Sara Melton purchased her home in 1973 from Philip St. George Cooke III, owner and operator of the Press of the Territorian. The small late nineteenth-century adobe home represents a long history of Hispano ownership beginning in 1871, when Nestora Gonzales (de Sisneros), a fifty-year-old widow, and her four children purchased the one-room adobe house for $49. Expanded over the years by family members, the Sara Melton House remains a good example of how related, familial, and multi-generational households lived together and enlarged their houses as needed. The home also demonstrates the regional Hispano practice of bequeathing single rooms or groups of rooms to various family members. Today the house is owned by Melton’s descendants, who maintain it as a rental property.
From Old Santa Fe Today, 5th edition by Audra Bellmore with photographs by Simone Frances.