Fort Stanton

Fort Stanton is the fort that became a hospital — the 1855 stone post built to fight the Mescalero Apache, named for a captain killed in that war, that got its second life in 1899 as the country's first government tuberculosis sanatorium. The Army's pick was the reason: the climate that made a good frontier post — dry air, high altitude, sun — was the same prescription the Public Health Service wrote for consumptive sailors.

The sanatorium ran fifty-four years — 5,000 merchant sailors came to the tents for the fresh-air cure, 1,500 of them stayed in the Maritime Cemetery on the hill above the fort. The doctors were often patients — five of the seven medical officers in 1908 had TB themselves, including the commander who'd recovered and was treating others. The fort kept its own baseball team of tubercular sailors playing the staff.

The site kept repurposing — after the sanatorium closed in 1953 it was a state hospital, a Border Patrol post, a detention center, a corrections facility, and finally a state historic site. The 1855 stone buildings never stopped being used; the file keeps the reinvention: the Apache-war fort that became the TB hospital that became the museum — the most intact Territorial fort in New Mexico because it never had time to fall down.

Fort Stanton is the archive's sanatorium file — the 1855 Apache-war post that became the first federal TB hospital, where the sailors' tents and the Maritime Cemetery mark the cure that the climate was supposed to be.