Breathing new life into old wood

Rangewood Ranch may be a young company, but it is fixing antique problems.

New Mexico is an old place, with farms and ranches dating back hundreds of years. What happens to those old buildings when they are abandoned and unused? One option is reclamation.

Technically two companies, Rangewood Ranch and Rangewood Reclaimers are a group of six people keeping New Mexican history alive by keeping 19th century farm buildings out of landfills.

The small team started driving all over New Mexico, dismantling everything from milk barns to cabins, in 2018.

“As long as it is wood or metal we can take care of it,” said Nathan Geary, director of operations for Rangewood companies.

He said the process of taking down a structure while preserving the wood is tedious, using padding underneath hammers to take out nails and setting aside time to analyze how the building was put together.

“Old cowboy construction, no barn is the same,” Geary said.

It can take weeks to take apart a building, depending on its size and structural integrity. While the company is working on a site, everyone sleeps in tents.

Geary records time-lapse videos of buildings being dismantled and posts them on the company’s YouTube channel, The Rangewood Posse.

One video shows a milking barn being taken down in Lincoln County. That barn used to belong to deceased New Mexico poet S. Omar Barker and his wife Elsa McCormick Barker, who was an English teacher and author.

Barker wrote “A Cowboy’s Christmas Prayer,” which was published more than 100 times, according to the Ranching Heritage Association.

“There is so much rich history and it needs to be saved,” said Claudia Hutching, who co-owns Rangewood Ranch with her husband, Steve Hutching.

The company’s work on the Barker barn started after she received an email from the Barkers’ grandson in which he recalled playing in the old milk barn.

The historic pieces of wood and other materials are often brought back to the Rangewood Ranch.

A workshop at the ranch is stuffed with wood planks that have come from all over the state. Claudia Hutching can tell you the story behind every piece of wood, where it came from and the oral histories the owners passed on.

A set of hand-carved wood corbels, a decorative wall mounting, sit unused on the floor. Claudia Hutching said she got them when the company took down Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic church that used to be near Second Street SW.

She was told the logs used to make the corbels were from Santa Fe and had been floated down the river.

Outside the workshop, the ranch is decorated with things from a different time, such as an old windmill named Mariah that came from Bear Creek in Magdalena and a working 1948 GMC pickup truck.

Reclamation and preservation are just half of what Rangewood does. The companies also make things.

Most people who see the work don’t even know it. The team helped build the Asia exhibit at the ABQ BioPark Zoo and provided the karri wood for the Australia exhibit.

Another well-frequented spot showcasing Rangewood’s woodwork is the bar at Boxcar in Santa Fe. It’s a 100-foot bar made out of real boxcar flooring the team rescued out of Oklahoma City.

Most of Rangewood’s work is never seen by the public because it is in people’s homes. Customers request everything from wood mantles to custom cabinets.

“Anything you can imagine, we have done,” said Geary.

The company charges by the foot and everything it does is costum so the price is on a case-by-case basis. However, the ranch has a showroom with some premade coffee tables listed between $300 and $600.

Hutching is hoping to grow the ranch in the coming years. She is working on getting permits to open a coffee shop in the showroom and turn the ranch into a venue for weddings and celebrations.