Sixty years ago this month Morley and Arthur Ballantine, Jr. agreed to donate $10,000 to establish a Center of Southwest Studies on the Fort Lewis College campus. My how that idea has expanded and grown!
In 1964 Durango remained rural and remote, but the town’s movers and shakers, and especially the Ballantines, wanted a brighter future. Fort Lewis College moved into town from the Old Fort in 1956 and became a four-year degree granting institution. Durango community leaders felt the fledgling four-year college lacked distinction so Dr. Robert W. Delaney, who had helped establish a degree in Southwest Studies, urged creation of a Center of Southwest Studies.
The Ballantines endorsed the idea with a check. A front-page story ran in the college newspaper The Independent on July 17, 1964. Former 1st National Bank banker A.M. Camp also added $1,500. “We have shared the community view that Southwest Colorado should have a center for the study of the Southwest – its history, peoples, geology, its economics, its vegetation. Fort Lewis is an ideal location,” explained the Ballantines who added, “It is our hope that once such a Center has been set up, all who are interested in the Southwest, both local residents and others, will help make the Center outstanding.”
The new Center, under the leadership of Dr. Delaney, took over space on the top floor of Reed Library to include bookshelves, a meeting place, storage for maps, photos, oral histories and next to a fireplace a large mosaic map with colored tiles – yellow for Native cultures, red for Spanish conquests, blue for American occupation and black for political boundaries. The Center did well in those early years amassing extensive local collections of original artifacts and it received funding from another new institution which was the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over the years the FLC Center for Southwest Studies received sizable funding for programming and to purchase contemporary Native American fine art and any 19th century Hispanic items which could be located.
By 1991 it had outgrown its space above Reed Library and with a $200,000 Program of Excellence grant awarded from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, planning began for a much larger facility with underground storage space, facilities for curation and conservation, a library and research center, museum exhibition space and on the second-floor offices and classrooms for Southwest Studies and Anthropology. All of this was part of a master plan “to replace the now overloaded center located in the Reed Library,” according to the March 1, 1991, issue of the college’s Intertribal News.
To go with a new building the college administration sought a new director and I was honored to be chosen in 2000 to come to Fort Lewis College, finish the building’s construction, and move the dispersed collections to campus. Final architectural drawings called for a 48,000 square foot building with 10,000 square feet of basement storage. Collections had grown to 160,000 photos, 7,000 manuscripts and major holdings on Native Americans, mining – coal, gold, silver and uranium – hydroelectric power and, of course, railroads. The railroad photographic collection is so huge that now 24 years later it has still not been fully processed.
The new Center featured a 100-seat lyceum or community lecture room, a 4,400 square foot public exhibit area and a 2,400 square foot Southwest Research Library, which I urged the college president to name the Robert Delaney Research Library to honor Dr. Delaney whose scholarship and academic vision resulted in those first plans in 1964. The Office of Community Services moved in upstairs and helped garner major funding for the San Juan Skyway.
I’ll never forget the day we opened the new Center on a Saturday afternoon in January 2001 complete with a good, fluffy, Colorado snowstorm that left nine inches of powder on fresh concrete. People came from across Southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico to fill the building and tour the main floor. That summer solstice on June 21, we watched as a beam of light at sunrise burst through a spiral tile high on a ceiling wall in the exhibit gallery to cast a spiral light beam on the opposite wall.
In those first years in the new building we hosted conferences for the American Association of University Women, a Hispanic Land Grant Conference, Colorado Philanthropy Days, the Society of Ethnobiology, Colorado Preservation, Inc. and the first Center of Southwest Studies Teachers Institute on Ute Culture and History that brought Ute elders to campus to talk to teachers from across Colorado.
We welcomed tours from the Smithsonian Associates Program and received a $5,000 gift for new exhibit casework. Curator Jeanne Brako administered a $50,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services Conservation Project to preserve textiles in the collection and a younger generation of Ballantines made a crucial gift. Richard and Mary Lynn Ballantine along with Mark and Lernin Winter gave to the Fort Lewis College Foundation the magnificent Durango Collection of more than 250 textiles that represent 800 years of Southwestern weaving including a rare Ancestral Puebloan blanket in excellent condition. Only three are known to exist. The collection includes a unique Navajo woman’s two-piece dress circa 1750 that may be one of the oldest original Navajo textiles.
The Institute of Museum & Library Services awarded a $104,361.00 National Leadership grant in partnership with the Southern Ute Cultural Center to inventory, document and share information on Southern Ute cultural material. Senator and Mrs. Ben Nighthorse Campbell enthusiastically supported the Center and at the end of 2004 we’d received a $1.6 million-dollar Congressional earmark “for the acquisition of equipment, technology and an education program for Native American interns.” That program has helped to train dozens of interns from diverse Native nations including interns who are Navajo, Lakota, Sac & Fox, Chippewa and Ute.
Coca-Cola Bottlers funded two years of art camps for students in our Upward Bound program. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded the Center $25,000 for an exhibit comparing Navajo and Tibetan wisdom. The Wade family from Mancos donated rare Navajo baskets, and Bill and Sue Hensler gifted their outstanding Native American art collection and Mata Ortiz pottery. Archaeological writer Florence Lister gave 37 boxes of her research and writing to the Center’s Delaney Library.
“Over the years, the Center has curated a nationally recognized collection that preserves and celebrates the arts and cultures of our region,” explains Center Director Dr. Cory Pillen. “It serves as a vital teaching tool, enriching both public understanding and the learning experience of FLC students.” She adds, “We’ve recently launched a Teaching Fellows Program aimed at deepening engagement with our collections and broadening outreach efforts.” Cristie Scott will soon join the staff as Curator of Exhibitions and Educational Outreach.
Now in its 60th year of public programming the Center of Southwest Studies continues to represent the vision of Arthur and Morley Ballantine. “The Center of Southwest Studies has endured as a key channel to bring community to college and college to community,” offers Provost Mario Martinez who explains, “Exhibitions, lectures and events intentionally draw on the college and region’s culture, history and place, elevating the life of Fort Lewis College and creating dialogue on critical topics in our region.”
Interim FLC President Steve Schwartz concurs. He believes that the Center, “is a unique and valuable resource not only for our faculty and students but also for our community as a whole. As a museum, archives and library centered around the diverse cultures, histories and environments of the Southwest, it supports the college’s mission of fostering innovation and community engagement while serving as a critical scholarly resource.” From little acorns grow big oak trees. Thank you, Ballantine Family for your generosity six decades ago.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
