San Miguel Chapel : More than bricks and mortar

The restoration of Santa Fe’s historic San Miguel Chapel is at the heart of a preservation initiative newly undertaken by citizens, local organizations, and state agencies.

Over the next six years, organizers of the San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project hope to fix structural, drainage, and asbestos problems at the old church, but the scope of the project goes far beyond such matters. It will include archaeological investigations, art and artifact conservation, searching for historical records in other countries, writing comprehensive histories, and engaging local students in various endeavors.

“Much more than just bricks and mortar, the project is driven by an expanded definition of restoration,” said architect Christopher Alba, director of the initiative. The project targets not only the chapel but also the structure known as the Oldest House and other adjacent buildings, with a long-range goal of creating a living museum.

Barrio de Analco, one of Santa Fe’s oldest neighborhoods, and San Miguel Chapel “provide a great opportunity to recover a more complete sense of the amazing depth and complexity of Santa Fe’s past, its people, and the work and wisdom that built a community and sustained it, and now to look back and remember it,” state historian Estévan Rael-Gálvez says in project materials.

The chapel at the corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and East De Vargas Street is by one definition the oldest functioning church in the United States, although it has taken at least five forms since its first construction in the early 17th century. One challenge to the title of most venerable is held by the 1699 Holy Trinity (Old Swedes) Church in Wilmington, Del., touted as “the nation’s oldest church building still standing as originally built.”

In a recent interview, architectural historian James Hare of the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division said little is known about San Miguel Chapel’s earliest antecedent. “It was probably a large, adobe rectangle with two towers, more like what you’d see at Las Trampas.”

Franciscan friars used the building until 1640, when Gov. Luis de Rosas had it destroyed. It was rebuilt, only to be partially destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. The bones of the building we see today date to 1710, when José Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor, marqués de la Peñuela, ordered it to be reconstructed.

In the year of American independence Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez described an adobe chapel: “the walls not very thick, single-naved, 8 varas [about 22 feet] high up to the bed molding, not quite as wide, and 23 varas [about 63 feet] long from the door to the high altar.” A statue of St. Michael was on the altar, and over the main door there was a small arch with a little bell.

By the 1830s, Hare said, the church facade included a single, five-tiered tower, which collapsed after damage from a storm in 1871-72. In 1883, following another restoration project, Santa Fe’s citizens rallied to prevent demolition of the church. The stone buttresses that are characteristic of the chapel today were added as structural support in 1887.

The first archaeological work performed at the site, 1955-57, turned up evidence of two earlier church buildings and, at a lower level, remnants of 13th-century Native-American buildings. Also during the 1950s the chapel was remodeled in the Spanish-Pueblo Revival (Santa Fe) style we see today.

“Almost all the great New Mexican churches have gone through repeated changes over time,” Hare said. “This is just another example of how our earthen-architecture buildings can change. The current restoration project will probably involve things that will change how it looks as well, so that we can do the structural work we need to.”

That may include doing excavations to solve drainage problems and replacing the exterior cement stucco, a material that tends to trap moisture in adobe walls. When such things are proposed, it is imperative that everyone in the community is involved, according to Donna Vogel, executive director of Cornerstones Community Partnerships, a member of the San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project team.

“With restoration, people start to get nervous because they are attached to what has been there,” Vogel said in an interview. She pledged that Cornerstones will work “to engage the appropriate stakeholders — not only professionals but people in the community who have a special connection to the place, to make sure their voices are heard. It also could engage Pueblo people and possibly representatives from Mexico.”

The Barrio de Analco, centered on East De Vargas Street between Guadalupe Street and Paseo de Peralta, holds several historic homes dating to the mid-18th century. The Gregorio Crespin House at 132 E. De Vargas St. is likely older than the so-called Oldest House, and it may be the earliest extant residential structure in Santa Fe.

The continued existence of these history-pregnant buildings is fortunate, since much of the barrio was carved up in the 1960s for expansion of the state-office complex and for urban-renewal projects. The Old Santa Fe Association led a protest against further neighborhood demolitions and, in May 1968, the barrio was named to the National Register of Historic Places.

