Three people were arrested after an arson fire over the weekend destroyed one of the structures for the closed Fort Courage Trading Post complex near Houck, Arizona.
Puerco Fire and EMS posted on its Facebook page:
Southern Navajo Nation News posted a video from a bystander of the fire in progress:
The Apache County arrests and inmates log didn’t have anything about arson arrests, but the website hadn’t been updated since Thursday.
Route 66 researcher Blue Miller researched the history of Fort Courage for her Never Quite Lost website:
Joseph Grubbs opened the White Mound Trading Post at the present site in 1933. That closed in 1948, but Fort Courage was built in the late 1960s.
It was an exercise in cashing in on the success of the short-lived but popular television series, F Troop. There was no actual link between the two and it certainly wasn’t the series’ location, but the owners tacitly encouraged the idea that this was where the TV programme had been filmed. There was also little note taken of copyright – postcards from the 1970s show signs that read ‘HOME OF F TROOP’ although they disappeared in later years. […]
Next to the trading post is the abandoned Pancake House which was originally built as a restaurant by Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakery of Los Angeles. The company had a chain of windmill-styled bakeries around LA and plans to extend across the country with a distinctive windmill building design.
Miller said the complex closed about 2014.
(Image of Fort Courage Trading Post near Houck, Arizona, in 2017 by Bill Eichelberger via Flickr)
And the punishment for deliberately destroying someone else’s property – just for fun – is?
It’s a felony in Arizona that can lead up to a prison term of 3 to 12.5 years, up to 7 years of probation, and a maximum fine of $150,000.
What in the WORLD were those three yahoos thinking?! We’re at the start of the fire season. What if that fire had spread? How about a few years at hard labor on a chain-gang. Maybe next time they’ll think twice before they strike a match.
What a shame this happened. I’ve driven by Fort Courage a few times, but never stopped, especially since it was closed in 2014. And maybe that’s why it closed. Now I’ll never see the insides.