Another Treasure of the Superstition Mountain

[Music] welcome to another edition very special of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains and today we're gonna learn all about the beginning of the Superstition Mountain Museum from somebody who should know all about that our own Larry Hedrick, Larry I know that you... started the museum with Tom Kullenburn how did you meet you know I met Tom Kullenburn in 1975 he was teaching a class down at the Apache Junction High School called prospecting the superstitions and I found it fascinating I took two courses in a row and although I had been here in the late 50s and knew about the legend from Hart Mullins and and other people Tom just so interested me in the mountains itself that and at the end of the class all the students rented horses and took a trip from Peralta Road all past weavers needle where we had lunch and then out first water road and I became friends with Tom and over the years we've if I said we made thirty trips in the mountains that wouldn't be an exaggeration how did the idea of the museum come about. Tom was a Rhodes Scholar he also was a teacher at unified Apache Junction unified district school district and he was he was involved in just about everything in Apache Junction you can name he was on a lot of different boards and stuff like that and somewhere around 1978 he began to talk about the need for a museum he even showed me where his dad had talked about the need for a museum here's a mystery of the superstitions for you Larry what what in on earth made you crazy enough you guys to think that you could start a museum one night we were over to his house just talking away and he brought up again and I said well Tom why don't we just do it all right so now you decide with Tom that you're gonna start a museum so what hoops did you have to jump through to get it all together we had never done anything like that before so what we did is we went and visited three museums in the Phoenix area and Mesa we the Arizona Historical Society the fire museum and Mesa Museum and we talked to all their CEOs and other people about what they went through to acquire tax exempt status and things of that nature and we borrowed articles of incorporation and we use their articles incorporation to design ours and we publish it in the newspaper three times like you're supposed to do and we paid for that kind of stuff out of our own pocket and in 1980 we finally got our tax except status and Tom and I both knew that nobody was going to seriously help a fledgling organization that didn't have a thing you know no building no nothing just a name and we are for the purposes of incorporating we had to have officers and Tom felt like we shouldn't be the officers you know we're just putting this together so we came to our wives as officers and and then of course after we got our status we we got our first board together and we got Clay Worst was the first president of the board and Berry Grandal was a educator at Apache Junction and one of my friends Carol Prophet was the other one and that was our founding board and we met at Clay Worst office which he was a real estate dealer several other people came along at that point and begin adding on Greg Davis finally come on a few other people like that and then we started meeting after we got about 10 people involved in the board we started meeting at the high school and when we got our tax except status Carol Prophet was that was a an artist and she is well-known she, she had works and and many of the the Scottsdale what do you call them Galleries... Scottsdale galleries and she knew a lot of people and one day she called me up and she says Larry there's a fella that's going to give a a large donation of Indian artifacts to Brigham Young University he's done that before and I said we'll take me out and introduce me to him and you know we know we knew that as I said people were not going to give things to a fledgling organization but I sit down at this guy's table for about an hour trying to convince him that we were worthy of receiving some of this stuff and all I got out of him was well we'll see well it's not very long after that he went ahead and made the donation of the best stuff to Brigham Young but he he donated four hundred pieces of Indian artifacts pottery and stuff like that most of it was restored but it was well done and we put that in and in June Woods garage who was the person that was nominated during the articles incorporation as the person took of contact and we stored a lot of stuff in her garage because she never parked her car in it and I just wanted to give an example of how some things came about because since we knew that people weren't going to help us right off the bat we actively sought donations We weren't thinking so much about money but we wanted to get things to fill a museum and Carol called me one night and there was a fella over in Paradise Valley that was selling his home rather fancy home with a three-car garage and he was moving up towards the Sedona and she wondered he was replacing all of the appliances in his house with all new stuff so that he first the sale of the home and Carol knew that I had a flatbed trailer and he was on a Sunday she called me up and wanted me to go over and get this stuff that he was going to give to her so I didn't want to go but I finally gave in we went over and loaded up all the stuff and sitting in the corner aways was in this empty three-car garage was a huge cabinet and I was looking at the back of it and it didn't look