New Mexico Historic Preservation Division

09/03/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The reredos located at Cristo Rey Church in Santa Fe, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for National Significance on September 4, 1970.

Located inside Cristo Rey Church, located at Canyon Road and Cristo Rey Streets in Santa Fe, the reredos or altar screen (also called a retablo) is carved from native, light-colored, compressed volcanic stone. Patches of the original polychrome decoration remained visible on the surface when the nomination was completed in 1970.

The reredos was carved in 1760 by unknown artisans after the Spanish Governor, Francisco Antonio Marin del Valle had a military chapel built (Our Lady of Light Chapel) on the Santa Fe Plaza. He financed the construction of the chapel and donated the central interior decoration carved by masons in stone from Pojoaque quarries. The new chapel and construction of the reredos were so noteworthy at the time that Pedro Tamaron, the Bishop of Durango, described the chapel and the reredos in his report to the King of Spain upon his return.

Religious services in the chapel were halted in 1832 and by the 1840s the chapel was in a state of disrepair. Bishop Lamy had attempted to revive the chapel but was unsuccessful. The chapel was abandoned and sold and the reredos moved to the parish church, which stood on the site of the present St. Francis Cathefral. By 1894, with the completion of the new Cathedral, the reredos was hidden from common view in a small room behind the cathedral’s altar.

Cristo Rey Church was built in 1940 and designed by John Gaw Meem. The reredos was taken from its hiding place and incorporated as the backdrop of the new church’s altar. Cristo Rey Catholic Church is a large Spanish Pueblo Revival structures widely considered the largest adobe church in the United States.

The National Register of Historic Places classifies its listings into five broad property types: buildings, districts, sites, structures, and objects. Out of the 2100 listings in the National Register database for New Mexico only 9 are for objects.

To view the nomination for listing, visit:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/13181161-9e83-497b-b711-16176b44a6c0

For more information on the reredos visit these websites from the church’s website:
https://www.cristoreyparish.org/photos
https://irp.cdn-website.com/8cb82a13/files/uploaded/CristoReyHistory.pdf

08/31/2026

New Mexico State Historic Preservation Conference
Rendezvous in ABQ, 2027

Save the date - October 13-16, 2027.

Save the Date for the 2027 State Historic Preservation Conference in Albuquerque NM - October 13 - 16, 2027

08/26/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

Patrick Floyd Garrett’s house in Roswell, New Mexico, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on August 29, 1988.

The house is a one and a half story, side-gable roofed dwelling built mostly of adobe. The building is representative of an adobe homestead dating from the 1880s. Additional significance is attributed to the property as it was the home of Pat Garrett, who gained national fame in 1881 as the Sherriff of Lincoln County when he killed the notorious Billy the Kid. Mr. Garrett, while living in the house, also developed a vast irrigation scheme which had a major impact on the course of settlement and agriculture in the region.

Born in 1850 in Alabama and raised in Louisiana, Garrett had ventured west to Texas while in his late teens, finding work as a cowhand and a buffalo hunter. In 1878 he had arrived in Fort Sumner and tended bar where he earned the nickname “Juan Largo” for his height of six feet, four inches. In January of 1880 he married Apolinaria Gutierrez and they settled on this farm. His many letters and writings in Territorial newspapers paint an invaluable picture of life on the Pecos Valley frontier. He published a book in 1882 to describe his side of the controversy over the death of Billy the Kid. The controversy centers on whether the Sherriff shot Billy the Kid or shot an imposter, allowing for Billy the Kid’s escape.

Garrett and his wife had eight children four before he left New Mexico in 1898. The most well-known was his blind daughter Elizabeth who is known as a musician and singer and composer of the New Mexico State Song. After his term as Sherriff ended, Garrett was not renominated and he went on to pursue a variety of activities without much success. He tried his hand at the cattle Business, joined a company of Texas Rangers, and then devoted his time to farming where he also had an orchard of apple and peach trees.

His irrigation plan involved a large part of the Pecos valley. Garrett realized that a dependable water supply could be had by damning the Hondo River and fluming the water across the arid plains in a canal. He partnered with local business leaders to get the project started which became the biggest construction project undertaken in the valley. The company floundered and Garretty was pushed out after John James Hagerman rescued the company in 1899. Now called the Hagerman Canal it was completed in 1890.

