History of Fort Burgwin
and SMU-IN-TAOS

There is evidence of prehistoric occupation on the SMU-IN-TAOS campus dating to 3000 BC.  Beginning around AD 1000, farming groups colonized the Taos area, ultimately comprising large villages of people who are ancestral to the present Tiwa-speaking tribal nations of Taos Pueblo and Picuris Pueblo.   Pot Creek Pueblo, the largest prehistoric site north of Santa Fe, is located on the Fort Burgwin property and has been the focus of intermittent archaeological excavation since 1957. Thought to have consisted of 400 ground-floor rooms and reached three stories high, evidence suggests that Pot Creek Pueblo was occupied continually from approximately AD 1250 to 1320.

Spanish explorers, led by Lieutenant Hernando de Alvarado of Coronado's expedition, arrived in 1540, and the town of Taos was settled in 1615. The Pueblo Indians revolted and evicted the Spanish colonists from the Rio Grande Valley in 1680, but New Mexico was reconquered by Don Diego de Vargas in 1692. An uneasy peace was maintained until 1847, when the local people of Taos rebelled against the United States government, which, while at war with Mexico, had declared New Mexico a United States territory.

Fort Burgwin--named for Captain John Burgwin who was killed in the the Taos uprising of 1847--was established August 16, 1852, as a cantonment to protect Taos-area settlers from roaming Apache and Comanche Indians. American soldiers at Cantonment Burgwin also helped guard the main road from the territorial capital of Santa Fe to Taos. Fort Burgwin was closed in 1860 when US troops were consolidated at Fort Union, some 50 miles to the south-east.

For more than 100 years, Fort Burgwin lay buried and forgotten. Born of the clash of cultures in the early days of the New Mexico territory, it gradually decayed under the weight of other forces changing the face of the North American frontier. By the mid-1950s, the property had been acquired by a lumber company.  Fortunately, the owner of the lumber company, Mr. Ralph Rounds, was an amateur archaeologist who had heard stories of the fort's existence. To relocate the lost fort, Rounds enlisted the help of archaeologist Fred Wendorf, now Professor Emeritus in SMU's Department of Anthropology. After Wendorf located the remnants of the log fort, Rounds provided financial support for Wendorf and his associates to excavate and rebuild fort structures based on sketches of the original buildings. Reconstructed, Fort Burgwin was designed to serve a new purpose--education.

Envisioning Fort Burgwin as the ideal setting for academic programs, Southern Methodist University began in 1964 to acquire the property with support from the Rounds Foundation and the Honorable William P. Clements, Jr., then-chair of the University's Board of Governors and Texas governor from 1979-83 and 1987-91. Eventually, the University added adobe casitas for student and faculty housing, classrooms, a dining hall, and a multi-purpose auditorium.  In 2004 a state-of-the-art computer facility and library, the Fred Wendorf Information Commons, was constructed on the Fort Burgwin campus.

Resurrected and restored, Fort Burgwin thrives as a center for academic discovery, experiential learning and scholarly research.  Now the summer campus for SMU-IN-TAOS, the program offers academic courses in the humanities, natural and social sciences, performing and studio arts, as well as archaeological and anthropological research.

Print version Legal disclosures Site Index© Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX 75205, 214-768-2000