Historic Furniture Reference Page

The Historic Furniture of the Walking Box Ranch

The Monterey furniture of the Walking Box Ranch comprises a significant part of the material culture that defines the period when Clara Bow and Rex Bell resided at the ranch. This style reflects the Spanish Revival theme.  After a major earthquake destroyed Santa Barbara in 1925, the city deliberately rebuilt utilizing a Spanish Revival theme. To read more on the origins of the Spanish Revival style, please see Roberto Lint Sagarena, "Building California's Past:  Mission Revival Architecture and Regional Identity," Journal of Urban History. 28.4 (2002): 429-444. Sagarena relates: "The regional identity of Southern California was invented and sold to (principally) Protestant settlers from the Midwestern and northeastern United States through a romantic articulation of the state’s Spanish Catholic past" (429). This deliberate, built environment influenced popular architecture, and Hollywood played its own role in the mythological environment.   Santa Fe also integrated the nostalgia of Ancestral Puebloan architecture with Spanish missions to create a uniquely southwest identity.  Chris Wilson addresses this development in "Place Over Time:  Restoration and Revivalism in Santa Fe," Page & Mason, Giving Preservation a History (2004): 185-206.  Wilson explains that preservation and commercialization melded together in Santa Fe to create a unique cityscape that attracted tourists while establishing a Disneyland vision of an imagined past that combined Spanish and Pueblo elements.  Mission and Spanish Revival architecture essentially allowed Americans to appropriate the cultural past of the Southwest. 

Understanding the origins of the Monterey furniture provides visitors with an authentic view of the culture that shaped the Walking Box Ranch and Clara Bow and Rex Bell's life on the ranch. For more on the importance of material culture and identity, please see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past:  Popular Uses of History in American Life (United States of America:  Columbian University Press, 1998).  Rosenzweig and Thelen argue that average Americans connect to the historical past in a variety of meaningful, personal ways.  Moreover, people view museums as providing interactive, authoritative experiences that are trustworthy.  Patricia West furthers this conversation in "Uncovering and Interpreting Women's History at Historic House Museums," in Restoring Women's History Through Historic Preservation, eds. Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman (Baltimore, MD:  John Hopkins University Press, 2003).  West makes a clarion call for incorporating women's history in historic house museums.  Interpretations of the Walking Box Ranch meet this call by focusing on the preeminent Clara Bow and allowing the audience to identify with a historical woman. 

Monterey furniture coincides with the plain, welcoming cowboy culture that Rex Bell sought to create at the Walking Box Ranch.  In 1931, Clara Bow had experienced emotional breakdowns, time in a sanatorium, and a stressful trial.  Rex Bell fell deeply in love with her and was determined to shelter the "It Girl" from the gossips of Hollywood and the stressors in her life.  What better place than a 300,000-acre ranch near Searchlight, Nevada, where Clara could pursue the life of a "cattle queen?" She purported this ambition in "Clara Bow Off To Wilds" Los Angeles Times. June 15, 1931, p. A1. This provided the couple with the privacy and isolation of the Mojave Desert while enabling them to pursue family life and escape their Hollywood and media troubles.  For more on the environmental significance of the Walking Box Ranch as a historically and ecologically important site see Paige Figanbaum, "An Interview with Paula Garrett." Paula Garrett. Transcript of an oral history conducted by Alexandra Shear, Alexander Reininger, Christopher Knott, Kristen Phipps, and Tracy Neblina, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2019. For resource management in the Mojave Desert see Eric Nystrom's  Mojave Preserve Administrative History at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/moja/adhi8.htm. Nystrom documents the various preservation concerns of the Mojave National Preserve, including management of diverse fauna, water resources, and domestic grazing. This underscores the human history of historical sites as well as their natural environment. In The Mojave:  A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert (New York:  Henry Holt & Company, 1996), David Darlington emphasizes the diverse and contrasting viewpoints of Mojave Desert residents. Additionally, he chronicles the changing environmental landscape that has evolved with human history and usage.  The National Register of Historic Place nomination of the Rock Springs Land & Cattle Company ranch speaks to the rich ranching history within the Mojave Desert.  The Walking Box Ranch developed from the sale of part of this original expansive property, and as the Walking Box National Register Nomination reveals, it was continuously used as a cattle ranch until its sale to the Viceroy Gold Company in 1990. The BLM and UNLV are obligated to consider the preservation and display of this property to the public.  As such, the institutions must consider the contested interests of public access, environmental preservation, strategic futuristic planning, and local cultural concerns.

Exploring the myriad of variables when embarking on a historical preservation initiative should include careful attention to potential adverse consequences, be they physical or social, and should start with fundamental information about the appropriate subject or site, as well as the nature of the project. Points of consideration include a property’s boundaries for physical sites, and the significance, veracity and integrity for artifacts are necessary in evaluating their appropriateness for use and installation in order to avoid, reduce, or allay any adverse optics and/or opinions. Many scholars have written and addressed the various aspects and concerns of museum work and preservation projects. For more information about the shifting paradigm in museums Gail Anderson, Reinventing the Museum (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004).  This work addresses  methods used to reimagine and retool the way museums operate have undergone a fundamental shift in vision and procedure due to the works and efforts of museum leaders and the vision of the role that museums play in society.

In the process of undertaking a preservation or conservation project care must be taken to preserve the integrity of the historic artifact or place, such as the Walking Box Ranch in the Mojave Desert of Southern Nevada. When deciding on the significance and value of one place or item over others it is essential to examine the comparative benefits of each in order to generate the most relevant and important historical evidence in achieving the goal of the project.  As historic restoration and preservation is commonly deemed as the sphere  and/or responsibility of those that protect or preserve certain sites, environments, objects,  buildings and structures concerning social, economic, cultural, architectural of political history it is imperative that these players expand their reach to include those that have not been normally seen as professional historians or conservationists.