Welcoming the La Farge House to Historic Santa Fe Foundation's Register

The La Farge House Register Nomination

Based on the nomination researched and written by UNM graduate student Hayden McAffee and Dr. Audra Bellmore. Summarized by Giulia Caporuscio. 

At the February 22, 2024 HSFF Board of Directors meeting, the La Farge House nomination was approved for HSFF’s Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation. The house was constructed in 1867 along the Santa Fe Trail and was situated on this route that later shared some of the same path of Route 66 from 1926-1937. The La Farge House is significant to the history of Santa Fe on multiple levels. It is an historic home originally from the Territorial period displaying many of the characteristic details and embellishments of that time. Important figures of Santa Fe’s early art and archeological community, including the pioneering archeologist Jesse Nusbaum owned and resided in the home. The home’s namesake, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oliver La Farge and his wife Consuelo moved into the house in  1947 and purchased it in 1953. Their son writer and historian Pen La Farge currently resides in the home. While multiple changes and additions to the home occurred, primarily during the first half of the 20th century, the property retains its architectural and landscape integrity, its view to the street, and its placement in the surrounding neighborhood.   

The 2,500 square-foot main house is a one-story adobe structure. It reflects Territorial style, with red brick coping encircling the entire structure. The windows and doors stand out for their blue trim, though they do not have the typical pedimented lintels of Territorial and Revival styles. The front façade has a white L-shaped wood portal with slender columns looking over an open garden protected from the street by a low adobe wall. The original part of the house was a large sala and attached room creating an L-plan. This was built circa 1867. In 1927, during the Nusbaums’ ownership, it was remodeled, raising the ceiling and opening the sala from three rooms into one large room. During the 1920s-1930s, the two portals, kitchen, storeroom, bedroom, bathroom, and connecting passageways were added. After the La Farges bought the property, they added another wing with two more bedrooms and another bathroom. Lastly Oliver’s office and studio was added to the front of the house, protruding forward. This addition created the current façade. 

GOOGLE MAPS. SEPTEMBER 2022. OLD SANTA FE TRAIL, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO STREET VIEW MAP. RETRIEVED MARCH 2024.

The property is located on the Old Santa Fe Trail, named for the trade route dating back to 1821 that remained an important conduit between Santa Fe and Missouri until the arrival of the railroad in 1880. The earliest record for the property is a hand-written deed on November 9, 1855. The original house was built in 1867, consisting of an L-shaped four room adobe house. In 1897 Juan Olivas purchased the property from Juanita Garcia de Hill and Adolphus P. Hill. Mary Aileen Nusbaum and Jesse Logan Nusbaum purchased the property from Juan Olivas in 1926. Lucy H Sturges and Cyrus B. More bought the property from the Nusbaums in 1939. In 1953 Oliver La Farge and wife Consuelo bought the property, though they had been renting it since 1947. The property was later passed down to their son Pen La Farge.

 Jesse Nusbaum and his wife Mary Aileen Nusbaum purchased the house in 1926 and owned it until 1939. During that time Nusbaum worked as an archeologist, as Superintendent of Mesa Verde and as the Director of the Laboratory of Anthropology. Mary Aileen was an artist. After his tenure at the Laboratory from 1930-1936, Nusbaum continued to work as a senior archeologist with the National Park Service at the neighboring NPS Southwest Regional Office until his retirement in 1957 and was a resident of Santa Fe until his death in 1975.

The namesake for the house, Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge, was born in New York City in 1901. Writer and anthropologist, he is known for his work with Indigenous groups. He came from a family of architects, artists, senators, ambassadors, and naval officers. He received an undergraduate and masters degree from Harvard University. As an undergraduate student he went on two undergraduate expeditions to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, his first interaction with Indigenous groups of the Southwest.

