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Stone buildings stand out in adobe town
he 1887 Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Asissi is the bestknown stone building in Santa Fe, but it was not the city’s first. It was, however, the first to be started, back in 1869.
In that year, New Mexico’s first archbishop, Jean Baptiste Lamy, who had been in Santa Fe for nearly two decades, visited his birthplace in the Auvergne region of France. “There he engaged an architect and master stonecutter, Antoine Mouly, to draw plans for the Santa Fe cathedral from sketches Lamy was already using,” historian Marc Simmons wrote in one of his Trail Dust columns in The New Mexican. “Mouly and his son were brought to New Mexico and became the first in a line of architects and masons fromFrance and Italywho would lend a hand in raising the cathedral.”
The structure was built around the capital city’s second adobe parroquia (parish church) built on the site since the founding of Santa Fe in the first decade of the 17th century. As the stone cathedral went up, the parroquia was dismantled and its broken adobes were carried out the front door and used to build up the banks of the Santa Fe River. A section of the old building is extant in the cathedral’s La Conquistadora chapel.
Simmons wrote that native stone blocks for Lamy’s grand building were quarried near Arroyo Sais on the outskirts of town. After the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Rail- road’s arrival in Santa Fe in 1880, flatcars brought in cut stone from a productive quarry at Lamy.
“The Lamy quarry provided us with some of the most workable stone we have and that was used on the Cathedral, the Loretto Chapel, the fence around Cathedral Park, and other areas,” contractor and conservation specialist Alan “Mac” Watson said in an email. Those included the yard wall in front of the Francisca Hinojos House on East Palace Avenue and some Santa Fe River embankments near El Castillo. “It is fine grained, regular and relatively hard and holds up well against the weather,” Watson said.
“If you’re in the town of Lamy and you look across the Galisteo Creek to the hill directly opposite, you can see where the quarry was, as the top of the hill has been leveled off by the quarriers.”
Watson said the type of stone that is most conveniently available in Santa Fe comes from the floodplain of the Santa Fe River, “but that stuff has been eroded down to ‘river rock’ and that’s like trying to build with marbles.
“The nearest limestone quarry is off Gonzales Road in the development now called La Cantera (loosely translated as ‘the quarry’). The site was locally known as the “cerro de los presos” or “prisoner’s hill” because penitentiary prisoners were used to mine the site for the clay that was used tomake bricks at the state pen on Cordova Road. I’m almost positive,” Watson said, “that the stone that was used for the first phase of the Federal Courthouse came from that quarry. It’s hard and irregular, so even the most skilled mason would have a challenge using it and making it look refined.
“Very workable, but very erodible stone was probably found in a quarry down near Waldo and used to create the ovalwall that surrounds the Federal Courthouse.”
Watson said Santa Fe masons set stones in lime mortar, made out of quicklime and sand, from the mid-19th century to about 1915. “The quicklime also had to be made locally and that too depended on a nearby source of suitable limestone. We’ve found lime kilns up in the development known as Hyde Park Estates, and references to lime kilns ( caleras) in the Santa Fe Canyon.”
The major source of quicklime for Lamy’s cathedral project was the Lamy LimeWorks, Watson said, adding that Abe Shaffer, an intern with Cornerstones Community Partnerships, restored the works in the early 2000s. “Its in the hills about a mile due north ofOur Lady of Light in Lamy.”
The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Asissi took more than 15 years to build and was never completed to its original design, which included a dome and twin spires on top of the belltowers.
The Loretto Chapel was built by the same stonemasons who were working on