In New Mexico, New Deal legacy gets a second look

The 100-year anniversary of the National Park Service is igniting new interest in the majestic Spanish-pueblo themed building that Lopez and other "CCC boys" built, along with other remote cabins, furniture and artwork of the 1930s that transformed and popularized national and state parks while putting millions of impoverished Americans back to work.

The Old Santa Fe Trail Building, nicknamed after its address alongside the former frontier migration and supply route, was stocked with hand-carved furniture and Native American pottery and paintings commissioned under the Work Projects Administration from local artists.

In June, preservationists of the New Deal era brought together Lopez with descendants of Franklin D. Roosevelt and several Cabinet secretaries that had helped ramp up government employment and infrastructure projects in the midst of the Great Depression.

Susan Ives, who works for the project from Mill Valley, California, said amateur contributors have helped identify public works buildings where plaques and labels went missing through neglect and as Roosevelt's progressive political ideals fell out of favor during the Cold War years.