After graduating, he took a position at Tulane University in the Department of Middle American Research, where he participated in multiple expeditions to Central America. In 1929 he graduated with a masters, published his book Laughing Boy, which received the Pulitzer Prize, and married Wanden E. Mathews. They had two kids Oliver “Pete” Albee and Anya Povy. In 1930 he accepted a position as the head of the Eastern Association of Indian Affairs, which later became the American Association for Indian Affairs, AAIA. In 1936, La Farge moved back to Santa Fe alone, and they divorced in 1937. In 1939, he married Consuelo Otille de Pendaries y Baca, in 1940 they moved to Santa Fe and stayed.  They moved into this house in 1947 as renters, and bought it in 1953, and raised their son, John Pendaries La Farge, here. 

During World War II Oliver La Farge assumed the title Lieutenant Colonel while serving as the official historian of the Air Transport Command, afterwards he returned as president. During his several expeditions to Indigenous communities of the Southwest, he made close relationships with Indigenous groups. He became a known and trusted figure in the communities. He leveraged his authority and became a pivotal figure in many campaigns and demonstrations including the fight for the return of Taos Pueblo’s Blue Lake.

 This nomination was written by 2023’s Mac Watson Fellow Hayden McAffee. Hayden graduated from the University of New Mexico in August 2023 with a master's degree in historic preservation and regionalism. He received his bachelor's degree in interior design and architecture with a minor in architectural history and theory from Oklahoma State University in 2020. Originally from Texas, Hayden has had a lifelong fascination with the history and culture of the American Southwest. This project allowed him to dive into the archives to research an individual who played such an influential role in the region's cultural landscape, Oliver La Farge. He began by interviewing Pen La Farge, Oliver La Farge's son, who still lives in the home. His research even took him to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which stewards a large part of the Oliver La Farge archives. His favorite find is a small watercolor painted by La Farge on an expedition in Mexico. Hayden now resides in Burlington, Vermont, and is enjoying connecting the dots between La Farge's East Coast roots and his life in Santa Fe. Hayden was mentored by Audra Bellmore, PhD. Bellmore is an associate professor at UNM as well as the John Gaw Meem Curator overseeing the John Gaw Meem Archives of Southwestern Architecture. 

Pete Warzel Reviews Patrick Joyce's "Remembering Peasants"

Book Review and a Commentary

Sold

Remembering Peasants • Patrick Joyce

$30.00

Publisher: Scribner (February 20, 2024)

Length: 400 pages

ISBN13: 9781668031087

On backorder.

Add To Cart

By Pete Warzel

I was drawn to this book for strictly subjective reasons. I consistently, constantly, tell my family and friends, “I love peasant food.” Said slyly, but whole-heartedly, and honestly. Our condo in Boulder, Colorado, is three blocks from an establishment called Bohemian Biergarten that I do not get to visit often enough. Sausages, sauerkraut, Jaeger Schnitzel, spaetzle, crispy gnocchi, goulash, and bier/beer. Czech beer, German beer, Austrian beer. No microbrew fruit beer. Simple, earthy food. Street tacos, menudo, tamales, and cerveza in our world here in New Mexico.

The craving is in my genes, jump started when I began doing business in Central Europe many years ago. I felt at home in the center of Europe, and yes partly due to the art and architecture, music, the history of empires, boundaries in constant flux, the long road from there to here, but also because of the evocative feeling of the countryside and traditions in the villages – the customs of hunting (though I do not hunt), local celebrations, church rituals, superstitions, and somehow, inbred social memories of people who looked familiar to me.

My grandmother Warzel, Susan, Zuzana, Baba, spoke no English, only Russian, having immigrated before War I, married, and moved into a home in the small Russian Orthodox enclave on the eastside of Buffalo, New York. We are not sure from where she came, though most likely what is now Slovakia. I wonder at her feelings about the house she moved into on Benzinger Street, coming from one likely much more rudimentary in amenities and size. It must have felt massive, too much to handle for a peasant. At the end of the street, addressed actually on Ideal Street, a proper name for the location, is Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church, the anchor of this “village” within an American city. On nearby Lovejoy Street, also a perfect street name for the property, was Warzel’s Tavern, another anchor in the “village,” operated by an offshoot of the family that I really did not know.

