Old Stone House off Yetman Trail
Sherry Bowen, a typesetter and later city editor for the Arizona Daily Star, had lived in Rockford, Illinois, but moved to Tucson in the late twenties with the hope that the change in climate would help Ruby Bowen’s serious heart serious heart condition. They lived in town for a few years, before homesteading on 2,000 acres in the Tucson Mountains and started building the stone house in 1931. It took one year to build the house, during which time the Bowen’s lived in a cabin nearby.
At that time, Tucson was still a small town. The Tucson Mountains terrain was a wilderness frequented by mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Ruby kept a diary while they were building the house. In the diary, she wrote about seeing mountain lions and bighorn sheep in the hills above the house. In one entry, she wrote of an incident where a mountain lion tried to climb through the window of her cabin while she was cooking some meat!
Ruby’s heart condition did improve, and the Bowen’s had a child in 1943. In 1944 they moved to New York, where Sherry worked for the AP. The land around their house was incorporated into the Tucson Mountain Park in 1983.
kenne
(Copy for this entry was prepared from the Tucson Hiking Guide written by Betty Leavengood. Additional Material: GVHC Library File 73)
Images by kenne
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Liking both the images and your narrative of Sherry & Ruby’s early Arizona experiences. Life here in the desert can be harsh NOW; I can only imagine what it was like 90 years ago.