Bringing Public Past into Public Present: The Rosedale Farms Historic Neighborhood Project

The problem with the field of public history is that it often confuses scholars—even professionally trained historians. Many students training in history within the academy struggle to fully understand the field’s importance because it often bends some of the hard and fast theoretical and methodological rules. Public historians can add to this confusion since they often argue as to how to define the field. But the academy does agree that public history takes place in public settings, is conducted on the public’s behalf, designed for public audiences, and addresses current public issues or problems within contemporary society. Since public history concerns itself with local, regional and community ideas, it is the perfect lens through which to view the definition and ideas of The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP. For our project, public history will act as the academic vehicle in documenting the human experience in El Paso at the local level.

For the past thirty years, public historians working in the subfields of urban and new urban studies have produced working histories of the United States’ built environment. This examination has generated mainly broad sweeping narratives that generalize twentieth century history of the country’s built fabric. A byproduct of this scholarship has been a topographical examination of residential and home ownership during the twentieth century. Most scholarship has focused on the post-World War II housing movement and the creation of mass-produced tract homes along the eastern U.S. seaboard and the U.S. West Coast regions. Historians have been more interested in how these processes of home ownership has changed or altered the country’s cultural landscape, and how these new neighborhoods and homes have shaped men's, women's, and children’s ideas about conformity and patriotism. Recently, though, historic preservationists and public historians have expanded the conversation by placing the buildings of these early Cold War spaces at the center of the public discussion to see what these places say about local and regional identities. By changing the conversation, historians have also made an argument why these places need to be preserved for future generations to enjoy or to understand their own history. These practices have also created local and regional histories of communities that have often been marginalized in the larger sweeping processes created by those urban and new urban historians.

Our Rosedale Farm Historic Neighborhood Project fits nicely into the public history conversation and illuminates El Paso’s place in this larger national home ownership conversation from 1922-1955. The historical time frame is important because Rosedale Farms was platted and developed in El Paso, Texas, before and during the Great Depression, and most of the home construction took place before the end of World War II or before the demand for more housing became a pubic crisis. Most Americans, including El Pasoans, had little money to buy the things they needed much less purchase a home during this time frame, so we are curious as to why this neighborhood was so successful. Moreover, this neighborhood is worthy of historical examination because it departs from El Paso’s other historically protected neighborhoods near the city's downtown corridor. Other downtown El Paso neighborhoods like Sunset Heights, Austin Terrace, Manhattan Heights, Old San Francisco, etc. have been well documented in city’s narrative by local and regional historians because they illuminate El Paso’s transition into a modern urban cityscape and tout famous architect Henry Trost’s legacy. The Rosedale Farms neighborhood came later outside of these processes and introduces new residential styles into El Paso’s built environment that are tied to Pueblo Spanish Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles and celebrate the arrival of the Californian Ranch House and floorplan. More importantly, this neighborhood also recognizes the automobile as an important feature in residential design and begins to place the garage at the side of the house, rather than being relegated to the back.  

The Rosedale Farms Historic Neighborhood Project will take place in three distinct phases over the course of the fall semester 2019 and spring semester 2020. The primary goal of the project is to nominate the Rosedale Farms neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places and to add it to the El Paso historiographical narrative.


Figure 1: Courtesy of the El Paso County Clerk's Office

The first phase (September-December) will see the entire neighborhood surveyed. The subdivision plats, 10 in total, will guide the way in which the neighborhood is surveyed. At the moment, a working guess is that there are about 150 homes in the Rosedale Farms neighborhood, and about 70% of them would qualify or meet the requirements for National Register of Historic Places. But this data could change once the information is collected and processed. During this phase, each home will be cataloged in person and cross-checked with the El Paso county and city clerk’s offices, city directories, and newspaper archives to see if and how many modifications have been made over the home’s history. Also, an intake form will capture the home’s information along with a picture for the second phase’s database. Near the end of this phase, additional research will help place the neighborhood into El Paso’s historical conversation, which will require primary and secondary source research. This phase will see approximately 20 homes processed a week, along with commercial, educational, and/or religious buildings.



Figure 2: Courtesy of Adelina Geers

The second phase (December-January) will take the information collected from the neighborhood survey and arrange the data into an expansive database. The data will more than likely be organized according to the individual plat history, or around when the neighborhood addition was surveyed, developed, and home construction began. This will give a clear picture of what homes qualify to be included in the nomination form and what homes are outside of the scope. The database will also help us to understand the different architectural styles, developers, architects, building materials, and so on that contributed to the neighborhood’s identity and if, beside the homes, what other criteria will help in justifying this neighborhood to the National Register. This phase will also allow for the team to decide if, in addition to, the neighborhood nomination of individual home nominations need to be considered at the end of the project.



Figure 3: Courtesy of Adelina Geers

The third phase (March-April) will end the project. There is a chance that this phase may extend beyond the projected 2910-2020 deadline as it is an expansive part of the project. In this phase, the team will work on nominating the Rosedale Farms neighborhood to the state and national registers. To complete the national registration form, the team will have to decide what criterion justifies the nomination and the database will assist in this process. Additional primary and secondary source information will be needed to create a neighborhood history, and an elaborate El Paso and borderlands histories. Other National Register forms will be consulted to see how this process looked in the other protected spaces. Finally, before the nomination form can be considered, a public forum needs to be held, in which the citizens from the neighborhood have a chance to voice their opinions or concerns about the nomination. If all goes well and the neighborhood makes it onto the National Register, the team would also suggestion working on a historical marker for the neighborhood. And finally, the data from all three sections will go into the final public presentation in April 2020 that was gathered in the 2019-2020 research under The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP.

When completed, we're hoping to provide the public with another historical view of the city's past by engaging with it through the humanities in the present. 

Written by Jerry D. Wallace, Faculty Fellow; and Adelina Geers, Undergraduate Research Fellow
El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP