Lamy museum backers hope to clear red tape soon

Directors of the Lamy Railroad and History Museum hope to have their ambitious effort to explain the historic impact of rail travel back on track later this month.

Santa Fe County commissioners are set to consider an application to restore the museum’s commercial-zone status Tuesday. With zoning status settled, museum president Sam Latkin said the organization can turn its attention back toward developing interpretive displays.

A Nov. 21 order from the county fire marshal put a temporary halt to the museum board’s plans for their newly acquired Legal Tender building. However, the museum board already was working on bringing the building into compliance when the fire marshal ordered it closed.

“Actually, we want to have a nice building anyway. We aren’t trying to get out of anything. We want it to be correct and right,” Latkin said.

The board soon reached agreements with the fire marshal to continue using the building while obtaining special-use permits for each event held in the 126-year-old saloon.

“They realized that we had a lot of things that they didn’t think we had,” Latkin said.

Smoke detectors were already in place. The building’s large commercial kitchen already had fire-suppression systems, but the fire marshal wanted sprinklers throughout the building. The museum started an escrow fund to buy a sprinkler system, which is likely to cost $25,000 to $50,000, Latkin said.

By February, the museum board had the fire marshal’s approval and could continue receiving special-event permits. Latkin said the building, across the street from the Lamy depot, has hosted frequent events this year, including community meetings and memorial services for local residents.

The fire marshal’s November inspection was part of a county review of special-event-permit applications. The museum learned shortly after receiving the museum as a gift in February 2006 that county ordinances rescind commercial status of a building that remains vacant for a year. The building had been unused since 1997 after a long run as the first meal stop in New Mexico for generations of new Santa Fe arrivals.

The County Development Review Committee on June 21 unanimously approved the museum board’s application for renewed commercial-zone status. The Tuesday visit with the county commission is the last stop in the approval process.

The building has been open for the past two months on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 11:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Those are the days the Santa Fe Southern Railway brings passenger-train tours from Santa Fe.

Latkin said 1,100 New Mexico children visited the museum in May. He’s glad to have guests at the museum, but the recent focus on administering the building has stood in the way of interpreting a story Latkin thinks New Mexico kids need to learn.

“The railroad changed the history of the West when it came through here, and we just want to make people aware of what happened,” Latkin said.

After the railroad was built, people on the East Coast could visit the West Coast with only a few days of travel. Before then, it took as much as six months and some mortal peril to cross the Southwest.

Wherever the railroad went, so went the telegraph. The new communication networks blazed trails for today’s information highway and brought with them new ideas.

“There was a technological boom when the railroad came through that was bigger than the airplane and television and iPods and dot-coms,” Latkin said.

While its public activities have mostly been mundane trips through a maze of red tape, the museum board has been quietly setting its sights on its main job — interpreting the dramatic impact of rail travel in the American West.

“They have an intriguing story to tell over there — the history of the railroad in New Mexico and how it changed isolated communities,” said Barbara Hagood, director of Vista Grande Public Library in Eldorado.

Hagood is also director of an Eldorado company that is shaping impressions of New Mexico history throughout the state.

Museum Development Associates works with several well-known and lesser-known museums, including the Lamy Railroad and History Museum.

“Our next step with them, after that meeting on (Tuesday), is going to be to get their board together for a planning session,” Hagood said.

Hagood’s company will help guide directors through the process of developing exhibits, she said.

For research support, Latkin said, the board recently recruited talent that has led some of New Mexico’s most well-known cultural facilities.

When the board returns to its preferred task, former Palace of the Governors director and noted historian Tom Chavez will be among those charting the museum’s course and planning interpretive displays.

Latkin said Chavez recently joined the railroad-museum board, along with some other scholars who have time to devote to the Lamy project.

“We’ve got the foundation to be something, and we’re not like every other museum in Santa Fe. We are more interested in history than art,” Latkin said.

Contact David Collins at 986-3064 or dcollins@sfnewmexican.com.