Los Alamos Historical Society

Ashley Pond's First Ranch School
By Sharon Snyder

“Who was Ashley Pond?”

“He’s the guy who started the Ranch School” is the likely answer you would give.

Most residents of Los Alamos know that Ashley Pond, the small body of water in the center of town, is named for Ashley Pond Jr. who founded the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1917. What could have been more natural than such a play on words? It was apparently irrisistable to early faculty member William Mills, who, according to Headmaster Lawrence Hitchcock, was a man of good humor with “a fondness for bad puns.”

The Pond home, c. 1904

As legacies from the Ranch School days, Fuller Lodge, Ashley Pond, and the log and stone buildings of Bathtub Row are key elements in Los Alamos history, as are sites and artifacts from other historic eras—the Romero homestead cabin, the V-Site from the Manhattan Project, the old movie theater that now houses C.B. Fox. In considering places and events tied to Los Alamos history we could also add Shoemaker Canyon east of Watrous, the old Clyde Ranch near Ft. Union, and the Tipton house in Boone Valley. And then there’s the Great Flood of 1904.

“Wait a minute!” you say. “What are you talking about?”

“It is a little-known fact that Ashley Pond Jr. had a ranch school previous to the one in Los Alamos. It existed for a very short time, in 1904, on a ranch in Shoemaker Canyon, some three miles east of the frontier town of Watrous.”

“Ah,” you respond. “1904? Didn’t you just mention a flood?”

“That I did!”

The same home in 2005.

The short-lived ranch school and the 1904 flood have a direct bearing on the progression of events on the Pajarito Plateau. Ashley Pond first came to New Mexico in 1898 to recover from typhoid fever, an illness he contracted while serving as one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The ensuing six years shaped the remainder of his life, the lives of his wife and descendants, and controlled the destiny of a place called Los Alamos.

The interweavings of history are what make it so fascinating. The Los Alamos Historical Society lecture on March 11—“Ashley Pond’s First Ranch School”—will explain just how your life is interwoven with the history of that first ranch school.

Keeping Los Alamos History Alive