White Sands Historic District: New Deal Pueblo Revival Buildings in New Mexico's Dunes

White Sands' housing, visitor center and maintenance complex, from the air. NPS.

The White Sands Historic District preserves buildings and landscape features tied to two things: Pueblo Revival architecture and the New Deal's public works programs. It includes a museum and administration building, a concession area and comfort station, and four residences that house park staff, set among native plantings and designed landscape features that tie the buildings to the desert around them.

The place

• White Sands National Monument became a national park in 2019. It protects a large part of the world's largest gypsum dune field — wave-like dunes covering about 275 square miles of the Chihuahuan Desert in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico.
• Human history: Apache territory was established here 700 years ago, and Spanish colonizers had entered the region by the 1500s.
• The park is surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range, created by the U.S. military in 1945 to test missiles and bombs.
• The district lies on the park's east side, just northwest of U.S. Highway 70.

Period of significance: 1933–1940 — from the monument's designation to the completion of the original buildings. Later additions include a residence (1964) and a new administration building (1997).

The Comfort Station (left) and the Administration and Museum Building (right), looking north. The concrete walkway, laid in 1985–86, replaced the original asphalt entrance road to the dunes. NPS / Betsy Swanson.

Pueblo Revival

The buildings were designed by the architect Lyle Bennett with the landscape architect Charles A. Richey, and are excellent examples of Pueblo Revival, a style drawing on traditional Pueblo and Spanish Colonial building:

• earth-tone finishes, flat roofs, irregular massing and surfaces;
• vigas — log beams that carry the roof — with their ends projecting beyond the walls, the defining mark of Pueblo, Pueblo Revival and Spanish Colonial architecture. Here they are exposed pine, resting on corbels carved with decorative patterns;
• adobe brick walls, each brick sixteen inches long, ten wide and four thick.

The patio: cottonwood tree, cobblestone paving and exposed viga ends. NPS / S. Dolan.

The details carry the design. Light fixtures of tin and combed glass recall trade along the Santa Fe Trail; benches and picnic shelters echo the rustic buildings. Tularosa Basin plants surround the buildings, and the patio is paved in cobblestone around a cottonwood planted at its center — together a single design vision for the site.

Building the visitor center: design and work began in 1936 and finished in 1938. NPS.

New Deal work

The district also shows the legacy of 1930s New Deal public works in the national parks. Programs such as the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) brought the Park Service a surge of workers and money for building and conservation across its lands. The architecture of the period was rustic: local materials and vernacular styles used so that buildings blended into their surroundings.

In the Southwest, that meant Pueblo Revival became a common Park Service style. The White Sands buildings belong to a tradition that includes the Painted Desert Inn at Petrified Forest National Park and the CCC Complex at Bandelier National Monument — both also designed by Lyle Bennett.

The district's site plans, about 1940 (first) and in 1999 (second), from the park's Cultural Landscape Inventory. NPS.

Protection

• 1988: the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, protecting its Pueblo Revival architecture and the craftsmanship of CWA workers.
• 2002: a Cultural Landscape Inventory extended the listing to features such as vegetation and viewsheds.

Today the district is still a hub for visitors, with wide views of the dunes from the grounds of its buildings.

White Sands National Park. NPS.

Sources

Based on "White Sands National Monument Historic District Cultural Landscape," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's text gives the dunes as stretching across "275 miles"; its photograph caption gives about 275 square miles, which is the figure used here. Its line that permanent Spanish settlements were established by 1850 is left out.