Garrett departed Roswell in 1891 for Uvalde, Texas, where he had racehorses and participated in local politics. Six years later he returned to Dona Ana County where he served as Sherriff. In 1901 he was nominated and confirmed by President Theodore Roosevelt as Collector of Customs at the Port of El Paso and then he returned to horse raising in Las Cruces. On the road from his ranch in Roswell to Las Cruces in 1908 Pat Garrett engaged in an argument was shot and killed.

The house is on private land north of Roswell and is not configured as a public museum or open-access tourist site.

O, Fair New Mexico, New Mexico’s State Song since 1917
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nm_state_songs/1/

To view the nomination for listing, visit:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/04528cb9-97ee-4238-b2cc-e8f7f82b1251

08/20/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Franklin MacFie House, located in Hernandez, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, was listed for local significance in the National Register of Historic Places on August 19, 2024.

The Franklin MacFie House, also called the Hobbit Hut, is a ferrocement dwelling in Hernandez, New Mexico. The house is a free form structure that is sited in a small grove of cottonwood trees on a bluff above the Rio Chama floodplain. The walls and roof undulate in various shapes and form three main lobes. The walls and ceilings are built of reinforced concrete punctuated with church windows, theater lights, and embedded decorative objects like glass bowls, colored glass and automobile taillights.

The house is organized around the living room with banco seating, a hearth and stylized piers that support the concrete roof. The sloping site was well suited for the house so that the entrance was the highest room on the hill and then the house steps down into the living room and kitchen and then the house steps down into the bathroom.

Franklin MacFie was an artist with no training in architecture. The house was created using reinforced concrete, reinforcing steel rods, chicken wire, and burlap. The house has limited straight lines and from the outside appears as a series of reinforced concrete domes.

The listed property boundary includes the MacFie Barn and circular drive and the noncontributing Quinn House shed, and acequia. The nomination has not yet been digitized into the National Park Service system.

08/13/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID), located in southern New Mexico, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for state significance on August 8, 1997. The district extends within Doña Ana County and Sierra County, New Mexico, and El Paso County, Texas.

The historic engineering district provides extensive regional water-delivery infrastructure linked to the federal Rio Grande Project. The Rio Grande Project is a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project that distributes water in the upper Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande project serves three irrigation systems, one in New Mexico (EBID), one in the EL Paso Valley of Texas, and one in the Juarez Valley of Chihuahua, Mexico.

Reconnaissance and preliminary surveys to construct EBID began in 1903. The Leasburg Division was the first unit, approved in 1905 and its purpose was to provide relief to farmers in the Mesilla Valley. Completed in 1908, the Leasburg Division included the Leasburg Diversion Dam and the Leasburg Canal and delivered water to Doña Ana, Las Cruces, and Mesilla community ditches. In 1911, Reclamation began rebuilding irrigation systems and new canals. The EBID water distribution system was substantially completed by 1921.

This new infrastructure dramatically increased agricultural production in raid southern New Mexico. EBID serves a total of 101,450 acres and has 217 contributing features (3 buildings and 214 structures). EBID draws its water from the Rio Grande and includes three diversion dams and over 200 irrigation and drainage ditches. The entire system is gravity fed and when the nomination was completed in 1997 almost all of the ditches were unlined.

The district also includes thousands of individual engineering features such as checks, drops, and gates. Most individual features have been modified or replaced within the past 50 years, with historic features consisting primarily of the diversion dams and irrigation systems and drainage ditches.

Listed properties also in Elephant Butte include the Elephant Butte Historic District and the Elephant Butte Dam, listed in the National Register in 1979.

The nomination for listing Elephant Butte Dam may be found online, here:
https://tinyurl.com/e96s2xmk
The nomination for the Elephant Butte Historic District, here:
https://tinyurl.com/bddeec4c
View the nomination for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District here:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/40076ee2-25aa-48d5-b7ad-a26b3a61d8f9
Information on the Rio Grande Project, may be found here:
https://tinyurl.com/3wuhzsb4

08/06/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio, located in Abiquiú, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, was listed as a National Historic Landmark on August 5, 1998.

The artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) discovered the house in Abiquiú in the early 1930s during one of her frequent visits to northern New Mexico. While driving by she glimpsed a rambling adobe structure and the remnants of a garden through a break in the adobe wall. According to the nomination, she climbed the wall to explore and found the property had its own well and acequia system fed from a spring located above the town on the mesa.

