Fort Larned contains nine sandstone buildings that have lasted through the years. The oldest of those buildings, the Old Commissary, is beginning to show its age. The Old Commissary’s foundation and walls have started to shift and jeopardize the structural integrity of the building.

Over the summers of 2005 and 2006, a team from the Historic Preservation Training Center in Frederick, Maryland, has been working in the blistering Kansas heat to protect and restore the building to its former self.

There were two main goals of this project: rebuild the walls so they don’t lean and pour a new foundation. Rebuilding the walls was an interesting process to observe. The HPTC team took a plastic sheet and a marker and traced around every piece of stone in a section of wall. Then they took that wall section down and set the stones in a wood frame in the exact placement it had on the wall. This allowed the team to access the foundation and add a modern one to help support the original. Then they rebuilt the walls, replacing every stone back to its original place. 

During this process, there were two major discoveries that changed the way the building is interpreted. The first was a stone with the carving of a name: J.H. McLaughlan. He was a member of Company B of the 3^rd U.S. Infantry. This shows that even the soldiers of Fort Larned helped in constructing the buildings. The other discovery was in another carving a bit further down the wall of Juan da Jesus, 1859. The Old Commissary wasn’t built until 1866. Not much is known of da Jesus, but the current theory is that the stone was from the original adobe Camp Alert. That camp was built in the Hispanic style and would explain why some of the stones in the Old Commissary look a bit different at the top of the walls than the bottom of the walls.