She, Baba, was small, always smiling, hands gnarled, knuckles swollen, gray hair in a bun, and loving. One of my earliest memories is of her and me in the attic of the worn, two-story house, where light came in from the windowed eaves, front and back, and she handmade very thin noodles, on a large wooden table. I watched in anticipation because there was nothing as good as her noodles in chicken broth, nothing. (I passed on the herring at New Year’s.) We did not speak intelligibly, although she spoke, telling me what she was doing at each step with me not translating, but following. We understood each other. She would pinch my cheek smiling and say “Schnudik” (shnudik, shnudic, snudick?), which my aunt, her daughter, told me years later translated to “piss pot.”

This all might echo in parts, New Mexico, and the correlation is sound. The book really has nothing to do with our state, though the descriptions of community in a small farm agrarian culture that is disappearing has more than serendipitous connections to northern New Mexico. The conclusions Professor Joyce reaches in his book have direct implications for what we are doing here with history, preservation, cultural continuity, and our present and future social concerns and correlation, especially in Santa Fe and its surroundings.

Patrick Joyce is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Manchester, Irish, descended from “peasants” in County Mayo, Ireland, “Joyce Country” as he calls it, one source of deliberation in his social history of peasants. He and his book are each a revelation.

The book proper is an extensively researched history of peasantry primarily in Europe, and its quickening demise in our time. “Figures tell the European story in stark fashion….In France, once the greatest peasant country in Europe, the percentage of people in agriculture was only 3% in 2019….By 2021 agriculture accounted for only a little 1 percent of GDP in the EU.”

In a report by KUNM, the University of New Mexico FM radio station, in 2023, Tomás Vigil, speaks at his family farmhouse in Pilar, New Mexico. "’ Why not preserve the farm that's in the heart of it,’ he asks. He worries his family will one day sell the land, developers will come and an old way of life, a historic community will be gone.” That is the crux of this book, here and worldwide.

What is a Peasant? Chapter 2 - “A peasant is a country person, a person of the land. That is all the word in its original innocence means.” But the elements of that country person are not as simple, though simply clear. “…What it highlights is the family and the family economy. The family anchors things in the peasant world. The essential point is that the land – whether it is self-owned, rented, aspired to or enserfed – is understood to be social rather than an economic entity.” And the personal traits are of a complex simplicity in demeanor: silent, conservative, frugal, hard-working, an ethic of soundness and craft in their work, tied to the seasons by a circular sense of time, a belief system that may be Protestant or most likely Roman Catholic, but still infused with the old religions and superstitions of nature, and finally identity in “group solidarity.” These traits add up to something less than acceptable to the more refined world of institutional education and money. “The German Bauer derives from Bur in Low German. In English, it is pronounced like boor, which is where the English word “boor” derives from.” Boor? An unrefined, ill-mannered person. A peasant to the people of the cities. Bauer is the German word for peasant, farmer, or neighbor.

“They were outside history…they were outside time.” So the peasant.

The center of this world is “…the ‘home place’ as the house and farm are called in Ireland.” Also the village, the gathering of like people tried by the same battles against nature and government restrictions. Home, farm, village – querencia in the language of northern New Mexico, the safe place, the center. “You go into the house and are on familiar ground as all houses are more or less the same.” The home place is a shared identity.

Professor Joyce’s conclusions in real-time are pertinent to us all. He centers his thoughts on history and heritage in our times where “everything happens now,” and what that means to the act of memory, or teaching history. His distaste for the word “heritage” is upfront and direct, “bereft of context”, engendering “depthlessness” in history. “Heritage is thus the form of the past for those who neither have the time nor the interest to ask questions of it….” And so a “museumification” occurs, “a post-colonial nostalgia” played out through the “…fantasies of second homeowners, for who the newly acquired peasant house was the material expression of the peasant soul.” That allows for “…unmediated access to what in Britain became ‘the good life’, one lived like the peasants of yore….” Sound familiar? Once strictly agrarian homes on Acequia Madre and Canyon Road, as witnessed by the acequias still visible there, lost to their original function of watering for subsistence farming, are now the core of expanded homes that provide a true Santa Fe experience.

