Mormon Fort celebrates its sesquicentennial

Park site considered the true birthplace of Las Vegas

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With Saturday's opening of the visitor center, the work in progress known as the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park will no longer be a work in progress.

Completion of the stunning and seemingly out-of-place 4,100-square-foot rusted steel and rough-hewn masonry building brings to a close a 15-year plan that has cost the state a little more than $4 million -- almost $1.9 million for the visitor center alone -- to rehabilitate and restore the birthplace of Las Vegas.

"Except for a few small projects around the grounds, that building is the culmination of the master plan that was developed back in the early '90s," said Park Supervisor Chris Macek, who has spent the last seven years of his 22-year state parks system career at the fort. "The visitor center represents the last piece of that puzzle."

If they could look at the old fort today, the Mormon missionaries that settled the area back in 1855 would be stunned to see what has happened to their original outpost.

For starters, the postage-stamp-sized, 2.8-acre state park is but a fraction of the settlement's original size, yet it remains unique.

"How many cities in the United States can you go to and say you're at the exact spot where the city began and say you're at the place where it was built at that time?" Macek asked. "No other state park that I know of is in a downtown, urban setting like the fort is."

The spring-fed creek that created the grassy and cottonwood-filled meadows also gave rise to ranches and orchards that capitalized on the abundance of the liquid necessary to survive in what was otherwise a dry, parched desert.

The oasis in the desert, as it was called, was clearly visible to "traders, emigrants and gold-seeking travelers en route to the Old Spanish Trail to California," the park's interpretative brochure states.

But it was the Mormons, specifically William Bringhurst and 29 other followers, who heeded founder Brigham Young's call to establish a settlement that had as its purpose, according to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, "to teach the gospel to the Indians" and "to establish a halfway station between Utah and California settlements."

The commemorative plaque located along the path between the visitor center and the relocated gardens in the park's northeast corner states the missionaries arrived June 14, built a bowery and held their first religious services on June 17. Following that, they began building the 14-foot-high stockade walls -- 150 feet long on each side -- on June 18.

The only original structure built by the Mormons still standing today is the old adobe building that has seen many uses and has, up until the visitor center opening, served as a make-shift museum filled with artifacts and exhibits that now will be replicated in the comfort of the new air conditioned building.

Although the fort's establishment as the region's central point and the area's first post office predates the commonly accepted start of modern-day Las Vegas by 50 years, it's a fact not ignored by park staff even though it may not be recognized by others.

"This may get me in trouble, but I still maintain the city is 150 years old and not 100," Macek said.

Ironically, the settlers that started it all only lasted two years until internal dissension -- and the summer's blistering heat -- forced the Mormons to disband, scatter and otherwise abandon what would become their legacy to Southern Nevada history.

A few years later, a crusty Eldorado Canyon miner named Octavius D. Gass acquired the fort site and turned it into a sizeable ranch with cattle, enlarged gardens, newly planted orchards, a way-station, a store for travelers and a blacksmith shop.

Shortly after his acquisition of the ranch around the end of the Civil War, Gass convinced the U.S. Army to send a contingent of 10 troops from Camp Eldorado located in the searing Colorado River canyon to "protect" the fort from perceived outside threats, of which, as it turned out, there were none.

According to local historian Jim Hinds, a longtime member of the Preservation Association of Clark County, the detachment's duty was not so much to defend the fort as it was to have a cool, little rest and relaxation from the hellish assignment in the middle of nowhere.

Gass ran the complex for more than 15 years, but lost the property to Archibald and Helen J. Stewart when he defaulted on a $5,000 loan that used the ranch as collateral.

Archibald Stewart, a successful rancher and businessman, died in a local gunfight in 1884, which required his wife -- unfamiliar with his business dealings -- to take over running the former fort property and what was to become the largest ranch in Lincoln County, which at that time included what is now Clark County.

As the area's first major real estate investor, Helen J. Stewart swallowed up acreage that ran along Las Vegas Creek from the fort property to present-day Lorenzi Park and farther out to what is now the Big Springs Preserve just east of Valley View Boulevard and the Meadows Mall.

Ten years later, she sold her 1,800 acres -- including the remnants of the once-significant fort -- to the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad for what then was the "huge" sum of $55,000, according to Macek.

The railroad, more interested in the creek water for its steam locomotives than some dilapidated old adobe and wood buildings, let the ranch sit dormant for a number of years.

According to Macek, after Helen J. Stewart died in 1926, the property supported a dairy farm and a resort with a swimming pool; in 1929, the Bureau of Reclamation remodeled and used the adobe building as a testing lab during construction of Hoover Dam.

Eventually, the Elks Lodge acquired the property in the 1950s and leased out the Stewarts' house and living quarters as a restaurant in the 1960s.

The city of Las Vegas took over the fort property in the early '70s, but let it languish.

"Basically, it was just here," Macek said. "It was open sporadically, but the city didn't have the funds to run it like it needed to be run as a historic property."

Then, in 1991, like a knight in shining armor, the Nevada State Parks System bought and rescued the fort from the city and, as they say, "the rest is history."

A visitor to the Old Las Vegas Mormon State Historic Park today, if they're motionless and quiet, can still see a living part of the fort's history if lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

"Oh, that's our resident roadrunner who's been around here about four years," Macek said of the docile bird. "My wife named him O.D. Gass."