Interesting individuals artfully memorialized in a distinctive setting

 

Recently we toured the cemetery in Madrid in the San Pedro Mountains on NM 14 (the “Turquoise Trail.”) 30 miles south of our Santa Fe home.  Our guides were three local friends – current neighbor J, and former ones L and J, with whom we get together for lunch every month or so. This was our May meetup. “But why visit that town’s graveyard?” you might ask. Well we would respond, Madrid is much more than a small community of 300 people living in the remnants of a once-thriving, coal-mining company town. It now is one of “the 12 Best Hippie Cities For Stressed-Out Progressives.”  With such a unique past and present, who wouldn’t want to see how they memorialize their deceased?  Plus its  village tavern serves a pretty darn good buffalo burger.

 

There are nine other towns in the world named Madrid. The capitol city of Spain of course. Plus one each in Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, New York and Virginia. Most pronounce it “Muh-DRID” – the way the Spanish do. Alabamans and Mainers say MAD-rid. New Yorkers accept either version.  “Madroids,” as the NM town’s residents like to call themselves, emphasize the “MAD.” 

 

All of these cities have their own history.  Here briefly is that of Madrid, New Mexico.

 

The town most likely was given its name by Roque Madrid – a 17th & 18th century Spanish conquistador who briefly became interested in mining lead in the area. “Madrid” is a “habitational surname” indicating where a person came from – meaning Roque would have pronounced both his last name and that of his namesake village in the Spanish way.  We could not find the answer as to why or when that pronunciation changed.

 

Roque’s interest in quarrying went nowhere. And the small village remained of no particular importance until 1822 when gold miners came to the area, found coal and used it to operate their nearby gold mill at Dolores. (There was a small amount of the yellow metal in New Mexico.)

By 1859 the New Mexico Mining Company owned the coalfield and sold the ore to military forts at Santa Fe and Las Vegas, NM during the Civil War.  More coal was discovered – ownership changed hands – and in the 1890's Madrid had become a regional mining center and company town with around 2,500 inhabitants belonging to the Albuquerque & Cerrillos Coal Co.  By 1920 all Madrid homes were wired for electricity from the company-owned power plant.  Plus there were Elementary and High Schools, a fully equipped hospital, a Company Store, and the first lighted ballpark West of the Mississippi – home to the Madrid Blues, who competed with squads from Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Bernalillo and Isleta Pueblo.

Madrid’s coal production peaked in 1928 with almost 200,000 tons. And in 1943 one hundred tons of coal a day were delivered to its new primary customer, the then secret city of Los Alamos. In 1947 the A&CCC’s Chief Operating Officer Oscar Huber purchased the company becoming the sole owner of the now flourishing town.

Life was good. Until natural gas came on the scene in the late 1940s and the coal market collapsed. By 1954 the mining company had closed, all but a hundred or so residents had moved away, and an ad in the Wall Street Journal listed the entire town for sale at a price of $250,000 ($2.8 million today.) There were no takers.

Oscar Huber died in 1962. In the early 1970s his son Joe rented a few of the old company houses to artists and craftsmen who wanted to work and live in the mountains of New Mexico. Having success he put the remaining buildings on sale – $1,500 to $2,000, sold them all in 16 days and Madrid’s population swelled to 80. Huber donated more land and a new Madrid began to rise from the coal dust. How well did it go?  In 2016 the town was named number four of “The 12 Best Hippie Cities For Stressed-Out Progressives” by ReverbPress.  “Madrid is a town reborn. Originally a coal-mining town, it disappeared along with the popularity of coal, becoming a ghost town of abandoned buildings. Those buildings have been restored … painted in a colorful array of hues [and] become home to an artists’ colony, but in a deserty, mountainous environment [and unlike SantaFe] removed from the madding crowd.”

 

(Actual, untouched-up photo of downtown Madrid.)

 

A brief stop in Madrid was a regular part of our New Mexico visits – usually after spending our arrival day and night in Albuquerque, and driving the Turquoise Trail to Santa Fe the next morning. And we’ve continued these trips now that the town is just down the road from our Santa Fe home. Easily 50 or more stopovers. But we had never heard about “Madrid’s Bone Orchard.”

And we definitely would have sought it out. As we’ve indicated in some of our earlier writings we are definitely “FoCs” (Fans of Cemeteries.)  Back in CT we particularly enjoyed visiting Hartford, CT’s Cedar Hill and Wethersfield, CT’s Old Village  – interesting individuals artfully memorialized in a distinctive setting, 

 

But there were no indications of Madrid Cemetery anywhere that we had seen. Like so many things out here – you gotta know somebody who knows somebody. It this case it was our neighbor J whose former companion’s ashes are interred there.

 

We rode in two cars – none of us having large vehicles. We were following J. As we slowly drove into the town (posted speed limit 15 mph) she made an abrupt right into what appeared to be a narrow alleyway. But turned out to be a slightly less narrow, two-mile long, uphill, winding dirt and rock road (unposted speed limit 10 mph.) The unimproved path passed by several colorfully and artfully decorated small houses before coming to an end next to a wrought iron entry gate welcoming us to the “Land of the Dead.”

Given our two-score-plus-ten previous explorations of the town, our self-proclaimed FoC zealotry and familiarity with our friends’ overall standards we had pretty high expectations for the burying grounds. And we have to say they were absolutely exceeded.

At this point we would normally interject a little history of Madrid Cemetery. But Jim’s internet research has turned up nothing. There is no Madrid Historical Society. Not surprising in a town that died then was re-birthed in the past 50 years by a small group of people who look more to the present and future than to the past. Jim thought of having one-on-ones with locals over beers at the town’s Mindshaft Tavern to see what they might know. But under doctor/spousal advice we will instead do our own conjecturing based on what we have learned about NM cemeteries in general.

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish the only funerary practices were those of the Native Indians – most involving burial, some cremation. The 16th and 17th century conquering Spanish sought to change these rituals to those of the Catholic religion – with varying degrees of success. In most instances the Native Americans simply added Catholicism to their traditional ceremonies and belief. Sometimes they carried on their old rituals secretly under the veil of their newly taught religion. Only Catholics were allowed burial in Catholic cemeteries. For non-Catholics there were no official cemeteries

When Mexico acquired New Mexico in their war of independence from Spain they invited trade from the United States, largely in the form of merchants who traveled the Santa Fe Trail. Many were Jewish or Protestant. This brought missionary ministers and Rabbis to care spiritually for those newcomers who chose to stay. And to convert those already here whose religious needs were not being fulfilled by the inadequate number of Catholic priests. Their arrival resulted in the establishment of non-Catholic burying grounds. In Santa Fe the Masons and Odd Fellows established the initial such cemetery in 1853. In 1881 the Montefiore Cemetery in Las Vegas, NM became one of the first Jewish burial places west of the Mississippi. And many Company Towns established them for their deceased residents.

So why all this background? Today’s Madrid Cemetery is actually two graveyards – old and new, side by side – both set in a totally untilled, take-it-as-it-is, high desert landscape partially enclosed by one non-continuous strand of barbed wire. To the right is a typical western rural cemetery – wooden crosses, weathered/crumbling/intact headstones and piles of stones. (The corpses are “six feet under.” The rocks protect from the ravages of coyotes, etc.) The names that we saw here were Hispanic and the dates of death from the 1920s and 30s. Some sites were being taken over by nature. Others cared for and decorated with fresh plastic flowers. One new gravestone seemed out of sync with its plot.

 

The layout of this section is largely freeform and overgrown. We did not wander its entirety and could not even guess at its total size. Clearly from the coal mining era – but Catholic, private non-sectarian, company provided? No way to know for sure.
However, with just a little knowledge of today’s Madrid, even a first time visitor can decipher the heritage of the new section.

If not for the adjacent traditional burial ground, and a couple of similar stone-covered sites you might easily mistake this for a sculpture garden of quirky works of folk art with an ironically titled entry portal. Until you read the accompanying signage with names and date ranges and realize that you are gazing instead at a collection of highly personalized, heart-felt memorials. A front bicycle tire and handlebars, a sewing machine, a fire extinguisher and hard-hat – phrases such as “to the butte” or an illustration of racked pool balls on the marker – a wrought-iron portrayal of someone reading on a bench. By the shape of the plot you can tell that some are resting places for bodies, some for ashes.  The new section also had a rudimentary performance stage with folding chairs leaning against its side. As well as a Maypole complete with ribbons. (It was that month.)

 

 

 

Interesting individuals artfully memorialized in a distinctive setting? Most definitely yes! And as survivors of the 1960s we would also add, “far out!”

 

Crescit Eundo

 

The impetus for the following was a concert of Medieval Christmas Music by the Boston Camarata at Cristo Rey Catholic Church on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. Unfamiliar songs, performed by a group we had never heard or even heard of, in a venue we knew of but had not been in. Both the ensemble and their selections were outstanding. The site – the largest adobe building in the United States and home of the “Reredos of Our Lady of Light” altar screen – even more so. We are not what you would call pious people. But we are very much drawn to art and architecture that depicts subjects, themes, and imagery from religion.

It began in 1997 during a vacation in Malta. We chose to go there simply because Marsha saw a magazine article about "Vacations Off The Beaten Path" one day at our hairstylist – and that was one of the places. The story showed a photo of the walled city of Valletta and she immediately said "we have to go there." Jim looked at the same picture and instantly agreed. It probably was the light. We both are drawn to almost blindingly-bright-with-natural-light locations – high desert in New Mexico, arid wasteland in the Big Bend of Texas, sand bunkers on golf courses. (Marsha not so much the latter.)  Five years earlier, with images of sun-blanched desert skulls from a recently seen Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit fresh in our own skulls, it took us about the same amount of time to decide on our first trip to New Mexico.

 

Our travel agent D arranged the vacation with a perfect mix of planned day trips, on-our-own-to-explore time and tour-company support. 👏

Although it was the brightness that brought us there we were attracted to one of Malta’s main houses of worship by the darkness – specifically the chiaroscuro contrasts between light and dark in the paintings of Caravaggio – “the most famous name who worked in Malta.” (St. Paul not withstanding.) Caravaggio was there in 1608 while on the lam from a shady past in sunny Italy where, perhaps unintentionally, he had killed a man. He left behind two masterpieces, “Beheading of St John the Baptist” and “St. Jerome Writing” – both on display at the Co-Cathedral of St. John. 

Once inside we were totally awed by the expansive ornate interior with its intricately carved limestone walls, painted vaulted ceiling, elaborate side altars and self-proclaimed "most beautiful floor in the world.”  More ecclesiastical space than we had ever been in, and seemingly none of it blank. Sure, we had seen similar images in magazines and on TV. But never before the real thing. “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Connecticut anymore.”

The experience whet our appetite for more. There are (believe it or not) 359 churches and chapels on the 122 sq. mi. archipelago. We visited a few more, but not enough. So in 2002, ten years after our first trip to New Mexico, we ventured to Barcelona, Spain on an Elderhostel (now Road Scholar) program to learn more about the works of Antonio Gaudi whose Catalan Modernist architecture features organic shapes inspired by natural forms. At the top of our list was La Sagrada Famiglia Church, his possibly never-to-be-finished attempt to transubstantiate the configurations of the physical world into a manmade metaphysical monument to his God. The construction began in March 1882 and is still incomplete. Gaudi himself projected it would take 200 years. An interesting estimate since, as was his wont, he never made a complete blueprint, preferring to add the details as he saw the structure coming to life. Gaudi died in 1926 and other architects are continuing the work.

    

 

The texture and shape of La Sagrada has been described as looking like melting wax or sculpted sand. And evoked in us the same feelings of awe and peace that we feel in parts of New Mexico’s landscape – towering shapes that somehow manage to be both harshly unsettling and at the same time comforting in their soft lines and colorless color.

In addition to bringing to mind the terrain of our new home state Gaudi’s organic design philosophy also exemplified the Official State Motto of New Mexico, “Crescit Eundo” (“It Grows As It Goes”.) The expression is from a 1st century poem by Lucretius, where it describes a thunderbolt streaking across the sky, growing bolder and mightier the longer its magnificent journey continues.

Still not enough sacredness for us. So, four years later we listened as another Elderhostel Art Historian told us, “ninety percent of all the great art in the world is in Italy. And eighty-nine percent of that is in Florence,”.

