Under normal circumstances, I can readily find the origins of weird things in Arizona, but there’s one north of Flagstaff that puzzles me. No one seems to know anything about what it is, why it’s there and who put it there. It is three weathered tree trunks (they look like junipers) standing next to each other, and someone painted strange faces on them. The images on the two smaller trunks are badly faded, but the face on the tallest one is still in relatively good shape. It resembles “The Scream,” the famous expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893.
Two huge Celtic crosses keep silent watch over the landscape of Cochise County. One graces the Holy Trinity Monastery, a Benedictine community just south of St. David. The second is on a hillside overlooking Our Lady of the Sierras Shrine near Hereford. Both tower more than 75 feet over their surroundings, and both are the result of a journey Pat and Gerry Chouinard made to a shrine in Medjugorje, in what was then Yugoslavia. When they retired in 1995, the couple decided to build a similar shrine on their property near Hereford.
Q: There are so many places around the Valley with “ranch” in the name. How many were ever really ranches?
A: Lots of them. Lots and lots. Despite all the sprawl, you have to bear in mind that the Valley metro area started as a farming community, and until fairly recently, Maricopa County was primarily an agricultural area. So there were a lot of ranches.
Not all of these spreads were exactly hardscrabble kinds of places. McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale, before it turned into a residential development, was the home of Fowler and Anne McCormick. Fowler McCormick’s two grandfathers were Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the grain reaper, and John D. Rockefeller, so he wasn’t exactly hurting for cash. He later became president and chairman of the board of International Harvester.
The Pima County Courthouse has been a Tucson landmark for eight decades, but it took a long time for the community to accept it because of a lingering controversy over the colors and style. But over the years, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure has become became a city icon.
The building, designed by Roy W. Place and built by Herbert Brown, is the third courthouse to occupy the site.