like much but I there was a space between the wall on the front of it and I went around and looked at it and it was an absolutely gorgeous display cabinet and I walked over to the guy and I said what's the story on that cabinet over there he says well that was handcrafted in Chicago in 1890 and shipped to Barry Goldwater's father's first store and Prescott and and I said gosh that's amazing I suppose you're taking that with you he said well I'd like to but I've been thinking about donate it to a museum I was back the next day with seven guys and we picked that thing up and loaded on the trailer and it's still in the museum to this day it is it is one of the most amazing cabinets you ever saw and and this is how we got started and another example is Carol called me up one day and said this fella over in Scottsdale has a complete collection of Arizona Highways he'd like to give to us well that's that's good but you know no hurry we put it off a week or so and we went over and saw the guy and he says well I gave those away already he says but I do have this fine collection of ore cars he had 15 or cars and stuff and he donated to the museum on the spot and we didn't have the boom truck at the time so we sent Bob Schoose over and he picked them all up and all of our stuff ended up at the Museum at Goldfield well we've done a lot of media in those days we were on Good Morning America West 57th Street unsolved mysteries all the TV channels and Phoenix and in Tucson and some national headlines because I used the Calvary to promote the museum and everything we did and we were in president reagan's inaugural parade we were in George Bush's inaugural parade and national television was was focused on this Apache Junction group associated with a museum and stuff like that and we began to get known through all this media that we did and we begin to get some offers the first offer we had was and I never could pronounce this quite right was Tove Castle Tovrea it's a Tovrea, Tovrea castle so we went down and looked at it and the place was was constructed out of solid cement and and all the electric electrical outlets were already there and it wasn't anything you could do to add anything as you went up these flights of stairs because each each part of the castle got a little smaller as you went to the top and we were really interested in that because of its location and it was well known but then they come up with the clincher says you guys are responsible for the care and maintenance of the building and the grounds well now that grounds are huge and they're just covered with cactus and you can imagine what kind of care that would take to to keep the weeds out of this place on on rainy monsoon season and where would we get the volunteers to do all that but because of several things we decided to pass on it and then we got an offer from Gold Canyon, Herald Crist had brought in a building from out of state a long building it's still out there to church right now but it was on blocks and and it needed plumbing and wiring and everything we didn't feel like we could swing that it's a good location but we decided to pass on that and then Ted Degrazia went down to Tucson and offered his Superstition Mountain facility to us and we went out and looked at it and most of it was dirt floors and you had to make about 15 turns to get to it it was the hardest place to get to I ever saw and it had very little parking and finally decided to pass on that well then a big offer came we got a call from Valley National Bank and wanted us to come down and talk to their president so we went down and went on the top story and and sat down these office and he says we're building Superstition Springs mall and we'd like to you boys to consider locating your museum at the mall and he says you won't have to pay any rent it will provide the space and stuff like that and he wanted some ideas we gave him some ideas about the construction in fact it used to be our idea to go through some canyons to get to the entrance and they had a model of the Dutchman's Buro and the Dutchman out there in a cave and all this sort of stuff and he finally ended up saying what would you boys have to have to do this and Tom and I looked at each other and Tom was speechless he didn't know what to say but knowing me I just blurted it out I said well sir we'd like to have a million dollar trust fund established at your bank where we don't get in either principle but we get the interest off that and he says well that's not a problem and we thought we had it made so I they wanted some of our stuff down there in the meantime so in the entrance of the place after they got it finished I took the Americas mounted military history all the uniforms of all the different wars we were in and made a big display and on the other side of the thing we had the animals of the superstitions and things like that and we we've really had the feeling that we were going to have a home without getting in in any detail because there are still people alive something happened to Valley National Bank it's not here anymore and that fell through then finally we got with Bob Schoose out of Goldfield ghost town and Bob offered to put us in a shell building and we were to do the electrical and sheetrock and the insulation and all that sort of stuff and he needed lumber so we made a deal when we went after the stamp mill in New Mexico that he got all the lumber and we got the mill and the museum at go field was built out of the lumber from the stamp mill in bland New Mexico so once you got