The Baca Land Grant No. 4 has been listed on National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places as a Rural Historic Landscape.
The Baca Land Grant No. 4 – Baca Ranch Rural Historic Landscape was nominated by the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area with help from Clerestory Preservation. A rural historic landscape is defined as a large area of land that has been shaped by human activity and has a significant concentration of buildings, vegetation, and other features.
The National Park Service (NPS) manages rural historic landscapes as cultural resources if they meet the criteria for the National Register of Historic Places. Some characteristics of a rural historic landscape include size, evolution, reflection of daily life, and types.
The rural historic landscapes are large in acreage and contain many buildings, sites, and structures. Rural historic landscapes have evolved over many generations in response to nature and the needs of people who live there. They often reflect the daily activities of people who work in traditional ways, such as fishing, mining, or agriculture. Examples of rural historic landscapes include farms, rural villages, and agricultural landscapes.
The Baca Ranch Rural Historic Landscape District (Baca Ranch RHL) comprises more than 44,500 acres of what was once the original 100,000-acre Baca Land Grant No. 4, awarded in 1862 to the Luis Maria Baca family. Located in the northern San Luis Valley, the land grant extended from the Valley floor into the western reaches of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Before the Baca National Wildlife Refuge was established, the land was a private cattle ranch owned for more than 100 years. Alfred Collins (1876-1951) inherited a majority stake in the San Luis Valley Land and Cattle Company from his father in 1930 after visiting the Baca Land Grant in 1929. Collins decided to make his fortune here and became an on-site presence on the ranch.
Collins worked hard to improve the grant’s hay production and cattle breeding, and under his control, the ranch flourished into a highly respected pure-bred Hereford enterprise. After moving to the Home Ranch with his wife, Helen Wilson Glenn, Collins spent the next decade improving the ranch and the SLV Land Cattle Company’s registered and commercial Hereford herd.
He also oversaw construction of irrigation ditches, head gates, and artesian wells. Collins had been in ill health for several years and in 1950, the land company sold the Baca grant and the company’s other landholdings in the San Luis Valley to the Newhall Land and Farming Company of Arizona and California.
After multiple sales of the property the Nature Conservancy succeeded in acquiring the majority of the original Baca Grant No. 4, with plans to transfer the land to the federal government. The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Act, passed by Congress in 2000, paved the way for federal ownership of the Baca Grant and creation of the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Baca National Wildlife Refuge.
More than 44,500 acres containing historic ranch resources and agricultural land are now part of the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. Managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the property is now conserved as a haven for migratory birds and resident wildlife as part of the broader effort to protect the wildlife, habitat, and water of the north and eastern portions of the San Luis Valley.
Find more information on Baca National Wildlife Refuge, Sangre de Cristo National HeritageArea, and the National Register of Historic Places:
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/baca/about-us
https://www.sangreheritage.org/
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm