Volunteers
Pitch in to Return Building to Glory For the Albuquerque Journal Despite the cool morning breeze, Chin and her friend, Californian Tom Roberts, already had worked up a sweat as they sanded a 90-year-old door propped across sawhorses. Aside from the big window overlooking the railroad tracks, the door is about all that remains of a bedroom once called home by the Harvey Girls who served meals to railway travelers at the downstairs restaurant. "Doing good deeds makes you a better person," said Chin, who traveled 1,800 miles from New Jersey to spend five days stripping paint and refinishing woodwork at one of New Mexico's few surviving Harvey House structures. "Anyway, it makes you happier in your life." Chin and Roberts joined six other adventurers in Belen this week as volunteers for an Elderhostel service project. Working with the city and the Valencia County Historical Society, the group provides elbow grease and shares stories as they slowly strip away the layers of paint obscuring the original woodwork in the century-old Harvey House. "I like hearing the trains go by," said Jeanne Beardsley, carefully taking stripper and blade to a door frame. Beardsley and her husband, Ed, a soil conservationist, will head back home to Iowa when the week's over. But first, they figure, there are at least four layers of paint to get through. Each paint layer removed brings the city of Belen and the Valencia County Historical Society a little closer to the dream of turning the entire historic structure into a museum. Local residents Vincent Chavez and Antonio Garcia are also on site this week, helping to coordinate the ongoing restoration efforts at the old Harvey House. Local volunteers also are welcomed on a continuing basis. "Thousand of trains have gone by here in the last 100 years and rattled the earth," said Chavez, a retired firefighter who moved back to Belen from Los Angeles. "This old building has held up pretty well." For the past 15 years, the historic structure at 104 N. First St. has housed a small museum operated by the Valencia County Historical Society. The restaurant's original dining room, once bustling with railroad travelers and workers, is home to a collection of railroad and general historical items. The one-time kitchen houses historical banking photos courtesy of the Wells Fargo Bank, and other rooms are used by local organizations ranging from a model railroad club to Alcoholics Anonymous. The Harvey House museum is open to the public from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Belen's Harvey House, one of a dozen in New Mexico, blossomed during the heyday of rail travel in the early 1900s, according to Richard Melzer, a history professor at the University of New Mexico's Valencia Campus. The Southwestern-style structure, built around 1905 as a hotel for railroad workers, was converted by the Santa Fe Railway into a Harvey House restaurant in 1910, he said. Young women, who came to be known as "Harvey Girls," were recruited through newspaper ads from the Midwest and East to live on site and work as servers in the Fred Harvey restaurants along the western rail routes. Following World War II, the old building, then known as a Reading Room, served as a boarding house for railroad workers who lived in the upstairs rooms once occupied by the Harvey Girls, said Melzer. Despite rumblings to tear the structure down in the early 1980s (a fate that befell Albuquerque's Harvey House, the Alvarado Hotel, in 1970), the Belen structure remained intact. "I have to confess that I'm responsible for one of those coats of paint you're removing," Melzer told the Elderhostel volunteers after presenting a slide show. Slightly embarrassed, Melzer conceded he authorized a painting spruce-up in the 1980s. Gretchen Roberts, a volunteer up from her retirement home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is also painting this week. The former professional house painter is touching up the building's exterior trim, with the help of Fran Gorton of Olympia, Wash. Gorton, on her first trip to New Mexico, said she enjoys mixing volunteer work and travel. "I love the idea of helping to restore a historical building," she said. Restoration work is second nature to volunteers John and Carol McCulloch, who live in a 260-year-old house in Pennsylvania. Now retired, the former surgeon and librarian will reward themselves at week's end by a visit to Santa Fe. "We believe in giving back to the community at large," Carol McCulloch said. Elderhostel is a nonprofit program that offers affordable and
educational trips and service projects around the world to participants ages 55 and older.
For more information about Elderhostel, call toll free (877) 426-8056 or visit the Web
site and catalog online at www.elderhostel.org. |