A 2009 Trip To Las Ruedas, New Mexico (A Ghost Town)

Joe Encinas and Victor Ortiz Jr. worked with Gilbert Ortiz to make this visit possible. The old Las Ruedas town site on the Pecos River about a mile from Rowe. Ms. Jane Fonda was the owner of the Los Trigos Ranch at the time (2009) when the visit occurred. There is not much left and the town site is private land, it used to be part of the old Los Trigos Land Grant.

Donna and I found out about the planning for the visit and asked if we could come along. An interesting occurrence was that everyone who ended up there, with the exception of Donna, were related through the Archuletas.

My maternal great grandmother Mariana Duran Archuleta was the last person buried there sometime in the 1920's. Her body was brought to Las Ruedas from Rowe for burial.

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Joe Encinas on the left and his dad Ruben Encinas on the right. Joe took this picture as well as the ones that follow. Ruben came up from Southern New Mexico. Joe was working on the Gila National Forest at the time, he is now in the Washington Office of the U.S. Forest Service..

On the left Victor Ortiz Jr., the late Gilbert Ortiz in the middle and Victor Ortiz Sr, on the right. Gilbert was the foreman of the Los Trigos Ranch owned by Jane Fonda where the old town site and church/cemetery ruins is located. It was good to see all of the Ortiz folks.

A corner of the old rock fence for the church and graveyard. It is crumbling and if it had not in the hands of Jane Fonda it would probably all be gone. I hope somehow it could be preserved, but I doubt it.

Another view of the rock wall around the old church site and cemetery.

Pot shards, more than likely of Indian manufacture as the New Mexicans did not do much, is any, of this.

Las Ruedas, For Sale Again

The old Las Ruedas town site is the grassy area on the upper right hand of the picture.  Click on the image(s) to make them larger.

Las Ruedas is for sale again. Jane Fonda put it up this past week. Here are some photos of Las Ruedas and environs today.

I last visited the area a few years ago with some relatives who had arranged with the ranch foreman, the late Gilbert (Gille) Ortiz, another Archuleta descendant, to visit the site. Gilbert led us down and briefed us on the site as he was probably the best informed. He had worked the ranch since he was in high school.

Las Ruedas was one of 3 small Hispanic villages on the old Los Trigos Land Grant.  The others being Pajarito and Los Trigos. The only one still in the hands of descendants is Pajarito. Las Ruedas is about 2 miles away from Rowe, New Mexico and I-25.

Anyway, Las Ruedas is long gone. The last person buried in the old cemetery is my great grand mother Maria Ana Duran. Her husband, Juan de Jesus Archuleta is most likely buried there also. No way to identify the few graves still visible.

This is one of the several houses and out buildings on the property for sale.

The grassy area to the right is immediately below the old Las Ruedas town site.

Jane Fonda is letting go of her New Mexico ranch, "a sanctuary and a place of great joy" known as Forked Lightning.

"The ranch encompasses 2,300 acres outside Santa Fe, and includes 3.5 winding miles of the Pecos River. The actress and activist bought the property -- part of a larger historic ranch once owned by oilman Buddy Fogelson and his wife, actress Greer Garson -- back in 2000. She is asking  $19.5 million. That includes the 10,000-square-foot River House, which is the main residence; a 2,000-square-foot guest house dubbed the Hacienda; and a 3,500-square-foot Log House, where Fonda lived while she was building the River House."

To have $19.5 million laying around. 

Alas, the old home of my ancestors will change hands again. My hope is that who ever buys it takes care of it and allows some limited access to it for folks wanting to see where their ancestors once lived.

Gross Kelly & CO, Rowe, New Mexico - 1910 - 1947

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This is a picture of the Gross Kelly & Co. store in Rowe taken on August 11, 1918.  Clearly the picture was taken in Rowe, the Picacho clearly visable behind the store. Other than that I do not recognize anything in the photo.

 

Rowe, what ever there was of the town in 1918 was 40+ years old, having been built as the AT&SF railroad came through. Prior to that the residents of Rowe were, for the most part, from Las Ruedas, down by the Pecos River.

 

This was the first Gross Kelly store. Later a second, or a third, building would be errected a bit further to the right of this picture and right in front of the AT&SF Railroad depot. Who knows who lived in the house next door pictured in this photo.

 

Gross Kelly was a big influence in the area around Rowe. Railroad ties were manufactured by the locals according to GK & Co. specs and sold to the company who in turn sold them to the Santa Fe Railroad who took them to a wood treatment plant to be treated prior to use on the tracks. The same goes for mine props and firewood, they were cut, delivered and sold by the locals to the store who in turn would sell them where ever they found a market. The store was operated as a Gross Kelly & Company store between 1910 and 1947, there after under different ownerships well into the 1960's. My mothers first cousin, Aaron Archuleta, worked at the store for many, many years and retired from there.

 

A good source of information on the Gross Kelly & Company is a book titled The Buffalo Head, A Century of Merchantile Pioneering in the Southwest written by Daniel T. Kelly with Beatrice Chauvenet and published by the Vergara Publishing Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1972.

 

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The man on the left is Harry W. Kelly (H.W. Kelly) and the person next to him is Carlos (Charles) Cramer. I knew Charles Cramer's, wife Mrs. Maude Cramer. She lived to a ripe old age and was the postmistress in Rowe in the 1950's. Carlos Creamer came to the Rowe area as manager of the GK & Co. store. His family did stay in the area and Mr. and Mrs. Cramer raised several sons in Rowe.

