Grants allow restoration of Delongchamps pillars at Dangberg Home Ranch

Friends of Dangberg Home Ranch announced this week that significant restoration work at the Dangberg Home Ranch Historic Park has recently been completed. Two major grants and additional donations from the community made the work possible, and also grown an endowment fund and enabled public access and operational support at the public facility.

The Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Smallwood Foundation awarded a $18,709 grant earlier this year to assist the non-profit in providing professional services at the park. This is the 11th consecutive year that nonprofit Friends of Dangberg received funding from the Smallwood Foundation. The nonprofit operates the park in cooperation with its owner, Douglas County.

The Smallwood grants create a foundation for Friends of Dangberg’s provision of visitor services, arts and history programming, maintenance work, volunteer management, and other activities that keep the park open to the public. 

The most recent grant funds a significant part of essential operating expenses, including telecommunications, website costs, and staff whose duties include not only additional fundraising but also the care of the park’s extensive and historic object, photograph, and document collection.

Among Friends of Dangberg’s successes resulting from the Smallwood gift was the ability to apply for and manage a $100,000 grant from Nevada’s Commission for Cultural Centers and Historic Preservation, awarded in summer 2020. 

Individual donors also contributed an additional $138,000 to assist Douglas County in preserving three structures at the park. 

The 1917 garage and separate carriage house benefitted from masonry, drywall, and electrical repairs. The garage also got a new roof. Most importantly, the work included extensive repairs to the 1917 gateway, comprised of two ornamented brick pillars designed by Frederic J. Delongchamps, a noted architect credited with many government, private, and commercial buildings in western Nevada. The gateway and all the buildings at the park are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In addition to Douglas County’s parks department, project partners included Nevada’s State Historic Preservation Office, Central Sierra Construction, Paul Cavin Architects, CFBR Structural Group, PK Electrical, Sartorial Masonry, Ponderosa Roofing, United Electrical Services, and Garlan Brewer Drywall.

Since January 2022, fundraising efforts in support of the park also yielded an additional $62,000 in private donations earmarked for addition to the Home Ranch Endowment Fund. The endowment now totals just over $150,000 and is professionally managed by Community Foundation of Northern Nevada.

Friends of Dangberg is now asking the community to help increase the endowment by a factor of ten by the end of 2023, building an investment of $1.5 million that will enable preservation and other work at the park into the future. A future $50,000 donation to the endowment has been pledged by Park Cattle Co., the park’s neighbor, as part of the successful fundraising campaign that concluded in 2021.

“I and the other Smallwood Foundation trustees are always pleased to see the results at Dangberg Home Ranch,” said Suzy Stockdale, a Minden resident and Smallwood Foundation trustee. “We can see that the Friends of Dangberg trustees, staff, and volunteers are always working to improve the park and share it.”

The Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation was established following the death of Mr. Smallwood in April 1968. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Smallwood resided and worked in Dallas, where he was a co-founder of First Southwest Company, a prominent regional investment banking firm specializing in public finance, bond underwriting, and the raising of capital for developing regional companies.

The establishment of the foundation represented the culmination of the Smallwoods’ lifelong support of a broad range of charitable organizations. In addition to the Friends of Dangberg, the foundation awards several grants to nonprofits and other organizations in Carson Valley each year.

“We can’t thank the Smallwood Foundation enough for its continuing support,” said Friends of Dangberg Director Mark Jensen. “Friends of Dangberg’s members and business sponsors are very generous, but it’s the larger grants that truly make restoration and public programming possible. We ask everyone to help us help Douglas County parks department to preserve this Nevada treasure.”

A public facility, the park is located at 1450 Highway 88, ¾ mile south of the high school roundabout. The site preserves the home of Heinrich F. Dangberg and his descendants, a prominent ranching family in Carson Valley history that founded Minden in 1905. The site includes eight historic structures built between 1857 and 1917, along with a large collection of artifacts, documents, and photographs original to the home. 

Information on current programming and visitor access is at Dangberg.org. 

Almost 4,000 visitors come to the park each year.

Friends of Dangberg Home Ranch began caring for the park in 2011, when Nevada State Parks ended its management agreement with Douglas County. Since then, the group has directed more than $1.2 million to the park’s preservation and development, supporting arts and culture programming, building maintenance and historic restoration, volunteer management, and professional services. More than three dozen volunteers together contribute more than 3000 hours of assistance annually.

The nonprofit’s accomplishments include one-time and repeating grants from additional agencies and foundations that include Douglas County, Nevada’s Division of State Parks, E. L. Cord Foundation, Nevada Commission on Tourism, Nevada Arts Council, Nevada Humanities, and several family foundations.