it all together when did the doors open to the museum we established a museum there and opened it in 1990 and we've done an awful lot of work to the inside I mean it was a two-story building when we had to sheetrock the upstairs and the downstairs had to build all the exhibits and about the only help I had was a guy named Salvador Delgado he he came in and finally I had somebody to hold up the other end of the sheetrock and between us we we finally got it open and we, we opened in January 1 of 1990 and then I was doing a story for the journal we'd been doing journals for several years by the way it only took us nine years to get into a museum and a lot of those museums we talked to in Phoenix some of them took 15 or 20 years to get in there and they had some sugar daddies behind him we didn't have any money coming our way at all and I was doing a story on weeks ranch for our journal which came out once a year weeks ranch is located just across the street to the west of where the Superstition Mountain Museum is today the new one and in that research I noticed that it mentioned patented land and I said well that's private property that whole area out there was all BLM and Forest Service land it wasn't any private property in the area and so I called Clay Worst real estate dealer said Clay how would we find out what the status of this property is and he said well why don't you call George Murcury realty in Phoenix if anybody knows George would know so I called him and he described the place to and he said oh yeah he says that that was listed with me many years ago he says it's in receivership with the Royal Bank of Canada he says would you like me to call him and find out what the situation is so he calls back he says there's a hundred and sixty acres of private property there and you can have any or all of it for ten thousand acre well that's that seemed a little bit impossible but he explained that the Royal Bank of Canada was paying taxes on unimproved property that was killing them off over all these years and they really wanted to get rid of this property and so they they made us quite a little offer we were able to tie up pieces of it because it was separated by State Route 88 and and a dirt road that went off to the South Mountain View Road I think it was cold so it was already in three pieces you could only divide property back then into three pieces but since it was divided by the road in three pieces already each piece could be divided into three pieces so Clay Worst and I he's also a surveyor and surveyed all of his own properties that he was dealing with so I chained for him and run the aiming stakes and we said we laid out the whole Area and partitioned off the piece that we wanted and broke all of them down into three separate pieces and that kind of thing and we put a sign up on the property to cross the road with the museum's phone number so when we'd get a call I would close the doors at the Museum and go show property and this is one of the greatest entrepreneurial associations I've ever involved in we went from a fledgling organization in a rented facility with virtually penniless to a million-dollar corporation in no time at all what happened was that we first tied up the 57 acres where the museum is now divided into three pieces and sold off this north piece and the south piece the fellow that bought the north piece we we bought it for we tied it up for 10,000 an acre we sold it for 15 so the 16 and a half acres to the north have made us $80,000 and each piece that we sold there after we paid the bank there 10,000 and we got our profit and the final piece was eighty seven and a half acres which amounted to over six hundred thousand dollars and when we got through selling all that land the museum had a profit of nine hundred and ninety one thousand dollars almost a million dollars then we spent two hundred and twenty dollars to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars to bring water in a six-inch line over a mile to this property what served everybody although they didn't pay for it we paid for it all they had to do was pay hookup charges the man that paid two hundred and forty thousand dollars for the 16 acres to the north immediately after water came in sold it for a million and a half so now you can see that after all this effort we had a paid for piece of property a building that was bought and paid for and and then of course we had the other buildings that we brought in and that property today based upon what the fellow at the north sold his for a million and a half for 16 acres our 13 acres ought to be worth a considerable sum of money today because it now has water and that's the way the Historical Society got started with Tom and I as co-founders and this marvelous wonderful opportunity of finding this property paid for everything and that's my story and I'm sticking to it well there you have it one of the mysteries of the Superstition Mountains has been solved courtesy of our own Larry Hendrick and that's the history behind the Superstition Mountain Museum all right here on your favorite show I'm sure Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains [Music]

Channel: Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains

Views: 33,102

Keywords: Charlie LeSueur, Superstition Mountains, The Lost Dutchman Mine, Superstition Mountain Museum, Opal Images, Arizona, History, Gold, Treasure, Supersstition Mountain Museum, larry Hedrick, Museum

Id: OgdYRev2QsQ

Length: 20min 30sec (1230 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019