Texas CCC’s Crown Jewel Hotel
Ninety years ago, a National Park Service inspector visited the Davis Mountains construction site of a new Texas landmark, a West Texas hotel now known as Indian Lodge, and decided the project needed a reboot. Two architects — San Antonio’s William Calhoun Caldwell and Austin’s Arthur Fehr — came on board to bring more “life and character” to the design, eventually leading to the creation of the crown jewel of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) park construction projects in this state.
Inspector George Nason’s insightful criticisms eventually helped the project harmonize and blend with the natural setting, as intended. A series of new plans was drawn for the 16-room facility while construction was already underway on the north slope of Keesey Canyon, based on a patchwork of previous designs. While it sounds impossibly chaotic, somehow the team kept the project going, adapting as they went along.
Left Structural work on the walls fell to crews from Company 879. Under the watchful eyes of a LEM (local experienced man, here wearing light clothes), this particular group is laying up the adobe brick for the southeast corner of the terrace. The large beam visible in the foreground will provide support for the lounge floor. Right Looking toward the southeast during construction of Indian Lodge
Caldwell and Fehr based new plans on the recent design of the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico, with rooms layered in irregular parallel rows along contour lines around a central lodge hall and patios. Three CCC companies (879, 881, 1856) worked five years to finally finish and open Indian Lodge in 1935 (its stark whitewash finish added in 1938).
In 1965, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department added 24 rooms with a dining room, meeting room and swimming pool, along with other upgrades. TPWD took another look at Indian Lodge in 2000, didn’t like what they saw and began work to restore the 1935 look that had been diminished in the earlier renovation.
“The hotel is historically significant as an artifact of automobile tourism, an example of Southwestern regional romantic architecture, an example of a Civilian Conservation Corps project and the location of World War II activity,” cites a 2007 Historic Structures Report. At the time it was built, Americans were beginning to explore the West by car, at first stopping to camp along the side of the road, then seeking out destination campgrounds.
Texas State Parks celebrated their Centennial in 2023, but it took about a decade beyond the 1923 start for the program to ignite with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of the CCC as part of his New Deal. Busloads of young men poured into West Texas, a thousand or more in the first few months. CCC worker Ernest Rivera recalls that residents helped getting them settled in to work.
“When I was 13 years old, I went into town one morning, and there come the [first] train with 200 kids on the train, young kids from 18 to 25,” Rivera said in a 1993 interview. “They didn’t have no way to bring those kids, so the people came to Fort Davis to bring those kids to the camp.”
The CCC workers, including many local men such as Rivera (who joined against his mother’s wishes), slept in tents while they built barracks, then began the real work of harvesting native materials for construction.
Left Indian Lodge rooms during summer Right Interior shows some of the natural materials used in construction | Images Courtesy TPWD
Indian Lodge’s ceilings featured viga (pine beams) crossing thin strips of latilla, or river cane. Both materials were harvested locally, in keeping with the National Park Service’s theory of extending the wilderness experience by using indigenous materials and design elements to blend with the landscape.
“Ten men would drive down to the Big Bend area, just beyond the Chisos Mountains, at a little place called Hot Springs on the river,” Rivera recalled. “They would cut cane — the river cane that grows up along the sides — strip the leaves and stuff, put it on the truck, bring it home.”
The pine logs were harvested in the Davis Mountains at several sites. Caldwell designed special white pine exterior and interior doors with hand-wrought iron latches and handles; these were constructed by the CCC at Bastrop State Park. Hammered-metal light fixtures were made at Camp Washington Seawell by the camp blacksmith, a man from Alpine named Burke who also made and sharpened the drills used to create the scenic Skyline Drive.
Indian Lodge furniture was also made at Bastrop — twice. One of Nason’s biggest beefs with the project was the style of the first set of beds, dressers, tables and chairs.
“We have fallen into the error of manufacturing stock furniture [at Bastrop],” Nason wrote to the parks board chairman. “The design of this furniture is not bad. It is, however, of a somewhat colonial type and does not necessarily fit into all of our work projects. This is particularly the case at Davis Mountain [sic], where the colonial furniture does not look at all well in a building of Pueblo Indian architecture.”
The new design featured simple angular forms and exposed mortise-and-tenon joints, similar to the Spanish Colonial Revival furniture being made by the Works Progress Administration in New Mexico at that time, with added “Indian” symbols painted on the flat surfaces.
left View of Indian Lodge after completion | Courtesy Marfa Public Library. Right Elevations of the Indian Lodge Master Plan | Courtesy TSLAC
Detailed floor-to-ceiling murals of frontier life in the dining room were painted by one of the project’s original architects, William G. Wuehrmann, but without a doubt, the most fascinating element of the Indian Lodge design and construction is the basic adobe building block. All the materials needed were available on site.
“We made the adobes first, then the other guys started to make the foundation,” Rivera recalled. “And then we were ready to lay the adobes. They were heavy, heavy adobes. I don’t know how many of those I made when I worked there. I know we made thousands and thousands.”
Those 40-pound blocks were molded from a mixture of straw, water and soil, then muscled into place to form 18-inch-thick walls.
“We had a frame thing that made two adobes at a time,” another local CCC worker, Lalo Baeza recounted. “Those times, we mix it in a wheelbarrow. Mix a little grass to the mud … then put it in the thing there with a shovel. Smooth it out with your hand or a float, something like that. Then wait about five minutes and lift it up and put another.”
They would remove the forms and then stack the bricks for drying. Over and over and over.
In return, the men of the CCC received $30 per month (they kept $5 and sent the rest home). They ate three meals a day (with an average weight gain of 30 pounds during their CCC time), free education and health care.
The CCC workers also received a warm welcome from their West Texas hosts, who opened their homes on weekends to the men who created a masterpiece from the trees, rocks and earth of the Davis Mountains. From the creative vision of the diverse team of determined architects to the craftsmanship of those unskilled, hardworking laborers, the timeless beauty of Indian Lodge has beckoned all adventurers with the allure of Southwestern romance for nearly a century.
Palo Duro Canyon
Texas State Parks and the Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of “New Deal” legislation during the Great Depression. It was created to employ single men from 18 to 25 years of age on outdoor conservation projects. Between 1933 and 1942, the CCC developed 56 state, national and local parks in Texas. Today, Texans can enjoy the great outdoors while utilizing cabins, shelters, trails and bridges created by young men nearly 100 years ago. The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department manages the following 28 CCC-built parks.
Abilene
Balmorhea
Bastrop
Big Spring
Blanco
Bonham
Buescher
Caddo Lake
Cleburne
Daingerfield
Davis Mountains
Fort Parker
Garner
Goliad
Goose Island
Huntsville
Inks Lake
Lake Brownwood
Lake Corpus Christi
Lockhart
Longhorn Cavern
Meridian
Mission Tejas
Mother Neff
Palmetto
Palo Duro Canyon
Possum Kingdom
Tyler
