Empire Ranch

Located in the 42,000-acre Las Cienegas National Conservation Area and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Empire Ranch traces its history to the 1870s, when a 160-acre quarter section homestead was purchased by Walter Vail and Herbert Hilsop. At the time, the ranch house was a four-room adobe, with a zaguan (breezeway) that passed between the rooms into the corral. By the turn of the century, the ranch covered almost a million acres and the house had grown to twenty-two rooms. The Vail family lived in the home through the 1920s. In 1928, Boice, Gates & Johnson, a large ranching enterprise, purchased several ranches including the Empire Ranch, where the Frank Boice family lived and became sole owners in 1951. The Boices ranched the property until the 1970s, though it was sold for development in the late 1960s. In 1988, the Bureau of Land Management acquired the property through a public-private land swap and designated the ranch lands as a natural conservation area, which it remains today.

The Empire Ranch Foundation has worked for over a decade to preserve the ranch house and outbuildings, including emergency repairs and stabilization. This work was performed in expectation of BLM funds that were anticipated for the preservation, but have since become highly limited. Currently, there are a number of structural problems with the site: a wall of the ranch house (1871-1878) is in danger of collapse due to a sagging foundation; the foundation, flooring, and walls of the children's addition (1886) are unstable; the south lintel of the zaguan is sagging due to water damage; concrete is trapping moisture in the adobe walls and needs to be replaced with lime and plaster.

[For more information, contact Christine Auerbach, administrator, Empire Ranch Foundation, at 520-370-6055 or e-mail.]

Marist College

The Marist College is a three-story structure built in 1915 by Manual Flores, a Tucson contractor. A component of the downtown precinct of the Diocese of Tucson, the school provided a Catholic education for boys from elementary school to high school sophomore year. It was an educational facility until 1968, when it became office space for the Diocese of Tucson. It has been vacant since 2002.

The Marist College is threatened by structural destabilization caused by the collapse of two corners and the cracking of a third. Deterioration is due to water penetration that comes from leaks in the roof and from the scupper and downspout drainage system. A replastering three decades ago with a plasticized composite stucco (Tuff-Tex) has cracked and spalled, allowing water to penetrate the walls but preventing the adobe from drying. Emergency bracing has temporarily stabilized the building, but there is a clear and present danger of collapse if a permanent solution is not implemented.

[For more information, contact Teresita Majewski, chair of the Tucson-Pima County Historical Commission, by e-mail. Photo source: Peg Price.]

September 2007 Update:

• “Old college building on endangered places list,” Tucson Citizen, August 31, 2007
• “Decaying Marist College gains spot on state list of endangered places,” Arizona Daily Star, September 1, 2007