Fuller Lodge

Fuller Lodge stands in the middle of downtown Los Alamos, three storeys of upright ponderosa logs on a footing of tuff, across Central Avenue from a pond named for the man who started it all. Ashley Pond Jr., a Detroit businessman, bought a homestead ranch on the mesa in 1917 and turned it into the Los Alamos Ranch School, where boys from wealthy eastern families rode, camped and studied a classical curriculum at seven thousand feet.

The Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem designed the lodge, completed in 1928, as the school's dining hall, masters' quarters and infirmary. He and the director, A. J. Connell, picked its 771 logs themselves in the Jemez forests, and a sawmill was hauled up to the site to prepare them. The lodge is named for Edward Fuller, a staff member who looked after the younger boys from 1919 until his death in 1923 and had helped the school with money.

In late 1942 the Army bought the school for a secret laboratory, Project Y. The last class graduated in the lodge's big room early in 1943 and the boys left the mesa. From then on the lodge fed the laboratory, housed visiting scientists and unmarried staff, and held its dances, plays and town meetings. The masters' houses along Bathtub Row went to the senior scientists, because they were the only houses on the mesa with bathtubs. On the pond's south bank, a memorial marks the school's icehouse, where components of the device exploded at Trinity in July 1945 were stored and assembled.

The lodge is now the county's cultural center, with an art center inside, and the Los Alamos History Museum occupies the school's old guest house next door. Both belong to Manhattan Project National Historical Park.