Fort Garland

buffalo soldiers: reVision

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THE FORT GARLAND MUSEUM and Cultural Center continues to establish unique exhibits that highlight not just an honest look at local history but also combine that with art, poetry and more to create immersive cultural experiences. Their newest exhibit, buffalo soldiers: reVision opened on June 24 and follows in the same vein of striking, multifaceted …

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Soldiers and Porcelain Dolls – The Children of Fort Garland

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By Jamie Devine

The infantry run their daily drills, the smell of sulfur lingering in the air. The cavalry are mounted and heading towards the area of patrol, their horses galloping by and kicking up dirt. The officer signs off on papers in his office, while the sounds of the blacksmith’s forge clang in the background. Children are playing in the parade ground as their mothers chat among themselves. This would have been a typical scene at a military fort in the mid-19th-century West. Yes, women and children did live at military forts. They lived and interacted among the soldiers in a male-dominated environment.

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Re-enactors bring past alive

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Sidebar by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Fort Garland – June 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

During the 150th anniversary celebration at Fort Garland, re-enactors will take part in many events. Representing cavalry, infantry, and artillery units, men will recreate drills and other daily routines of life in a frontier fort. Ladies also will be present in period dress for the social activities that included wives and local women and to demonstrate the domestic chores performed by servants and laundresses.

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Kit Carson (and others) slept here

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Article by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Fort Garland – June 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

THE MOST CELEBRATED NAME associated with Fort Garland is Kit Carson: trapper, scout, Indian agent, Indian fighter, and Civil War officer. But, in the fort’s quarter-century as a U.S. Army installation, many individuals took part in the life of the old adobe stronghold in the San Luis Valley.

Now, year ’round, the public can visualize military life in territorial days and the early years of Colorado statehood at Fort Garland, the oldest existing military fort in what is now Colorado.

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