Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School National Historic Landmark Nomination

Welch, John

This document is the National Historic Landmark (NHL) nomination for Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School in Fort Apache, Navajo County, Arizona. The NHL nomination for Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School documents its national significance under NHL Criterion 1. As a fort that became a school, the property provides an unparalleled site for a nuanced interpretation of the complex processes and dynamics that both shaped the Federal government’s interactions with Native Americans and laid the foundations for the policies, institutions, and attitudes that define and distinguish Indian Country and much of the American West. During the mid-nineteenth century, military bases, such as Fort Apache, enabled the U.S. Army to first defeat and then control Native populations. Following the confinement of tribes on reservations, assimilation through education became the focus of Federal Indian policy. Located on the site of the former Fort Apache, the Theodore Roosevelt School was one of 14 former forts re-developed as a school under this new policy. Among the 14 forts that became schools, Fort Apache/TR School’s significant role in the history of the West marks it as one of the best sites for preserving and illustrating the strong connections between shifting and seemingly diverse Federal policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, the school is a unique architectural compendium of overlapping efforts by the Federal government to address the “Indian problem” throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School National Historic Landmark Nomination

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