Other committed partners in the San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project, besides Cornerstones and the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, are Construction Analytics (Alba’s firm) and St. Michael’s Corporation, a business arm of the Brothers of the Christian Schools organization that owns the property.

The Christian Brothers first came to Santa Fe in 1859 under invitation by Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy to establish a school for boys. The brothers built St. Michael’s College (today’s Lamy Building) next to San Miguel Chapel. In the mid-20th century the school’s directors split the institution into two and moved both from Barrio de Analco; they survive today as the College of Santa Fe and St. Michael’s High School. The brothers have maintained their stewardship of the chapel for more than 140 years.

“Education is Andrea Shapiro 10/8/04 should this be “was”? the traditional mission of St. Michael’s College and it is the primary focus of this preservation project, which will provide ‘hands-on’ and internship opportunities for students,” Alba said.

The search for resources, records, and artifacts relating to the area’s history may extend to Mexico, Spain, France, and the Vatican, he added. Records and artifacts will be archivally cataloged and ultimately made available to students, researchers, and the general public through physical, microfilm, and virtual collections.

One of the big issues for the San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project partners is the existence of more than 200 graves on the chapel property. “From what I’ve heard in talking to architects who have worked on San Miguel in the past, you can hardly put a spade in the earth without hitting bones, even though the Archdiocese did extensive removal of bodies back in the late 19th century,” Hare said.

There is an old camposanto (graveyard) beneath the paved entrance area in front of the chapel, and it is likely there are burials under the church itself. “The wooden floor is 4 or 5 feet above the historic earthen floor, and when they did excavations of the sanctuary area in the 1950s, they found several burials there — two French priests and a child,” Hare said. Archaeologists at the time actually hoped to find the remains of Diego de Vargas, because it was common practice for important persons to be buried inside a church.

In a July interview Cordelia Snow of the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division said she and her cohorts don’t want to disturb any burials, although she acknowledged that restoration and repairs may make that difficult.

At any rate, the burials should not be disturbed merely to answer curiosity about the past. “My estimation is that they should be avoided,” Snow said. “The entire history of Santa Fe is frequently based on conventional wisdom leavened with a great deal of myth, and I’d rather see an accurate history developed, based on available documents and research into archives.”

The writing of readable, comprehensive histories about the Barrio de Analco is indeed one of the goals of the preservation project. One of the most intriguing questions to be explored is whether or not it was Tlaxcaltecan Indians who first built and worshipped in a church on the San Miguel site.

Tlaxcaltecans were representatives of “a powerful Nahuatl-speaking people who allied with the Spanish to bring about the downfall of the Mexica (Aztec) empire, and who assisted them with other military and political endeavors as the Conquest was carried north,” New Mexico Historic Preservation Division’s Elizabeth Oster writes in a recent paper on the subject. She adds that old Franciscan documents contain references to Tlaxcaltecan Indians in the barrio at least by the time of the Pueblo Revolt. Questions about the nature of their residence there, and about Santa Fe’s population makeup earlier in the 17th century, challenge the authors of future histories.

The conservation of art is another aim of the preservation initiative. Among the pieces that require care and restoration are the chapel’s altarpiece, created by the [anonymous] Laguna Santero in 1798, and half a dozen oil paintings also dating to the 18th century.

Finally, there are ghosts to bust. Alba includes “scientific investigation into paranormal activity in the buildings and the barrio” in his list of project goals. “The gift shop, which was once a residence, is supposed to be haunted,” Alba said during a July walk-through of the Oldest House and San Miguel Chapel. “Apparently a child died here in the 1940s, and some believe there is more than one ghost here. The Oldest House supposedly has a malevolent presence.”

Mayor Larry Delgado and other community leaders kick off the preservation project with a ceremony and free concert by guitarist Ronald Roybal at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 16, at San Miguel Mission, 221 E. De Vargas St.

The preservation effort is scheduled to culminate in 2010 on the 400th anniversary of the founding of the church and the city of Santa Fe.

details

San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project commemorative ceremony

4:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 16; concert by guitarist Ronald Roybal

San Miguel Chapel, 221 E. De Vargas St.

No charge, 983-3974