I once had a discussion with former Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales about the tension of the potential for development and the restrictions of historic code, specific to downtown and adjacent historic districts. We talked about the looming presence of the city itself becoming a museum, and that museums held things in disuse, not living but on artificial respiration, not useful except to gaze upon a past alien to us now. To my horror I saw an Instagram post from the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, several years ago, that proclaimed that the city itself as the best museum of all in a city of museums.

It seems to me that initiatives that take the vision from out of the preservation and museum norms may be the way to best “preserve” the cultural history of a place, by preserving directly the centers, the homes, of the history itself. Initiatives like the repair and stabilization of traditional homes to keep them habitable and maintain ownership within the family could be a positive step forward. The Endangered Properties Program by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation and Habitat for Humanity, as well as the work done by Nuevo Mexico Profundo, begin to foster a new norm of preservation. They focus on the at-risk cultural history and landscapes, and take a direct step in making sound the homes and churches of the traditional cultures of Santa Fe and the state, ensuring continuation of real life in real time.

The danger of this is of course the “knowing better” by the outsider, we who look in and pontificate – that whiff of denigration that comes with any effort to save or interpret what has gone before by someone other. I think even Professor Joyce would admit to a bit of that potential. It recalls the posture of General Stephen Watts Kearney on the Las Vegas, New Mexico plaza: We come amongst you as friends - not as enemies; as protectors not as conquerors. We come among you for your benefit, not for your injury. In other words, “I am from the home office and here to help.”

Professor Joyce’s writing is superb, a literary book, not just a pedantic history or repository for statistics. There is poetry in his writing, enhanced by his frequent citations from Seamus Heaney and John Berger, who both wrote of peasants, the earth, work and beliefs in Ireland and France respectively. His history is eloquent. His ability to connect the dots to a larger issue, that of memory, remembering, and how to do and not do it during our time when “the ephemeral came to be highly prized” is an even larger gift to us reading this in northern New Mexico. It rings true close to home, and hopefully we learn from the wisdom he presents. Remembering Peasants is a stunning work in history. “The past is never over.” Or, “The presence of the past is my theme.” So well said by the Professor. We call Santa Fe “The City Different”, but in the end it is not so much different than every countryside made citified worldwide, moving the original agrarian culture to a social level looked down upon, and then wanting it to be saved by the rest of us for the present. We are truly not so different than any other history in our new world of instant gratification, and “If you are not on the tourist trail, things can be hard.…”

Pete Warzel Reviews Álvaro Enrigue's "You Dreamed of Empires"

Review by Pete Warzel

Last year in August this blog published a review of a history of the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Conquistadors and Aztecs, by Stefan Rinke. That was then, this is now. Welcome to the Electric Kool-Aid conquest of the Mexica/Nahua…an extraordinary reimagining of the machinations of colonialism. Tenochtitlan here is Tenoxtitlan and 1519 is cast in a modern literary trip, non-stop, cranked up a notch or two by the ingestion of magic mushrooms. Álvaro Enrigue manages a fantastical Cortés v. Moctezuma endgame, and it works as a novel for our times.

Mr. Enrigue is an award-winning Mexican author who has taught at Columbia and Princeton, working on his PhD in Latin American literature to while away the time. He has the literary chops for this epic story that sets in motion the history of the Western hemisphere, including the devolution to our convoluted corner of the Southwest. We all know the story of the Conquest of Mexico, but not from this angle. It is stunning.

You Dreamed of Empires

Written by Álvaro Enrigue
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books
Hardcover
240 Pages
$28.00.

He begins the novel with a note, instructions to his English translator, that explains his use of Nahua words and names, with pronunciations. Then he backs off, apologizes with the truest rationalization of a writer and his work. “…But I’m a writer and words matter to me. They may signify and signal, but I believe they also invoke.” 