 

The other four people and the dog are not identified.

 

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These are the three folks who appear to be locals from the area. I do not recognize anyone, a bit before my time. But the boy appears to be 9 or 10 years old.

 

My padrino Jose Benavidez was living in Rowe and 18 years old at the time this photo was taken. My mother, Refugio Benavidez was 12 years old and my grandfather Roman Benavidez would have been 44 years ols and my grandmother Ignacia Archuleta 42.

 



More on Las Ruedas and Pajarito, New Mexico

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Las Ruedas, New Mexico is one of two communities that existed on the old Los Trigos Land Grant. The other community was, or is,  Pajarito. The Los Trigos Land Grant lies between the boundaries of the Pecos Pueblo Land Grant and the San Miguel del Bado Land Grant at Gusano, todays South San Isidro, along and on either side of the Pecos River. The Los Trigos Land Grant was made on May 26, 1817 by Jose Manrique, acting governor of the province of New Mexico and confirmed by Alberto Maynes, governor of the province on June 22, 1815. It was granted to Francisco Trujillo, Diego Padilla and Bartolome Marquez.

Up to 1815 only a few acres of land had been tilled in the "arroyo de Las Ruedas" area. The community began to grow until 1829 when Vicente Villanueva sent an Indian boy also known as Vicente Villanueva , whom he had bought from the Comanches, to the Los Trigos area with a flock of sheep. Villanueva and a partner took some cattle to graze at El Canon de los Soldados. Suddenly, the Apaches swooped down on the Indian Boy and killed him, ran off the sheep, and continued on to the Canon de Los Soldados where Villanueva and his partner were also killed.

Las Ruedas was abandoned after the death of its most influential citizen.

The story of the Indian boy, also known as Vicente Villanueva, presisted and in time the people of La Cuesta had the name of their village changed at the request of the American postal authorities because there was another village north of Taos named Questa. The villagers decided on Villanueva to honor the name of the captive who gave his life in the defense of his masters sheep.

Anyway in the 1830's people from San Miguel del Bado and Santa Fe once again moved into the Las Ruedas and Pajarito area of the Los Trigos Land Grant. They were, as can best be identified, Antonio Maria Archuleta, his wife Maria de Jesus Lovato and his brother Nepomuceno Archuleta and his wife Maria Manuela Lovato, the sons of Vicente Antonio Archuleta and his first wife Maria Ignacia Angel. Miguel Sena and his wife Maria Ygnes Valencia were others who moved there. Matias Alarid, the son of Jose Antonio Alarid and Marcelina Quintana and his wife Maria Josefa Valencia also moved there.  Jose Alejandro Montoya, the son of Juan Jose Montoya and Juana Gonzales and his wife Francisca Lovato were another couple who moved there  as were Antonio Ortiz and others who moved into the area.

For the most part, these and other Hispanos with their families were the ones there when the Americans arrived in August of 1846. The village continued to grow until the late 1870's when construction on the Santa Fe Railroad started a few miles up the arroyo at the base of the mesa. By 1880 most of the families had moved to the railroad site at the new village of Rowe. My great grand mother Mariana Duran Archuleta was the last person to be burried at the Las Ruedas cemetary in the early 1920's. She was the the second wife of Juan de Jesus Archuleta who was the brother of Antonio Maria and Nepomuceno Archuleta who are mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Many descendants of these settlers still live in Rowe and the surrounding communities.

Note: Some information for this post comes from the book, Giant in Lilliput, the story of Donaciano Vigil by F. Stanley and the remainder is from information unearthed by my wife and myself.

1860 Las Ruedas, New Mexico

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The top (1st) image is the tail end of El Gusano, New Mexico and the begining of Las Ruedas, New Mexico. The first name in Las Ruedas is Juan de Jesus Archuleta with his wife Maria Anna (Duran) and their son Jose Ologio and daughter Cleta.

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This is the last part of a page for Las Ruedas, New Mexico and the first part of a page for the area between Las Ruedas and Pecos.  See if you can make out the other names.

Between both images it has all of the people enumerated at Las Ruedas, New Mexico in 1860. This was way before the thought of the railroad, so what is now Rowe, was not there, not yet.

There was a small group who went to the ruins of the old church at Las Ruedas on November 9, 2009. One of the latter day Archuleta descendants invited other Archuleta descendants to come along. And another descendant of  long ago Las Ruedas residents guided us in. It was a pleasant day and to be in the ancestral village and was an emotional experience.

Las Ruedas, New Mexico in 1870

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 A few more folks are moving in and some of the others are gone. But the names are the same. Samuel Dean, born in Maine was new. He married a local lady Juliana Ortiz.

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Roque Salmeron, born in Mexico was new to Las Ruedas as was John B. Bowles from Virginia. John Bowles married a local woman by the name of Manuela Sena.  An interesting side note is that Roque Salmeron was taken by the Indians in Mexico and released at Las Ruedas. Most Salmeron's are descendants of this individual. He married an Archuleta woman by the name of Maria Librada.

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Here we have O.P.  Anderson from Georgia. Looks like he married a local lady also. I do not know her name.

By 1870 Las Ruedas had incorporated 4 strangers from across North America. Dean from Maine, Salmeron from Mexico, Bowles from Virginia and Anderson from Georgia. It was becoming quite the cosmopolitan village. Everyone else had been here for generations.