Española mainstay celebrates 100 years
Family-owned Chimayó Trading Post is Española landmark
Family-owned Chimayó Trading Post is a Northern New Mexico landmark.
For more than 90 years, the Chimayó Trading Post in Española has stood at one of the most significant crossroads in Northern New Mexico, the intersection of what is now U.S. 84 and N.M. 68, a juncture also known as The Way.
One way (U.S. 84 via Paseo de Oñate) leads across the Rio Grande toward the artist and naturist retreat of Abiquiú, or north toward the mountain-crowned verdant Chama River Valley and the Colorado border. The other way (N.M. 68 via Riverside Drive) sends the traveler to the northeast up toward Taos.
Until the early 1940s, just a few blocks from the landmark multi-generational family-run Trading Post — which has literally seen history pass through and by its doors — was a station of the Chili Line railroad, where farmers loaded their produce and vegetables on train cars bound for Colorado and points north and east.
The store, its blue and red trim and signage accenting its adobe exterior, this year celebrates its 100th year as a family business, encompassing four generations back to its 1917 founding in Chimayó by Gavino and Ursulita Trujillo, great-great grandparents of the shop’s current owner, Patrick Trujillo. A celebratory community open house is planned for Oct. 27.
Gavino Trujillo opened the family’s first store in Chimayó in the late 1880s. Patrick’s grandfather, Esquipula Deaguero (E.D.) Trujillo, took over that market in 1917 after a stint at what was then New Mexico Normal College in Las Vegas, N.M.
Using a $500 loan from a Las Vegas connection, he expanded the store to include Native textiles, pottery, jewelry and other artwork with a bent toward capturing the tourist trade. E.D. and Patrick Trujillo’s grandmother, Romanita Trujillo, renamed the shop E.D.’s Curio and Pottery general store.
Patrick Trujillo said the family traces the current store’s roots to E.D.’s transformation of the original market.
Trujillo said that in 1924, E.D. moved the market to its current site in Española to take advantage of the area’s rapidly growing tourist traffic, adding a house to the back of the store. The Trujillos proceeded to expand the venture, building a hotel, The Romana, named after Patrick’s grandmother, a restaurant and shops, including a photography studio adjacent to the store in the triangular site.
“It was kind of a mini-mall of its day,” Trujillo said.
He said the center also became a routine stop between Santa Fe and Taos for Fred Harvey’s Southwestern Indian Detours, which offered Harvey-girl guided tours of Arizona and New Mexico Indian and other sites for wealthy tourists in the 1920s and ’30s.
“That’s where my grandparents made a lot of their money,” Trujillo said. “The ’30s, ’40s and ’50s were the boom years.”
In 1939, a fire — believed to have started in the trading post’s coal-fired furnace — pretty well gutted the store and the adjoining buildings, but it was restored and reopened less than a year later, and remained so until Romanita died in 1956.
Trujillo said his grandmother had been running the store as E.D. was on the road selling and acquiring blankets and other goods. E.D. also had opened another trading post in Pojoaque in the early 1950s, which remained opened until E.D.’s death in 1972.
Trujillo said his uncle, Leopoldo (Polo) Trujillo, consolidated the Española property and reopened the market in 1983. He remained involved in its operation until he died in March, when Patrick took over the reins.
The trading post was declared national and state historic landmarks in 1992.
Patrick Trujillo is in the process of remodeling the store and the attached house, and said he would like to re-create the fun of the market’s heyday when it was often the gathering place for Democratic Rio Arriba County and state politicos, as well as the occasional FDR administration official who would be passing through.
E.D. Trujillo was the state auditor from 1939 to 1942 and again from 1947 to 1950. Patrick Trujillo has served as an Española city councilor and an aide to Gov. Tony Anaya, and human resources director at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Trujillo also hopes to be able to open the house as an art center where visitors can meet and buy directly from the artists.
As to whether there will be a fifth generation of Trujillos operating the store, “That’s the million-dollar question,” quipped Trujillo, 63. “My sister, [Roberta, who helps run the trading post now], has a couple of nieces but they are in California, so I don’t know, so unless I start having children now …’ ”