Mi Casa

   This was the house I grew up in from birth to about ten or eleven year old. It is located at 610 East Palace Avenue. The picture above was taken in May 1936 by an unknown tourist passing through on a trip from New York to California. My father had the house built in the twenties. Part was adobe and part was hollow clay tile. The lot extended from East Palace to Alemeda. The house was built into a hill so that the front is one story and the back two stories. I well remember the huge steam boiler in the basement that provided heat to each room through three-foot high cast-iron radiators. There was a separate garage in the back facing Alemeda..

   Iron bars are evident on the last window on the left. The bars were installed in August 1933 as a result of a kidnapping scare involving my sister who was five years old at the time. Our grandfather, Governor Seligman, received a letter demanding a ransom or his grand daughter would be taken. The threat was taken seriously and twenty four hour guards of State policemen were stationed at the house for several days. Nothing actually happened.

The Galisteo Basin, just east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is home to thousands of years of human occupation and was the site of significant ‘cultural contact’ between native Pueblo Indians and Spanish colonizers. San Marcos Pueblo was one of the largest Pueblos in the Southwest (approximately 2,000 rooms) in the 15th and 16th centuries. By the early 17th century, Spanish Jesuits began construction of a mission inside the Pueblo. The mission began in several converted pueblo rooms, but eventually grew into a large two story adobe church and 18-room convento, complete with priests’ quarters, offices, reception area, and kitchen. The mission lasted for approximately 70 years, until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 resulted in the priest’s deaths and the abandonment of the mission. Unlike other Southwestern missions, however, San Marcos was never re-occupied by the Spanish and remains an important ‘time capsule’ for archaeological research

Dave Thomas

In 1996, an extensive aerial mapping was done of the pueblo.  The attached file has a wealth of drawings, surveys and maps of the site, which is 15 miles southeast of Santa Fe on NM 14.

Map of the Galisteo Basin Pueblos

Map from "Ancestral Pueblo Warfare and Migration
in the Galisteo Basin, New Mexico:
Report of the Tano Origins Project,
2005 Season"

James E. Snead
Dept. Of Sociology and Anthropology
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
8 June 2006