Huachuca Museum Society - Gift Shop

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

Brown Parade Field
Early 20th Century Baseball
Then and Now

08/08/2026

Sierra Vista 1954

From Frank Vega
sierravistahistory.blogspot.com

Looking west towards the main gate. The sidewalk on the left that is visible is for the Service Club. Mac's Bent Elbow would become The Sorry Gulch Saloon, the Gate Theater building became The Smoke Shop and Sherbunby's Canteen became Sierra Drug and later it was Snow White Appliance and TV and Snow White Launderette and now it is known as Bloom Country Florist.

Post card image provided by David Simpson.

Army wife comment on Frank's blog page:
"Sugarbabe" December 29, 2020 at 5:58 PM
My husband was a soldier at Ft. Huachuca in 1954. At that time there was no base housing for enlisted personnel so Mr. Fry who owned quite a bit of land just outside the Fort, offered spaces for trailers, with sewer, water and electricity hookups. My husband bought a new Southwestern 28 ft. trailer in Tucson, had it delivered and set up and brought me from CA. We had been married only a few months and coming from Santa Monica to the Arizona desert was a whole new experience. At that time there were very few places to shop except at the PX on base or make the long drive to Tucson for major purchases. Never in our wildest dreams did we think little old Fry would become the bustling city of Sierra Vista. It was an experience that I'll never forget.

08/08/2026

The Military Inn

From Frank Vega
sierravistahistory.blogspot.com

The Military Inn was located on the corner of Fry Blvd and Carmichael Ave. the current location of the Wells Fargo Bank parking lot.
First image, circa 1970.
Second Image, August 1955 image shows the MI's seven foot wall to hold their dances under the stars.

Courtesy The Bellantoni Family

Menu:
Menu obtained by David Simpson from a man whose name is Les, who lives and works in Tombstone. Les was working at the MI and left when he joined the Army in 1966. Les also donated a copy of this menu to the SV Henry Hauser Museum.

08/08/2026

Sierra Vista's first Dairy Queen

From Frank Vega
sierravistahistory.blogspot.com

Built in 1957 for Joseph and Virginia Hilb and recently closed in 2017. 1974 Jerry Long photo.

08/07/2026

Navajo made Prayer Feathers
Available in the gift shop

08/07/2026

Contrary to announcements you may have heard, the Fort Huachuca Historical Museum is still open.
The federal government put the scheduled closure on pause until further notice.
Please visit 😊
The gift shop is located in the museum

08/07/2026

Old Post Capehart and Wherry-era housing Then and Now

The beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s led to sizable increases in the nation’s military.
Housing soldiers and their families exacerbated a national housing shortage that had grown steadily between 1926 and 1948.

The 1949 Wherry Act and the 1955 Capehart Act (named after their sponsors, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska and Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana) addressed the issue by providing innovative
legislation for the construction of family housing “on or around military installations.”
The programs utilized private industry to construct the housing. Relying on federal financial incentives and using the services of architectural and planning firms, many of national note, private developers eventually built nearly 250,000 units of Wherry and Capehart housing for the military at installations across the country.

At the end of 1994, some 175,000 Capehart and Wherry housing units were inventoried on active military installations. In early 2001, the Military Construction Subcommittee
of the House Appropriations Committee met to discuss historic properties within the Department of Defense (DoD). Among the concerns expressed by the services was the large number of military housing units that would soon be 50 years old and thus potentially eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photos: from the Arizona Memory Project website
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/220273

Read the whole article:
https://www.achp.gov/sites/default/files/2018-07/CapehartWherry5.pdf

08/07/2026

Fort Huachuca's Apache Flats and Knoxville WW2

From Huachuca Illustrated Magazine by James P Finley

It was announced on August 7th that a contract had been awarded to a California construction firm to build 180 family dwelling units and dormitories for 314 people. These new housing areas, later to
be known as Apache Flats and Knoxville, would be mainly for civilians and military families.

An Army journalist, Pvt. Chester A. Burrill, presented a picture of the busy Fort Huachuca training base in an article appearing in the Apache Sentinel on March 9, 1945.

"... Laundries prepared to handle the weekly washing for 30,000 people were put into operation. A dry cleaning plant added another service.
These facilities were available too to the airfields as far away as Douglas and Tucson. In a single month 500,000 pieces of flat work and 700,000 pieces of clothing were handled by the laundry. Cold storage plants and storehouses for other foods were erected as Fort Huachuca needed to provide not only for itself, but was acting as sub-depot for the regional supply department at San Antonio, Texas.
Tons of material were shipped from the Fort to places as far away as California. Two bakeries produced several thousand pounds of bread a day. Over 1,500 gallons of milk were consumed at one meal, most of it being shipped in. The post dairy supplied the milk
for the hospitals.
Shops were installed for the reclamation of items of wearing apparel, tents, equipment and other items.
Almost 10,000 pairs of shoes were repaired in a single month to indicate the size of this project. Automotive equipment, tanks, guns, gas masks, all were maintained in perfect working order by the installation of new shops.
To operate the new facilities a great many civilian employees were required. The number grew to 1,400, and a vast city grew to accommodate them.
Dwelling units, cafeterias, recreation halls, nurseries for children made up the towns of Knoxville and Apache Flats on the reservation. The fort hummed with activity, military and civilian. In one 24-hour period as many as 23,238 telephone calls were
cleared..."