Enrigue’s prose hints at Garcia Marquez – fluid, poetic always, but not timid. There are echoes of Borges. Dialogue is embedded in the narrative without quotation marks, much like Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but it is not difficult to follow. All flows smoothly in the story. He takes on the gore of Aztec social justice and the bone-crunching violence of battle with a wicked sense of humor. It is a chilling scene when we encounter Moctezuma with his sister/wife Atoxtli that runs counter to our historical conception of his indecisiveness regarding the Spanish invaders. “There’ll be no scandal in this house, and if I have to erase you, I will.” That is the cold voice of an emperor and a very icy brother. “These are days of blood and shit.” That is the voice of a pragmatic leader. 

All of the characters are historical, save one fictional invention. Enrigue himself appears in real time in a scene where the tripping Moctezuma sees him and certainly does not understand. The story proper is divided into four sections, and all action takes place in the course of one day – when the Spaniards enter Tenoxtitlan for the first time. It begins with “Before the Nap,” in the heart of the city at Moctezuma’s invitation. Most of the action is internal to the characters as they feast with the emperor’s sister/wife in the old palace. There is a wonderful episode where the captains of the Spanish search for their stable boy and the 27 horses in his charge. They begin to walk the palace rooms and hallways, lost in a maze, a labyrinth, and the narration is the stuff of nightmares. “Also, they had the sense that the corridors and cells they’d been wandering through were getting narrower and narrower.” They call and hear response from the rest of the Spanish soldiers in the palace. “They were on the other side of the long wall, but Caldera and his men couldn’t figure out how to get to them despite walking the length of it several times.” I have had a variation of that dream many times.

Section two is “Moctezuma’s Nap” – the center of the book. “The silence his nap demanded was imperial.” The story’s motion is on hiatus. Section three, “After the Nap” starts the forward march of history with long narration and quick cut scenes of the stress-induced palace intrigue within Moctezuma’s court. Parallel action by Cortés, Moctezuma, his sister, and the fictional character, Jazmín Caldera, moves rapidly, all leading to the same place at the same time – the end of the day for the temple sacrifices. The emperor is tripping on more and more mushrooms and Enrigue inserts modern drug slang into the story. “…Give me a slide, a whole one.” Time becomes surreal as Moctezuma and his high priest at the temple of  Huitzilopochtli hear music, and begin to dance to the music of Marc Bolan’s 1970’s rock band, T. Rex. The song is “Monolith” and you really must give it a listen to put the whole novel in context. Linked here.

Section Four, “Cortés’s Dream,” is a powerhouse of imagery at the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma, with all the novel’s players present. Cortés delivers a history of Christianity and the emperor bids the conquistador to “dream now.” The day ends, the action of the novel is over. But the dream…it is the dream of the entire history of Mexico from that day forward, condensed elegantly into three pages. “…But the new kingdom that he had called  New Spain grew so much that it stretched all the way to another enormous kingdom to the north, to be called New Mexico.” Magnificent.

With all the press on this novel, I expected a doorstop of a book. It is about the size of a paperback physically and runs to just 227 written pages. A surprisingly modest package, but also an epic undertaking. To put it all succinctly, “No one had any idea what was going on.” We can recount history, but most assuredly we still do not know what is really going on in our world.

Álvaro Enrigue’s novel is a marvel.

Remembering Stanley Crawford

Remembering Stanley Crawford
A gentleman, intellectual, environmental and political activist, a great writer, and yes, a farmer. 
By Pete Warzel

Following the passing of John Nichols several months ago, I tried to repair my dutiful neglect and emailed Stan Crawford after the new year, who I immediately thought about given his age. I told him that now, me being retired, I was foot loose and fancy free, so let’s meet for lunch in Dixon, at Zuly’s Cafe, where he always enjoyed the food and hominess of place.

I received a reply that stunned me. He told me he was dying of prostate cancer and only had a few days left. He wished me and Denise a Happy New Year.

I did not know what to say, but told him I hoped that his next life was in a place that had enough room for his enormous creativity and wicked wit.

This morning I heard the sad news. I am so sorry.

