Tour guides to offer insights on ranch of famed author D.H. Lawrence

Public to get tour of famed author’s NM ranch

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In the mountains north of Taos along an ancient Kiowa Indian trail is the historic ranch of famed English author D.H. Lawrence.

There are towering pine trees and vistas stretching from the Colorado Rockies to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This is the place where Lawrence, deemed by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, found his inspiration for several of his stories and poems.

Visitors will be able to tour Lawrence’s ranch on June 19 with experts from the Friends of D.H. Lawrence, a local nonprofit group dedicated to all things Lawrence, and hear their stories about the famous people who frequented the ranch — from Georgia O’Keeffe to Tennessee Williams.

“When you go up there, you can feel a spirit to the place that is very special. … It’s just got an aura to it, a magical quality that many, many visitors still feel even though Lawrence left it 85 years ago,” said Hugh Witemeyer, a retired English professor and a founding member of the group.

The group organized the tour in an effort to let more people know about “the hidden treasure.” The ranch is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the state list of cultural properties.

Lawrence took over the 160-acre spread from prominent socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan during the early 1920s. Luhan tried to give the ranch to Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, but Lawrence insisted that they pay for the property. That payment came in the form of Lawrence’s manuscript for “Sons and Lovers.”

The Lawrences spent a total of 18 months at the ranch over the course of three years. His wife wrote in her memoirs that of all the places the couple had lived, Lawrence loved the ranch most.

Sharon Oard Warner, an English professor at the University of New Mexico and director of the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, said the Taos area has drawn generations of writers and other artists and it’s understandable why Lawrence would have fallen in love with his piece of northern New Mexico.

“The ranch itself and the landscape in New Mexico made a huge impression on him,” Warner said.

In fact, many of the poems included in Lawrence’s “Birds, Beasts and Flowers” are set at the ranch, and passages in his short novel “St. Mawr” vividly describe the property.

Several miles down a dirt road off the highway, the ranch — owned by the University of New Mexico — features Lawrence’s memorial, two cabins and a home that was built by Frieda Lawrence following her husband’s death.

The memorial has a colorful history of its own. Warner said there was a bit of disagreement among Frieda Lawrence, Luhan and friend Dorothy Brett, an artist who had lived at the ranch, about what to do with Lawrence’s ashes. To keep the other women from getting their hands on them, Frieda dumped them into the cement that was used to build the memorial.

There are also questions as to whether the ashes were those of Lawrence at all. The application for the ranch’s historic register status points to some versions of the story that say the ashes were accidentally spilled or dumped and replaced with fireplace ash and that the urn was forgotten and retrieved several times on the way to the ranch.

At the top of the hill where the memorial is located is a guest book that has been signed by famous writers and countless others. Warner pointed out that actor and producer Sean Connery’s name is among the signatures.

Taos resident and author Steve Fox described the ranch as “sacred ground” for literature scholars.

“Lawrence and Frieda were part of that Mabel Dodge Luhan salon group that included almost everybody in the modernist movement in the U.S., everybody from Ansel Adams to Paul Strand to Georgia O’Keeffe,” Fox said. “Lawrence and the ranch are not kind of a funny little vacuum. They are part of this whole network of American modernists that made Taos probably the most densely artistic and literate of the little towns in the West.”

Online:

friendsofdhlawrence.org/