Contributing What You Can: Investing in Palace History in Fiscal Year

The New Mexico History Museum hit many high notes in fiscal year 2023-24 (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024), thanks in part to $294,576 in private giving via the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. The resulting exhibitions and education programs drew 70,459 visitors, including a nearly 30% increase in visitation from New Mexicans.

The museum also logged an astounding 934 docent tours, while 786 youth participated in the always-popular Hochberg Early Education
Academy. Funded by Foundation advisory trustee Stephen Hochberg and his wife Jane, the academy offers museum visits and educational programs to pre-K and Head Start students and their families.

The architectural heart of the New Mexico History Museum—the historic Palace of the Governors—provided a fiscal year focal point for fundraising. Thanks to advocacy through the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, led by government affairs director Lorin Abbey,
$610,000 in capital outlay funds was secured from the New Mexico State Legislature for preservation of the Palace.

The April reopening of the Palace, History Homecoming, was a festive unveiling of the renovated structure that drew 2,600 people. The occasion spotlighted the launch of several new Foundation-supported exhibitions at the Palace, including 18 Miles and That’s As Far
As It Got: The Lamy Branch of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; The Art of Peter Ashwanden: For the Compleat Idiot; and Reflections on History: Palace Through Time.

Foundation advisory trustee Michael Pettit and his wife Cindi were among several major sponsors of the grand reopening weekend. Michael Pettit, a former Foundation trustee and board chair, is a longtime supporter of the Palace and New Mexico History Museum, an expression of a deep love for New Mexico developed during his boyhood summers on his family’s southeastern New Mexico ranch.

Pettit moved permanently to New Mexico in 2002. In 2006, he published Riding for the Brand: 150 Years of Cowden Ranching, a book chronicling six generations of his ranching family, who resided around Jal and Santa Rosa.

This led to his meeting Frances Levine, former director of the New Mexico History Museum. She was researching ranching in Jal and connected with Pettit’s uncle, Rooster Cowden. “Our shared interest in New Mexico history and her connection to my family strengthened our bond,” Pettit recalls.

Soon, Levine was giving Pettit hard-hat tours of the then-under construction museum. Inspired by her commitment to telling New Mexico's
complete history, including the often-overlooked contributions of Anglo ranchers, Pettit and his extended family—the Cowdens in Santa Rosa and the Kelloggs in Texas—wrote their first check for the museum in 2008.

Later, as Foundation board chair, Pettit was pivotal in renovating the Shonnard House into the Foundation’s new home, providing a $100,000 lead gift. “I knew a permanent home would benefit the Foundation's long-term interests,” he says. The Shonnard House’s Pettit Family Garden recognizes his family’s generous support and his inspiring leadership. He humbly notes that “the garden was not something I asked for nor expected. At the ranch, everyone contributes according to their abilities. That's what my family has been doing and will continue to do through our involvement with the Foundation.”

The philosophy of contributing what you can inspired another important gift to the Palace this fiscal year. David Huntley, husband to Foundation trustee Edelma Huntley, combined his dual passion for fine woodworking and New Mexico history to create a beautiful wood loveseat for the interior lobby of the Palace.

While visiting the Palace during renovations, Huntley recognized valuable Ponderosa heart pine being discarded. He intervened, received the museum’s approval and salvaged the wood. Working from a “sketch that exists only in my mind,” he says, a kind of inner dialogue, Huntley paid homage to the Palace’s extraordinary history, hoping to craft “a legacy piece that will last generations.”

Huntley’s bench is another example of the many ways that “friends, and especially donors, allow the museum to connect even greater numbers of people with New Mexico history,” says Billy Garrett, the museum’s executive director. “Your gift makes you an advocate for the importance of history in our lives.”

This article and images are from the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s Member News Magazine.