Stanley Crawford was a gentleman, an intellectual, an environmental and political activist, a great writer, and yes, a farmer. He was a truly inventive novelist, although best known for his non-fiction. Mayordomo is, in my mind, maybe the best book written about northern New Mexico in our time. He was a garlic farmer and wrote according to the seasons of the farm. Winter – writing time. Spring through fall - working the land. How wonderful is that balance with the earth that we now have all but lost? We are tied to work schedules that are artificially constructed, home lives that are set by television shows and clocks, and disrupted by all things social media. Stan knew the true rhythms of the land just as he labored over the rhythms of a written sentence, each to the betterment of the work.

I first met Stan at a Board of Directors meeting of the Railyard Community Corp., where he sat as a Director due to his guidance and commitment to the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market. We talked writing and he invited me up to El Bosque Garlic Farm for a visit. Over the years I reviewed his novels, did a profile piece on him for New Mexico Magazine, met him for coffee at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, and genuinely enjoyed his company. He was a very wise man, not afraid to take a stand, apparent in the recent legal actions over Chinese garlic import inequities. Over the years Stan spoke and read from his newly published books at The Historic Santa Fe Foundation, and he always filled the house. He appeared shy, but was certainly sure of himself, and I do not think suffered fools.

He leaves an empty space at the Santa Fe Farmers Market. He leaves his readers alone with his fine books. He leaves this odd piece of geography in northern New Mexico a much better place. And he leaves his friends and colleagues smiling, remembering his intelligence and wit.

“You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know. Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences...” - Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm.

2023 Faith & John Gaw Meem Preservation Trades Internship Report by Giulia Caporuscio

Front Wall Saga  

  The summer started with a week of getting to know the lay of the land at El Zaguán as the Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s (HSFF) 2023 Faith and John Gaw Meem Preservation Trades Intern. Any spare time I had I spent familiarizing myself with the Foundation’s preservation easements. The second week HSFF Preservation Projects and Programs Manager Jacob Sisneros and I went straight to work plastering El Zaguán’s front wall. Don Sena, from Cornerstones Community Partnerships, collaborated with us, supplying the materials, and teaching us the tricks of working with adobe. The mixture was equal parts sand and clay, with a slightly gray hue. The wall was not in terrible condition but had a few holes in places. The previous mixture had been too sandy, and a colony of ants took up residence in the top. With Don, Jacob, and I working on the wall we finished in three days, with half a day spent mixing and hauling more sand and clay. A bonus was going with Don to San Miguel Chapel where he gave me a full tour of the work and renovations there and pointed out some archeological finds. This visit included laying electrical cables in adobe walls, hard troweling, applying lime plaster, and dry packing around windows and doors.   

  The rain on June 25, took down the cap of the wall. On July 26, we replastered the cap with the leftover mix we had from the second week. This time we tried adding Elmer's glue to the mix, to see if the polymer would help against monsoons. This trick is used at Las Golondrinas for all the final plaster. The addition of Elmer's glue changed the consistency of the mud mix, creating a non-Newtonian liquid, making it easier to trowel onto the wall but harder to hold and place the mud. It also made the mixture drier. I noticed that the wall needed to be soaked before the mixture was applied, then I would throw the mud on, wet that, then trowel it smooth. Then for good measure wet the new patch before troweling again. The final cap came out smooth and more scratch proof than with the previous mix. It did not hold up against the rain of August 8th. Parts of the new cap remained, but the wall was still wet two days after the big rain. The moisture in the wall meant that more of the plaster peeled off during the next day. In one spot the adobes were exposed, the same spot that had a huge hole at the beginning of the summer. (It appears that the tree next to the wall directs water into that spot). It is discouraging the damage done to the wall, but it is a reminder that this is just mud, it is a material that came from the earth and will return to it, it is still in sync with the climate and reacts to the weather. It is a material that does what is needed but requires more maintenance, however, does not exploit or harm the environment when it fails. The process of remudding the wall is in tune with the cultural practice of New Mexico and mirrors the reality of generations of people in the greater Southwest.   

