AUGUST 3, 1918

PRESIDENT WILSON PROCLAIMS CASA GRANDE RUINS A NATIONAL MONUMENT

Casa Grande is located near Coolidge, Arizona.  The ancestral Sonoran Desert people who built it developed irrigation farming & had extensive trade connections which lasted over a thousand years until about 1450 C.E. when it was abandoned.  Historic accounts of the Casa Grande begin with Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1694 who gave it its name.  Preservation efforts began in the 1860s after railroad and stagecoach lines brought visitors resulting in damage from souvenir hunting, graffiti and vandalism.  The Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition of 1887-1888, led by anthropologist Frank H. Cushing, caused influential Bostonians to urge Federal action to preserve the ruins.  In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside 1 sq. mile surrounding the ruins as the first prehistoric and cultural reserve established in the U.S.  President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Casa Grande Ruins to be a National Monument with management of the Ruins by the National Park Service.

Sources:
  “A Brief History of the Casa Grande Ruins,” Casa Grande Ruins, National Park Service.  Retrieved 6/4/2020, https://www.nps.gov/cagr/learn/historyculture/index.htm
Photo:  National Park Service, undated.  Public Domain.