As part of the original Spanish land grant that had established the Village of Abiquiú in the 1730s, each property had access to the spring water. After repeated attempts to buy the Abiquiú property failed, O’Keeffe purchased a small adobe house at Ghost Ranch. The house at Ghost Ranch became a place of artistic renewal and a yearly retreat from the pressures of the New York art world.

While a garden was something O’Keeffe hoped to have so that she could be self-sufficient it was the sight of a double wood door that compelled her to buy the house in Abiquiú - “That wall with the door in it was something I had to have.” She finally was able to purchase the Abiquiú property from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 1945. She retained the Ghost Ranch house even though the two houses were only 12 miles apart. O’Keeffe permanently moved to New Mexico from New York City in 1949, making the house in Abiquiú her primary residence until 1984, when she moved to Santa Fe for the last two years of her life.

The Abiquiú Home and Studio is a complicated overlay of building periods and architectural styles. Elements from the Spanish vernacular courtyard house of northern New Mexico and mid-twentieth-century domestic modernism, resulted in an architectural creation. O’Keeffe started with a 19th century adobe compound which she rehabilitated from 1946 to 1949. The house has three one-story adobe brick structures that form an integral unit by covered walkways called zaguans. The floor plan is patio-centered with a single file of rooms enclosed in an interior courtyard known as a plazuela.

Ms. O’Keeffe worked on the house in collaboration with her friend, Maria Chabot. Their updates to the traditional structure made the house more livable. Changes opened up the interior space to make it more functional, public and private activities were assigned to specific sections of the house and large windows were installed to frame dramatic views of the Chama River Valley and to bring natural light into the interior. Chabot researched materials to locate the most contemporary and practical. Traditional mud floors were replaced with cement and cork flooring. Modern plumbing, gas, and electric were added. Fluorescent lighting and skylights were added to bring more light into typically dark interiors.

After the rehabilitation, O’Keeffe was left with an expanded 5,000 square foot complex. The complex included 1) a house with living and dining spaces; 2) a smaller detached building containing the artist’s studio and bedroom; 3) a second courtyard; 4) a parking area; and 5) a garden enclosed by a tall adobe wall. Bounded on the east and west by arroyos and on the south by a dirt road leading into the Village of Abiquiú, the north boundary of the property is the edge of the mesa that drops 60 feet to U.S. Highway 84 below. Sited on the edge of the mesa the 3.9-acre site has panoramic views of the Chama River, the Plaza Blanca, Abiquiú Mesa and the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Santa Fe.

The Georgia O’Keeffe House and Studio is owned and managed by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum based in Santa Fe. The house is open for tours. For more information, visit: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/homes/

View the NHL nomination here:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/087a6971-9089-4c4d-9dfe-243f80edf4d4

07/30/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

San Ysidro Church, located in Corrales, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for stat significance on July 30, 1980.

San Ysidro Church was built shortly after 1868 when the first church was destroyed by a flood. It is located further to the west and on higher ground than the original church. A third church, located to the east on the highway, was completed in 1966.

The church was originally flat-roofed with an espadaña, or bell gable, an architectural element crowning the upper end of the wall of church buildings, usually in place of a church tower. In 1929, the towers were added to support the façade, and a pitched roof was installed. The foundation was covered with concrete to protect it and a tin ceiling was put in on the interior covering the traditional viga and corbel roof supports.

In 1966 when the new church was completed, interior furnishings, the pews and altar were sold and the 1868 church was converted into a summer playhouse.

The church is architecturally significant as a good, well-preserved example of a village church. The changes it has undergone are also typical to village churches - evolving over time.

The nomination for listing may be found at this link:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/5bb4bca5-5dce-421f-8fdc-aa6312131a69

07/22/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Santa Fe Historic District, located in Santa Fe, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for national significance on July 23, 1973.

Roughly bounded by Camino Cabra, Camino de las Animas, West Manhattan Avenue, South St. Francis Drive, and Griffin Street, the Santa Fe Historic District encompasses the oldest part of Santa Fe and its original settlement. Founded in 1610 Santa Fe’s full name is La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis or the Royal town of the holy faith of St. Francis of Assisi.

The historic district is irregularly shaped and recognizes natural features like the Acequia Madre, and narrow, twisting streets tracing major historical routes like El Camino Real and the Santa Fe Trail. The historic street plan and plaza of this densely settled are among its most important resources. The plan, which can be seen in cities and towns throughout Spani’s empire, is a direct result of King Philip II of Spani’s Royal Ordinances Concerning the Layout out of New Towns in 1573.

