Fort Union National Monument
national monument in the United States
Fort Union National Monument is a unit of the United States National Park Service located 7.7 miles north of Watrous in Mora County, New Mexico.
The site preserves the remains of three forts that were built starting in the 1850s. Also visible at Fort Union and from the road leading to it are ruts from the Mountain and Cimarron Branches of the old Santa Fe Trail.
The monument has a visitor center containing a historical museum and showing a film about the fort's history. A self-guiding trail leads through remains of the second and third forts. Ruins of the ordnance depot and site of the first fort are visible across the valley to the west.
The monument is open 8:00 am to 4:00 pm throughout the year except Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November), Christmas Day (December 25), and New Year's Day (January 1). Admission is free.
Description by William Davis
Santa Fe trader and author William Davis gave his first impression of the fort in 1857:
Fort Union, a hundred and ten miles from Santa Fé, is situated in the pleasant valley of the Moro. It is an open post, without either stockades or breastworks of any kind, and, barring the officers and soldiers who are seen about, it has much more the appearance of a quiet frontier village than that of a military station.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fort Union National Monument” is national monument in the United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fort, Union and National, not as a finished interpretation.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q623124. VIAF identifies the subject as 315527734. The Library of Congress control number is sh93003386. Authority coordinates are 35.907, -105.012. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fort Union National Monument” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.