Painted Desert Trading Post gets a more level look

Take a look at this days-old photograph of the front of the remnants of the Painted Desert Trading Post in eastern Arizona. Notice anything different?

If you’re not seeing it, here’s a photograph from a few months before:

Those straighter lines you now see along the roof line are not an illusion. Volunteers with the Route 66 Co-op and other preservationists spent nearly a week jacking up the front corners of the long-closed Route 66 business and other work.

The building’s sagging corners were in danger of collapse and bringing the structure down. The volunteers decided to take care of that problem before winter.

The sagging was especially pronounced on the east, or right, side of the building. Workers jacked up the walls more than a foot there. Here’s a time-lapse video of the process.

Volunteers leveled the ground around the Painted Desert Trading Post to rid of brush and weeds. They erected a fence around the perimeter] to keep out local cattle, which had damaged the building in the past. Don’t worry; humans still will be able to check out the Painted Desert Trading Post through a small gate.

Mike Ward, one of the members of the cooperative, said the next work session in the early spring will deal with replacing the building’s rotted roof structure and the foundation. He said more walls around the building also will be raised.

The Route 66 Co-op recently received a $20,000 cost-share grant from the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program to stabilize the trading post’s walls, roof and foundation.

It also is raising money for its preservation efforts through selling T-shirts that feature an image of the trading post and its “Cold Drinks” sign on one wall.

Dotch Windsor and his first wife, Alberta, opened the Painted Desert Trading Post along Route 66 during the early 1940s. Even along the Mother Road then, it was a remote outpost with no electricity or telephone service (gravity pumps dispensed fuel).

It closed by the late 1950s after being bypassed. The Painted Desert Trading Post, located several miles from Interstate 40, remains inaccessible except for a locked gate. Those who wish to visit the trading post via Pinta Road can use these instructions to unlock the road’s main gate.

(images of the Painted Desert Trading Post in Arizona via Facebook)

7 thoughts on “Painted Desert Trading Post gets a more level look

  1. It is always a problem as to how much “preservation” is done to anything. “Preserved” railway locomotives have new boilers, new frames, new cylinders, new wheels. Often all that is being preserved is how a locomotive looked when new. Should old buildings be repainted, or left as they are?

    As to “replacing the building’s rotted roof structure and the foundation”, how will the foundation be replaced with the building sitting on the current foundation?

    As for “more walls around the building also will be raised,” should that be “razed”? Or are there walls outside the picture that have fallen down and need re-erecting?

  2. Eric, our goal is to stabilize the building and manage access, not to make it look new. Eventually we will rebuild the rotted window and door frames and screen them to keep birds out. We will also repair the fallen stucco and renew the lettering on the front with a ghosted effect. The sections that were raised (east and west corners) are no long sitting on the foundation. Those portions of the building now rest on shear walls inside supported with jack posts and braced 2×4 walls erected under new ceiling joists positioned 30 inches inside the exterior walls. We still have to level the end walls and rear wall. Once that is done, the foundation work can begin. We will replace the entire roof structure, which is severely rotted and open.

  3. Thank you, Jim, for your comprehensive reply about highly commendable work. Such “everday” buildings need preservation as much as the grand structures; perhaps more so because they represent the daily life of a people or culture at a certain time in that people’s history. Once such typical buildings have gone so has much of the ability to picture the life associated with them.

    I now understand about “more walls around the building also will be raised,”

  4. Thank you Ron Warnick, for this very nice article. The Route 66 Co-Op certainly does appreciate your great work informing the public about the early work at the Painted Desert Trading Post project.

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