Dangberg Home Ranch

One of the area's most prominent ranches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Dangberg Home Ranch remains in an excellent state of preservation, still in private hands. Both the state and county have discussed converting the ranch into a museum and park, but no concrete plans have beeen developed to date.

After arriving from Germany in 1856, H. F. Dangberg rapidly accumulated land for his growing ranching business. Between 1860 and 1880, he built a house, barn, slaughterhouse, bunkhouse, and supporting buildings. Under the Dangberg Land and Livestock Company, the ranch grew to 48,000 acres, the largest in the area. The complex served as the Dangbergs' base of operations, supporting line camps in more far-flung locations. Around 1915 Dangberg's heirs hired DeLongchamps to design a number of simple brick buildings to accommodate the variety of tasks on the ranch. The Dangberg company throve until the Great Depression, after which it limped along until the death of H. F. Dangberg, Jr., in 1946. The remaining Dangbergs sold the property in 1978. Today the home ranch covers 33.7 acres.

The buildings at the home ranch are clustered in two groups. The residential core, where the family lived, is enclosed within a fence and includes the main house, stone cellar, and garage as well as a laundry, where Native American women were employed to do the laundry for the ranch, and a pump house, which still contains the machinery that supplies the main house with water. Outside this compound are the working buildings: the bunkhouse, cook's quarters, slaughterhouse, hide house, barn, and a second garage.