Stop 3 -- Sanford House, Quarters 11
(Building 22128)
Grierson Avenue for many years was known as “Officer’s Row,” a term commonly used at many old Army posts. As you look up the road, imagine that on the side of the parade ground grew a line of tall shady cottonwood trees, while on the housing side, picture a wooden boardwalk with white picket fencing outlining each home. Across the dirt road from each gate was a hitching post for horses. The trees grew, died, and were replaced, but in recent times dead trees weren’t replaced due to the large amount of water they consumed. The picket fences were removed in about 1902, the hitching posts disappeared after automobiles replaced horses, and the boardwalk was replaced by curbs with a sidewalk next to a paved road.
The home is named for Major General George Bliss Sanford, a cavalryman who first served in what became the Arizona Territory in 1862, fought in other actions in the Civil War, and returned to the territory for campaigns against the Apaches after the war. He commanded Fort Huachuca in 1881.
In 1893, Major Adna R. Chaffee, who oversaw the building of these homes and the barracks in 1884 as a Captain, returned as Acting Inspector General for the Department of Arizona. He commented in his report on the lack of paint on the buildings since their construction, stating:
“This post is the most satisfactorily constructed of any in the Department; the buildings, as a lot, are the best we have, and I think it probable that the place will be occupied as long as any in the Department as a station for troops. A few hundred dollars’ worth of paint and the necessary expense for labor to lay it on will tend to preservation of the buildings, resulting in economy in the end…”
It took more than a few dollars, but in the end, Fort Huachuca outlived every other camp and fort in the state of Arizona. What’s more, 130 years after his commentary, the Old Post buildings are still surviving.