With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

200-year-old Trading Post Renovated in New Mexico

Historic preservation specialist Jeff Brown is hoping his work crews won't find the spot where legs and arms are buried at Pecos National Historical Park.

The appendages would be those amputated from Civil War soldiers in 1862 at a makeshift hospital housed in Kozlowski's Trading Post east of Santa Fe.

Finding the bony remains, while exciting, would slow down Brown's current project: a six-year renovation of the almost 2-century-old stage stop and tavern. The low-slung pink stucco building with faded turquoise trim along N.M. 63 was a popular stop on the Santa Fe Trail for decades.

Brown and crew will restore the adobe-and-pine building to its look from the 1940s and '50s, when E.E. "Buddy" Fogelson and his actress wife, Greer Garson, used the trading post as headquarters for their Forked Lightning Ranch.
Read entire article at Santa Fe New Mexican (NM)