Adobe construction techniques are represented in Santa Fe architecture using locally sourced earthen materials. Traditional methods use sun-dried bricks and thick walls. These techniques are rooted in both Indigenous and Spanish traditions. Spanish Colonial influences are illustrated through buildings with ornamental features that reflect architectural and decorative traditions brought by settlers and missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the early 20th century, the Pueblo Revival style began, starting as an interpretation of Indigenous Pueblo forms and Spanish colonial elements. Public buildings exemplified these adaptations and use long low profiles, flat roofs with projecting vigas and canales, battered walls, rounded parapets, and earth-toned stucco.

The Santa Fe Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places under Criteria A for its association with significant historical events, settlement, politics, government, commerce, and community development. The district is listed in the NR under Criteria C for Its embodiment of distinctive architectural characteristics.

Santa Fe remains as a vital center for Native American and Hispanic cultural practices and expressions.

The nomination for listing may be found at this link:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/c2eb6ac4-91c8-428d-a775-5b7b25c94995

07/15/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Ozark Trails marker at Lake Arthur, located in Chaves County, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on July 16, 2004.

The Ozark Trail was a network of locally maintained roads and highways organized by the Ozark Trails Association. The Trail predated the federal highway system and included roads from El Paso, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico to St. Louis, Missouri. The purpose of the marker was to provide drivers with directions and distances on the rudimentary road network.

Built in 1921, the Ozark Trails marker in Lake Arthur is located near the center of town and is surrounded by houses dating from the late 19th century to the contemporary. The marker was built in conformance to Ozark Trails Association (OTA) standards.

The marker is 21 feet tall and constructed of reinforced concrete. The base is 48 inches square and 46 inches in height. Each side of the base has the words “Lake Arthur” painted in green. The west side has mileage distances to local cities and towns. The 2004 nomination states that at that time of the nomination there were only seven extant Ozark Trails markers and that the Lake Arthur marker has retained a good deal of its historical integrity and is the only extant marker in New Mexico.

Prior to the development of the federal highway system in 1925-1926, nearly one hundred private highway associations were in competition to building intrastate and transcontinental highways across the U.S. The Ozark Trails system was one of many projects of entrepreneur William Hope Harvey to promote tourism and small-town development. The OTA did not build highways, but their promotion of automobile travel and good highways encouraged counties and states to improve the roads, helping to expand travel throughout the Southwest.

The OTA was active in New Mexico between 1916 and 1924. After the new highway numbering system began in 1926, some sections of the trail became Route 66 or U.S. highways 285 and 366. The Lake Arthur Ozark Trails marker is significant at the state level under National Register Criterion A for Transportation.

The nomination for listing may be found at this link:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/a296f623-ec83-445f-8943-0a3209407479

07/09/2026

This Week in New Mexico History

The Randall Davey House, located in Santa Fe, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on July 9, 1970.

In 1847, the central portion of the house was built as a sawmill by the United States Army Quartermaster in order to provide lumber needed for the construction of Fort Marcy. The sawmill was the first in the area and was powered by water diverted from the Santa Fe River. At the time the nomination was written the ditch that served as the millrace still ran behind the house.

By 1852 the property had been sold to a private owner who was sued by the party that held the mortgage, Colonel Ceran St. Vrain. St. Vrain was a noted trapper and trader from St. Louis who had lived in Taos and Mora and was friends of Governor Charles Bent. St. Vrain built a flour mill during his time in Mora and served as Colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry (succeeded by Kit Carson). St. Vrain acquired the property at auction.

Later the property was owned by Candelario Martinez, a local figure who practiced law, and held posts as Probate Judge and Postmaster. In 1882 he and his family sold the west part of the land to the Santa Fe Water Company for use as a reservoir to supply city residents with water.

Randall Davey was an American painter and art educator. In 1920, Davey purchased the property and converted it into a residence, preserving its architectural integrity. The main building has two stories and is constructed in stone and adobe. Clustered around the central structure are other 19th century adobe buildings. All have traditional fireplaces and traditional window, door, and ceiling details. During Randall Davey’s time, the home was a center for social activity and Davey hosted the artist’s family and friends.

The building was donated to the National Audubon Society after Davey’s death in 1964 and the home is now the centerpiece of the Randall Davey Audubon Center and Sanctuary. The building is used as offices, a classroom and visitor center. Two murals on the building were painted by Davey.

The nomination for listing may be found at this link:
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/ac4a4924-e7e2-48e9-89d9-7ae23e4239a4