Completed front wall in June

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Damage from June 25 storm

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Completed font wall in July

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Damage from August 8 storm

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Las Golondrinas Adventures  

    My main project at Las Golondrinas was the rebuilding of an horno. The original horno was over twenty years old and the adobe walls had become too thin to hold heat and properly roast the green chilis it was most often used for. The first job was to demolish and haul away the dirt from the old horno. After this I discovered that the floor of the horno was originally a cement circle, with a packed earth floor beneath.  The next process was clearing out and leveling the ground to lay bricks to create an even, easy to clean floor for the horno. Then came the process of laying the adobes. The adobes were trapezoidal blocks specially ordered from Adobe Man in Santa Fe.   

  I played around with the layout of the adobes to determine the best size and structural pattern. Since the layout was circular, I soon realized that I needed to fill the mortar in between neighboring adobes with adobe shards so that there were not huge gaps of mortar that would change shape as the horno dried. This process was slow. Every level had to dry completely before building the next round to prevent settling. That and the summer temperatures required a water break every fifteen minutes. When I was four courses in, I plastered the interior before I would no longer be able to fit my arm inside. Then I finished the arch with a keystone. I added a port at the back and closed off the horno in two more courses. The rest of my time on the horno was spent evening things out and creating a dome on top, rather than a flat top. I plastered the exterior with the Elmer’s glue mixture, then we lit the inaugural fire inside.   

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

  The rest of my time at Las Golondrinas consisted of plastering and wall repairs. These projects included a pair of buttresses, the wall along the ram enclosure, the comal, and a small wall next to the sheep enclosure. There was some relief in this work since most was shaded. Really hot days required the workday to start at five in the morning to avoid the sun. The heat could also be seen in the plastering. Many places had some minor cracks in the plaster since the new work would dry too quickly. Las Golondrinas was a quiet place to work and plaster, especially when I would get there hours before the visitors or other workers. I made friends with a goat in the ram enclosure, saw hawks, ospreys, vultures, hummingbirds, hundreds of lizards, toads, frogs, and scorpions.  I answered many questions from tourists, most often about what was in the mixture.   

Freshly mud-plastered wall on the right

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Goat

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Student Workshop  

    One of my favorite events from the summer was the student workshop with the Santa Fe Children’s Museum Youth Conservation Corps. Five high school students participated in the workshop. I enjoyed showing them how to mix mud for the adobes and lay them into the forms, while trying to answer their questions on how to identify a true adobe building around Santa Fe.  

Photo by Jacob Sisneros

Photo by Giulia Caporuscio

Wood Working   

An unexpected skill from this summer was learning some basic woodworking skills from Jacob. I had used some power tools before, but I gained more confidence with them, learned more safety precautions for them, and ultimately how to respect the tools. The first project was building a frame for the arches built at the youth workshop. This included working with an electric jigsaw and cordless drills. Our biggest project was building a crate to protect an artifact. This taught me how to use a circular saw to cut all the wood pieces to size. The last project I briefly worked on was refurbishing a table. This taught me about belt sanders and orbital sanders.  

Preservation Knowledge  

The skills I can add to my resume following my internship at HSFF include conditions assessment, site maintenance, fundraising and party planning, preservation easements, and familiarity with nonprofits.  As I said going into this, I wanted more practical experience in historic preservation, and I am so grateful for what I have gained this summer. I saw my skills in plastering, creating mud mixes, and estimating how much material is needed increase greatly.  I have seen so many beautiful examples of historic preservation from the J.B. Jackson House to Los Pinos Guest Ranch, Oppenheimer’s house, and behind the scenes at El Zaguan, Las Golondrinas, San Miguel Chapel, and a few easement properties.  

I am most grateful for the people I have met this summer and the insights I have received from them. Pete, Melanie, Hanna, and Jacob at HSFF, Sean and Cesar from Las Golondrinas, and Don Sena from Conerstones Community Partnerships. As well as the HSFF Board of Directors and Property Committee Members.