “There were families here, children.” Some veterans permanently stayed in New Mexico and played a role in the founding of Blackdom, the Chaves County freedom colony, in 1901. 

The contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers who stayed at Fort Stanton are under-recognized. So later this year, Horn’s team plans to collaborate with the African American Museum and Cultural Center of New Mexico to make a permanent exhibition on site that centers their stories. “Fort Stanton is arguably the most important 19th-century Black history site in New Mexico,” he says.

WITH THE SO-CALLED CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER, the military abandoned Fort Stanton in 1896. Although one war was over, another battle—against tuberculosis—was already underway in New Mexico. 

Fueled by the close quarters of urbanization and the Spanish-American War, tuberculosis had become one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. Medical professionals believed the Southwest’s high altitude, arid climate, and sunshine could ease and even cure symptoms, which resulted in tens of thousands of infected “lungers” coming to New Mexico in search of healing. 

Fort Stanton’s isolated location and existing infrastructure made it an ideal candidate for a sanatorium. In 1899, it reopened as the nation’s first federal sanatorium, servicing TB-afflicted merchant marines. A 1904 El Paso Herald article touted the facility as a place where “fresh air, outdoor exercise, and proper food take the place of medicine.” Over the years, Stanton became a state-of-the-art treatment center known for innovative approaches, such as housing patients in tents year-round and implementing a 4,000-calorie-a-day diet to combat the disease’s wasting effects. 

Patients spent their days convalescing in cots on the hospital’s porch, playing croquet on the parade grounds, or engaging in occupational therapies like woodworking and ceramics. Gallows humor also helped them cope. In September 1905, according to the Des Moines Register, Fort Stanton’s Lungers’ Club initiated new members by having them demonstrate “deep, sepulchral coughs” while their brethren waved metal sputum cups in the air.

Today, the site’s second hospital building—built in 1936 and holding one of New Mexico’s earliest electric elevators—serves as a museum dedicated to Stanton’s sanatorium years. Ragtime music drifts through exhibition rooms filled with early 20th-century artifacts: X-ray equipment, a dentist’s chair, a large metal blood bank. One room re-creates the hospital’s pharmacy. Another focuses on patient recreation, displaying a 1920s Fort Stanton baseball uniform and an antique movie projector.

Fort Stanton was transformed again in 1941, when a large Civilian Conservation Corps camp became the country’s first German internment camp of World War II. Over the next four years, the site held as many as 700 German and German-American internees, as well as 50 Japanese-Americans the government deemed “high risk” and eventually deported. Few tangible remnants of the camp exist, but Horn says the topic is ripe for further research. 

In 1952, scientists developed a drug to treat tuberculosis, and cases plummeted. The next year, the federal government transferred Fort Stanton Hospital to the state of New Mexico. It continued as a TB treatment center until 1966, caring for around 200 inpatients and a couple thousand outpatients annually.

“I REMEMBER IT BEING A VERY ISOLATED PLACE,” Ron Hodges says from his home in Los Lunas. “Very serene, very quiet.” At 87, the retired educator is likely Fort Stanton’s last surviving tuberculosis patient. 

In 1961, Hodges was a newly married 23-year-old freshman at the University of New Mexico when he tested positive for advanced tuberculosis. “I’d been stationed in Okinawa and knew that’s where I’d contracted it. But the VA denied me treatment, claiming it wasn’t service connected,” he recalls. 

With few options, Hodges checked himself into Fort Stanton Hospital. “With antibiotics, TB wasn’t supposed to be as deadly as it used to be,” Hodges says. “But within two weeks of arriving, my roommate—a coal miner from Ratón—died. It was a rude awakening.”

Hodges’s dreams to be a high school teacher and a coach, maybe even a principal someday, were suddenly in jeopardy. “I wasn’t fighting depression so much at that time, it was more anger,” he reflects. “I was quarantined in the middle of nowhere.”

INSIDE THE OLD “NEW HOSPITAL,” Horn offers to show me the second floor, which has remained untouched since the facility shut down in the early 2000s.

As I climb the stairs, the temperature drops 10 degrees. Darkened rooms act as time capsules, holding metal hospital beds and cobweb-covered crutches. Although I’ve spent the day imagining apparitions—TB-stricken sailors playing cards on the terrace, Black Jack Pershing leading mock battles on the parade grounds—this is the first time I half expect to see one. 

“Yeah, that Ghost Hunters show filmed here a few years ago,” Horn says dismissively, as we pass a door blocked off with caution tape. Although the historian doesn’t believe the site is haunted, he says visitors enjoy spooky Fort Stanton After Dark tours. Repurposing the abandoned second floor for historical interpretation is on his long list of future projects.

I pause to admire a mural of a gray mare painted by an inmate in the 1990s, when the fort operated as a women’s prison. The hospital is filled with art by the women who stayed here, depicting old barns, howling coyotes, and elegant swans. The murals’ colorful presence is a reminder that Fort Stanton has long been a place where hardship and resilience coexist.

AFTER HODGES SPENT SEVEN MONTHS as an inpatient at Fort Stanton, the VA finally admitted their mistake and arranged for life-saving surgery, removing part of his right lung. Despite his harrowing experience, Hodges fondly recalls the compassion of his nurses and the hours he spent becoming a voracious reader—something that served him well in his career as a high school history teacher, coach, and principal. 

“Now I sort of see it as a blessing,” he says. “It made me realize how lucky I am.” At the end of our call, Hodges shares that he’s finally ready to revisit the historic site this spring, with his family. “I want to go back and say, ‘I survived this place.’ ” 

Ensuring the survival of Fort Stanton’s many inhabitants’ stories is at the heart of its recent preservation efforts. “Historical memory is critical to the creation and attachment of a place,” Ball says. “People have to believe it’s a place worth remembering to visit, then hopefully they’ll create memories there too.”

After my tour, I take a seat beneath one of the elms slated for removal and let the quiet settle around me. I close my eyes and listen. The echoes of the Buffalo Soldiers’ brass instruments, the whispers of tuberculosis patients, and the guarded conversations of World War II internees still seem to linger in the New Mexico wind, waiting to be heard.  

Senior Editor Candolin Cook would like to thank Durwood Ball for regaling her with stories from Fort Stanton’s early days.