Waring Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, National Park Service

Warner, Len; Provencher, Shaun

The Waring Ranch is a rural historic landscape whose buildings, structures, and other landscape features constitute the essential elements of an early twentieth‑century independent cattle ranch on the Arizona Strip. The landscape extends for approximately twenty miles on the Kelly Point Peninsula, occupying approximately 50,000 acres between Horse Valley and Kelly Point, the southernmost extent of the Arizona Strip (those lands in Arizona located north of the Grand Canyon and south of the state of Utah). Located primarily on a peninsula extending southward into the Grand Canyon from the northern rim, the landscape is at an average elevation of 6,000 feet in a mixture of open rangeland composed of pinyon‑juniper woodland and occasional stands of ponderosa pine forest. The built features of the ranch, which include cabins, corrals, fence lines, dirt reservoirs, and roads, were originally developed in the late 1920s and 1930s, with later additions from the 1940s and 1950s. The ranch is significant for its association with the development of the cattle ranching industry in the remote Arizona Strip country, as well as for its vernacular architecture. The ranch represents a remote cattle ranch headquarters built in an era of kerosene illumination which never was modernized with electricity, and consists of buildings and structures built predominately of hand‑hewn logs, with minimal use of manufactured materials. The period of significance extends from 1928 to 1953, which reflects the period from when J.D. “Slim” Waring received a homestead patent on the property, through the ranch’s development in response to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, to the year when Waring installed the last major infrastructure at Green Springs. The Waring Ranch cultural landscape boundaries include all lands grazed by J.D. Waring, including a number of outlying line camps that were managed out of the 28.5 acre Horse Valley Ranch headquarters complex. The Waring Ranch rural historic landscape retains integrity as a rural historic landscape and is in poor condition due to the deterioration of a number of structural and small scale features. Although Waring was not the first independent rancher to establish himself on the Shivwits Plateau, his occupancy on the Shivwits exceeds all others in terms of continuity, having weathered the second cattle boom and bust cycle of the 1920s to 1930s and surviving through the modern period of 1930 to 1950 and beyond. Waring arrived in the area in 1916, and received a patent on his first homestead entry in 1928. In the years that followed, Waring gained control of virtually the entire Kelly Point Peninsula below Horse Valley. Existing improvements on the Kelly Point Peninsula were incorporated into Waring’s expansive operation. He built structures, added fencelines and corrals, and excavated a series of earthen tanks for water catchment. Most of his purchases occurred soon after the passing of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which regulated the enclosure of the formerly open public rangelands of the west with fencing and established regulations for the proper management of these areas in order to conserve rangelands that were rapidly being overgrazed and depleted of their native vegetation, topsoil, and productivity. Waring’s final major infrastructure improvement occurred in 1953 with the construction of a circular metal tank and adjoining valvebox at Green Springs, signifying a shift in water catchment technology on the ranch from earlier self‑excavated tanks to commercially available units. Following WWII, the focus of beef cattle raising began to shift from rangeland systems to the more intense feedlot corporations. In 1969, J.D. Waring sold his ranch property to the National Park Service. His departure ended a tenure that lasted more than forty years, and reached back into the era of pioneering ranches and homesteads in the remote Shivwits Plateau region on the Arizona Strip.

Waring Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, National Park Service

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