Mackwood Hopper, visiting Los Alamos in 1951, stands beside the chimney he built for his homestead cabin in 1908. Courtesy photo
The Hopper chimney as it looks today. The structure was vandalized in recent years and rebuilt by Eagle Scout Daniel Sarrao. Photo by Todd Nickols
By SHARON SNYDER
Los Alamos Historical Society
Behind the History Museum is a pile of stones that don’t generally attract the attention of visitors looking for elements of Los Alamos history, but those stones are all that remain of an artifact and its story that date back to homesteading days.
The stones once formed the chimney in a log cabin built by William Mackwood Hopper in 1908.
Adding to the story is the possibility that the stones may have come from the nearby Ancestral Puebloan site, as the importance of those small room blocks would not have been recognized at the time Hopper filed for 110 acres in August of 1908 to homestead on the Pajarito Plateau.
Most of the plateau homesteads were farmed by Hispanic families from the Rio Grande Valley, so what brought Hopper to this area? Historical research reveals that it was a long journey. Hopper was born in 1871 on a farm in Yorkshire, England. He emigrated to the United States in 1893, entering through Ellis Island. As with so many others, Hopper was looking for opportunity and adventure.
In his first years he worked as a lumberjack, a miner, and a construction worker, eventually making his way to Oregon. From there, he returned to the Midwest. By early 1908 Hopper was in Illinois, but soon he was wandering westward again, headed for California. His route took him to Santa Fe, and there he met a man named Harold Brook who was filing for available homestead land on the Pajarito Plateau. Brook made the farming possibilities look good, and Hopper decided to stay.
Hopper and Brook filed for side-by-side homesteads near what is now Ashley Pond and began improvements on their land. Hopper built a two-room cabin, with two doors and two windows. He added a barn large enough for eight horses and dug a small reservoir for watering his stock, which included three milk cows. On 80 acres of his claim, he cultivated corn, wheat, beans, oats, rye, spelt, barley and peas.
Both men gained the patent to their land on March 6, 1914, and at that time, Brook bought Hopper’s homestead for $10 an acre. For Hopper, the time had come to move on. He found work in logging camps and construction sites throughout the West before enlisting in the Canadian Army during World War I. He served with troops building railroads for moving the big guns to the front lines in France.
Decades later, in 1951, Hopper returned to Los Alamos at the invitation of Frank Brown, the stepson of Harold Brook. Brown had returned to Los Alamos to become the assistant manager of Zia Company. During the visit Hopper stood for a photograph beside what was left of the chimney he built as part of his cabin in 1908. He returned to California, and a brief obituary published in The Sacramento Bee in 1955 confirms that Hopper died in nearby Redding at the age of 82. From what we know of him, it seems that Hopper found the “opportunity and adventure” he was looking for when he landed in New York all those years ago.
A small collection of stones can sometimes hold amazing history!
The homestead era on the plateau ended in 1942 when the government condemned the land for the Manhattan Project. Brook and Hopper had been out of the picture for many years, but 19 of the homesteads were still owned by the original families or their descendants. The story of that era and the people who became part of that Pajarito Plateau history is beautifully told in Homesteading on the Pajarito Plateau, 1887-1942 by Judith Machen, Ellen McGehee, and Dorothy Hoard.