Pine Ranch, Littlefield, Mohave County, AZ

Significance: Pine Ranch is typical of the small, family-owned cattle operations that co-existed on the remote and isolated Arizona Strip from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the second half of the twentieth. The ranch is located in a pine forest on the Shivwits Plateau, a vast tableland in northwestern Arizona that stretches north from the rim of the Grand Canyon. About 1918, Wallace Mathis of St. George, Utah, established a seasonal home near Pine Spring, a water source that had been used by mining and stock-raising interests from southern Utah since the 1870s. Mathis and his sons ran cattle from the site, and, in the mid-1920s, his son Carl lived there nearly full time in order to homestead the property. Carl built a stock tank, fences, corrals, and other outbuildings and improved the existing ranch house, largely creating the ranch core visible on the site today. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Carl's brother Reed, Reed's wife Grace, and their children were the ranch's primary residents, running cattle from the place seasonally. They sold the property before 1970, and the new owners subsequently traded it to the Bureau of Land Management. Since 2000, the ranch has laid within the boundaries of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, a federal reserve established to protect the natural, archeological, and historic resources of the remote Arizona Strip.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N41
Survey number: HALS AZ-4
Building/structure dates: before 1917 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: ca. 1918- ca. 1970 Subsequent Work