The National Park Service (NPS) lists Historic Vernacular Landscape as one of the four landscape categories. 1 The historic vernacular landscape is a historic site designed in a manner that it reflects the traditions, cultural ideas, and customs to display a clear interrelation between the land and the people. The vernacular landscape reflects a category of beliefs, customs, traditions, and values from a historic period. These cultural resources manifest in the environment and the structures in the surrounding, which remains to be a visible part of the property landscape.
Tassi Ranch in Arizona Mojave Desert is a perfect example of a historic vernacular landscape. The ranch is located along the Pigeon Wash course in Northwestern, Arizona. The ranch is about 60 miles from Mesquite, Nevada, and 33 miles from Overton southeast. 2 The site basically sits on the Arizona Strip western edge, an isolated desert area in northern Arizona sandwiched between the Colorado-River and the Grand Canyon. The site features several natural springs that deliver natural water all year round. There are chances that it was a waypoint to the Native American travelers in the region several years before the arrival of the American explorer ranchers and settlers who started stopping in the region in the mid-20 th century.
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Tassi Ranch is situated in a rural setting with distinctive structures, buildings, and landscape marks that represents the ranching traditions and customs from the early 20 th century. 3 Even today, Tassi Ranch still has several structures and buildings that had stood firm from the time when the ranch was functioning. It also has the irrigation tunnels and the tree plantation patters that provided the required protection from weather and harsh conditions. The ranch also features natural systems built by the old-time ranchers into the landscape and environment to make the farm a livable place and a cultural space. The ranch hosts a ranch house that is covered by cottonwood trees and is anchored of rock instead of log construction, which was typical building materials at the time of establishment. The very first house of stone at Tassi ranch was erected in 1920s ad was intermittently inhabited up to the 1970s. However, the house was facelifted by the National Park services in the 1990s by carrying out some repairs in the ranch house and its environs.
By the mid-1930s, a few years (decades) of informal and traditional adoption by a succession of cattle and sheep ranchers reverted to the building by rancher Ed Yates 4 . They built irrigation buildings, a house, reservoirs, and outbuildings, which were concentrated around the springs. These water features and the vernacular structures changed the site to be a habitable ranch, with most of these features still existing in the place today. 5 The site habitation continued for several years until in the 1980s. The grazing on the land, on the other hand, lasted much longer to the late 90s. The 2003 National Park Service (NPS) cultural landscape inventory determined that the Tassi Ranch site was locally significant for its relations in the development of cattle ranching in Arizona Strip. 6 The NPS also discovered that the structure of the Tassi Ranch and the improvements on the landscape were very important cultural structures for survival during the time of its operation. The ranch demonstrates how the homesteaders and independent ranchers modified the environment and the natural landscapes in the southwestern desert to create sites for settlement, farming, and cattle grazing in a remote and harsh environment.
In conclusion, cultural landscapes and properties are defined and preserved in a similar manner NPS. As a regulation, the resources effectively streamline and offer great access to the understanding of the traditional cultural groups affiliated, with the sites. To avoid being insignificantly natural, Tassi Ranch remains untouched so that native communities, visitors, anthropologists and other groups continually find them useful. Tassi Ranch is a vernacular landscape because the features in the site are representative of the Arizona cattle ranching, the people’s ways of living, the cultural diversity in Arizona, and the richness of traditional cultures of the local people.
Reference
Alanen, Arnold. 2003. Considering the Ordinary: Vernacular Landscapes in Small Towns and Rural Areas . In Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, edited by Arnold Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Evan, Robinson . 2017. Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Cultural Properties: A Study in Designation and Protection . Accessed 6 th March 2020 from https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/52254/PDF/1/play/
Taylor, Ken & Altenburg, Kirsty. 2006. Cultural Landscapes in Asia ‐ Pacific: Potential for Filling World Heritage Gaps 1 . International Journal of Heritage Studies. 12. 267-282. 10.1080/13527250600604555.
National Register of Historic Places Program: Traditional Cultural Properties Request for Comments. Accessed 6 th March 2020 from https://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/guidance/TCP_comments.htm
NPS National Capital Regional Office and Donaldson, E. 2010. President's Park South: Cultural Landscape Inventory, The White House (President's Park), National Park Service. Cultural Landscape Inventories. 975602. National Capital Regional Office/CLI Database.
NPS National Capital Regional Office and Fanning, K. 2006. Union Square: Cultural Landscape
Inventory, National Mall, National Park Service. Cultural Landscape Inventories. 975261. National Capital Regional Office/CLI Database.
