Mabel Dodge Luhan wanted D.H. Lawrence in Taos. Badly. So in 1924, she gifted the 160-acre mountain property, then called Kiowa Ranch, to Lawrence's wife, Frieda. In return, Frieda handed over the original, handwritten manuscript of Sons and Lovers. It was a wild trade. The cabin sits 8,600 feet up on Lobo Mountain, overlooking the dry sagebrush plains. Lawrence stayed only eleven months. But he worked hard, milking goats, chopping pine, and writing. It was his only home. Under a massive ponderosa pine-the one Georgia O'Keeffe later famously painted-he drafted St. Mawr.
After Lawrence died in France in 1930, his ashes took a bizarre journey back to New Mexico. Frieda brought them back in 1935 to build a concrete, Southwestern-style memorial shrine on the steep hillside above the cabins. She had a plan. Rumor has it she mixed his ashes directly into the concrete altar to stop Mabel Dodge Luhan from stealing them. It worked. The artist Dorothy Brett, who lived in a tiny cabin nearby, helped guard the property. Today, visitors still climb the zigzagging dirt path to that shrine. They find a phoenix stencil.
Frieda left the ranch to the University of New Mexico when she died in 1956. The university still owns the 160 acres. It is raw. You won't find manicured lawns or gift shops here. Instead, you get peeling paint on the historic cabins, old farming tools rusting in the dirt, and the same intense quiet that inspired Lawrence's late-career writing. The site preserves the eccentric, unvarnished reality of the early Taos art colony.
What Makes Lawrence, D.H., Ranch Historic District Special:
