WASHINGTON – The Interior Department plans to turn a former dude ranch in Wyoming into a national training center for preserving historic buildings in Western national parks.
The training facility is to be fashioned from the White Grass Dude Ranch in Grand Teton National Park, outside Jackson, Wyo., as part of a $3.5 million project. Park officials have begun to assess the project’s environmental impact on the park.
The Interior Department is getting some financial help from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit group started in 1949, which agreed to try to privately raise up to $1 million to pay for the renovations.
Turning the ranch’s buildings into the Interior Department’s Western Preservation Training and Technology Center will create a science lab where visiting students, including public employees, businesses and volunteers, can learn the skills and techniques for maintaining and preserving historic properties.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in an interview Thursday that once the research center is built over the next five years, people trained there can begin refurbishing some of the wooden cabins and mining ghost towns left behind by some of the first of the region’s frontier settlers and that are now in the custody of the National Park System.
“This is a research center that allows us to address an important part of Western history,” Norton said. “It’s an opportunity to save buildings that are real special.”
Norton said the center’s purpose will be to “focus on the techniques that are unique to the Western-type of wooden buildings. Many of them are in a state of disrepair where they may not be salvageable, but some are salvageable.”
About half the buildings in Western national parks are at least a half-century old, and many of those are considered to be historic properties in needed of some work or refurbishment, according to the department.
But many of those same properties also are on the department’s list of backlogged maintenance projects that would take several billion dollars to catch up with.
The refurbishment itself of White Grass Dude Ranch, which is no longer a working ranch, is seen as a training opportunity. As part of that project, several historic log buildings that were part of the Rockefeller family’s 1,100-acre JY Ranch might be transferred to the White Grass site.
Philanthropist Laurance S. Rockefeller agreed in 2001 to give the ranch to the government to protect the land and expand Grand Teton National Park.
White Grass Dude Ranch: wyoshpo.state.wy.us/wgdr.htm
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