Committee talks museum preservation

CLOVIS - Despite the meeting location on the outskirts of the city, plenty of residents and committee members found their way to the Pappy Thornton Museum on Monday for the city's parks, recreation and beautification meeting.

For about 30 minutes, they talked about the importance of the museum at Ned Houk Park, why it's so little-used and what needs to happen to preserve it.

The museum, named in honor of former city employee and trading post operator Ardale "Pappy" Thornton, includes a variety of old farm equipment outside, a dugout house, a decades-old residential home hauled in from elsewhere in the county and a steel building. The committee met in the steel building on museum property first developed in 1954.

The building also includes offices for the Ned Houk Park maintenance crew, and a pair of cats who live at the building to head off any mouse populations.

The informal discussion ranged on the concerns that the museum is not well known to Clovis residents, and fears it will be lost to time if some upkeep doesn't happen soon.

The fenced area includes a sign with a phone number for private tours, but nobody at the meeting knew who that phone number belonged to.

"Being the museum junkie that I am, I found this place almost immediately," said Donna Labatt of the High Plains Historical Society, who remembered first seeing it in 1993. "The number out there got me nowhere."

Many of the museum shortcomings could be addressed with more signage, members said, but the old structures are in poor shape and of the most immediate concern.

Joyce Gates of the parks committee said she frequently took students to the museum while she worked in education, and the kids would be amazed to find out the two-story house had a family of seven people. But now, Gates and others fear the building could collapse on somebody who stepped in the wrong place.

"It's totally deteriorated," Gates said. "It's not safe in places."

City Manager Justin Howalt asked committee members to hold off on any action regarding the museum until he could make some phone calls with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division. The best approach on the family house could be structural renovations or fencing the property off, but he didn't want to do anything that could run afoul of the division's instructions. Cliff Segura, the committee's newest member, expressed doubts the house was salvageable in any way.

The next meeting is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Nov. 25, back at Clovis City Hall.