Peggy Pond Church

Her father's school, on the plateau she rode as a girl, did not admit girls. She married one of its teachers, Fermor Church, in 1924; he was acting headmaster when the Army closed it in 1943, and the family left. Her best-known book, The House at Otowi Bridge of 1959, is about her friend Edith Warner, whose tearoom below the Rio Grande bridge fed the laboratory's scientists, and her companion there, Tilano Montoya of San Ildefonso. The pond beside this panel carries her father's name.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Peggy Pond Church (1903-1986) Peggy Pond Church, author of the Southwest classic The House at Otowi Bridge and daughter of Los Alamos Ranch School founder Ashley Pond, will forever be "The First Lady of New Mexican Poetry." As she rode the Pajarito Plateau and camped beneath tall pines, she came to understand that "it is the land that wants to be said." She captured it in her sensitive poems.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fuller Lodge — 0.2 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Bandelier National Monument — 7.2 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 10 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.
• El Santuario de Chimayó — 22 mi
  A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.

More markers nearby

• Los Alamos — 3.1 mi
• Valle Grande — 8.8 mi
• Pueblo of San Ildefonso — 10 mi
• Maria Montoya Martinez — 10 mi