HORACE LANGFORD JR. / PVT CMA and Valley Electric employees made sure the schoolhouse could duck under the utility lines along the way. HORACE LANGFORD JR. / PVT NHP prepares to escort the Red School house to its resting place at the Pahrump Museum after the school house was reported missing fom its place of origin. Advertisement

The old one-room, little red schoolhouse was no where to be seen when various Pahrump media showed up at 9 a.m. Tuesday to get pictures of its appointed move.

The plan was for the Nevada Highway Patrol to escort the schoolhouse to the Pahrump Valley Museum on Basin Avenue. Valley Electric Association and CMA Communications were to share the duty of lifting the wires over Basin Avenue where the schoolhouse couldn't otherwise pass under them.

But for the Pahrump Valley Times and other media outlets who came to the dusty lot behind Cingular Wireless, off Highway 372, there was no trace of the schoolhouse. It had gone MIA.

It so happened that the movers had come earlier than expected and were already half way to their destination, parked off to the side of Highway 160 at Three Amigos car sales waiting for the Nevada Highway Patrol to escort their wide load.

About an hour later, a line of cars, including seven NHP Crown Vics with lights a-twinkling, could be seen following the old schoolhouse west in a queue of traffic on Basin Avenue.

The new addition to the Pahrump Valley Museum's acquisition of large artifacts is only the first of six structures to be moved at a cost of some $90,000, funded by Nye County through federal grants.

It costs about $500 per move just to have the Highway Patrol escort the slow moving historic structure to the site, said John Weisser, the museum's historian. The schoolhouse alone cost $12,500 to move, not counting the NHP escort.

But no one ever said history and culture would come cheaply to a modern community fixated on the future.

With its continual growth, Pahrump's movers and shakers have sometimes lamented the lack of much tangible history to the valley, sorely felt if for no other reason than attracting tourists. Much like Las Vegas, old buildings are torn down when they have outlived their usefulness, relegated to history's dust bin.

But the museum's plans call for a massive effort to save and restore several old buildings, replanting them on two acres to the south of the current Basin Avenue museum building and then connecting them all with an old wooden sidewalk, so kids and tourists alike can get some sense of Pahrump's historical past.

Where most Western towns date back into the last third of the 19th century, Pahrump's social history only goes back to the early years of the 20th century -- though the so-called "Wild West" was still wild enough even then. But in the long and wide-open Pahrump Valley, inhabitable structures were few and far between.

Joseph Yount is credited with first settling in the valley and establishing the Pahrump Ranch around 1876. But precious little else is known of life in the valley for the remainder of the century, or for that matter, the first decade or so of the succeeding century either.

The buildings that have been rescued for their historical value and slated to be moved to the museum date mostly from the 1920s to the '40s. The oldest building, the Pahrump Store, dates to around 1910, according to Weisser, who added it was only a best guess.

In two weeks, Weisser said, the Pahrump Store will follow the same route as the schoolhouse to the museum, along with the rusty, grain-storage silos, which date from perhaps only 1970.

Shortly after the silos are moved, if all goes well, the old Bowman Place out near Hafen Ranch Road will make the trip.

The latter was built of railroad ties taken up from the dismantled Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad through Amargosa Valley. That building dates from the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Weisser said it will be a challenge to move the structure, since the railroad ties could easily break apart in the move. But the museum wants to include it among the town's artifacts because it represents "the premier (historic period) house in the Pahrump Valley," Weisser said.

The structure, which Weisser said has a larger interior space than that of the Bob Ruud Community Center, is slated for use as a general meeting place for community civic functions and for children's activities.

After the Bowman house, there's another old ranch house, until recently occupied by No To Abuse behind Cingular Wireless on Highway 372, that the museum wants to acquire. It was the second ranch house to be built on the old Pahrump Ranch.

The museum's oldest historic structures, the blacksmith shop and the old Manse ranch house, are already situated on the museum's property. They date to the 1880s, Weisser said.

Last year, a two-room Pahrump motel from the 1930s -- formerly Boulder City housing for workers building Hoover Dam -- was going to be moved to the museum. But the building was vandalized by kids before movers could get to it.

Donations of labor and money will be sought for renovation of all the historic structures moved to the site, Weisser said.

On Aug. 15 the Nye County Commissioners are slated to approve going to bid for the museum's new building, a 50-foot-by-100-foot replica of the present museum building, for expansion of exhibits, meeting room and office space.

The museum is looking to place exhibits obtained from the Spring Mountain Ranch State Park that explain regional geology and the history of the Old Spanish Trail.

The golden spike in Pahrump's museological coffin -- a coup really -- would come when, and if, the outlaw Butch Cassidy is discovered buried in a forlorn grave in Johnnie, just north of the Pahrump Valley.

Weisser said the hold-up (no pun intended) for now is getting the Bureau of Land Management to approve digging up the suspect bones. A forensic anthropologist at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas is already lined up to do a DNA analysis, comparing the bones to known samples from the outlaw's sister, who died in 1980.