 

The city’s churches and museums can be overwhelming in both their vastness and the sheer volume of masterpiece-level works of fine art within them. The religious buildings more so because all the artwork is done “in situ” – sometimes in seemingly impossible places. Like Malta every apparent inch of available space was used. Here, some artists’ works also hung in the city’s museums.

For various unrelated reasons our survey of the sacred art of Europe ended after our Florentine adventure. Which was okay because, while all of the above was happening we discovered something completely different in the churches of northern New Mexico.

Beginning in the late 16th century the Spanish came here with the intent of bringing their culture – and most importantly their Catholic religion – to this unfamiliar New World territory. But there were two major obstacles. There were never enough priests. And, while the artists and crafts people were here, the raw materials needed to create the familiar sacred art and architecture just did not exist locally. As a result…

“There are few iconic structures more fundamental to the culture and history of the Southwest than its adobe churches,” wrote John Benigno whose project “to photograph as many adobe churches as possible while they were still in their traditional state” can be seen at https://luminous-landscape.com/adobe-churches-new-mexico-built-earth-faith.

The architects of these edifices were the European Franciscan priests and brothers who planned to replicate the dressed-stone "fortress-churches" that their fellow clergy had erected in Mexico during their conquest of that colony.  However, “carried to New Mexico, to a semiarid frontier environment where inconstant adobe, field stone, and wood replaced reliable masonry, such ideals were [quickly forgotten.] Local materials, relatively few and unskilled workmen, poverty, and isolation all contributed to a unique and, as it turned out, an all but invariable New Mexican style.” (npshistory.org)

Still, while not what they had hoped for, adobe did satisfy “the invaders' insistence on erecting churches of churchly proportions.” Interiors would be 25’ x 80’ or more. Height never exceeded width. Most churches had windows on only one side. To illuminate the altar they used a “transverse clerestory window” – a wide low overhead opening that spanned the structure. The effect was theatrical – focusing the viewer “immediately on the stream of light descending like the Dove precisely on altar and reredos.”

Decorations were sparse. “Above the main altar, if the painted wall itself did not serve, stood the carved and painted wooden reredos, or retablo, forming a matrix for the patron and companion saints who stared out from timeworn statues or from animal-hide paintings.” There were no pews – with sometimes a bench along the wall, and perhaps a modest side altar.

Instead of gold leaf inlay there were thinly sliced pieces of straw. Tin replaced silver. “Separated from their nearest supply points in Mexico, Spanish colonial-era artists in New Mexico made do with the materials they found here. Cottonwood branches and roots became bultos, or statues. Pigments derived from rocks and insects turned into paint for retablos, the flat paintings of saints. Animal hides served as canvas. Those creative colonists gave birth to an art-form that was unique to the Southwest – and that still thrives today.” (New Mexico Magazine)

This lasted until the 1850 arrival of U.S. Territorial New Mexico’s first Bishop, Jean Baptiste Lamy (from France by way of Cincinnati.) To him these adobe churches “were lowly, obscene, utterly lacking in architectural character, like the stable of Bethlehem.” Not at all “the high architectural art whose tradition he had inherited. [He would be] a civilizer, a bringer of orthodoxy to benighted folk Catholics.”

In Santa Fe Lamy helmed the construction of the French Romanesque Revival Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (aka St. Francis Cathedral) and Gothic-Revival Loretto Chapel with its “miraculous staircase.” His actions also led ultimately to the 1940 erection of the setting for “one of the most extraordinary pieces of ecclesiastical art in the country” – and prompted this piece of writing.

The 25’ x 18’ stone “Reredos of Our Lady of Light” altar screen at Cristo Rey church was carved in 1761 to be hung in La Castrense military chapel on the Santa Fe Plaza. Lamy removed the reredos and transferred it to La Parroquia, the main parish church of Santa Fe at the time. He then sold the Castrense. When La Parroquia was replaced by the Cathedral the screen was consigned to a small room away from public view at St Francis until 1940, when it was moved to its present adobe church abode.

 

It was our first time in Cristo Rey. We lived for a short time in its neighborhood during our 2017 summer of house-hunting – but its doors were never open for spontaneous tourism.

Described as the “last great adobe mission,” by architecture critic Chris Wilson the church was designed in the what is now known as the Pueblo Revival style by John Gaw Meem, who revolutionized architecture in the southwest by mixing progressive elements and materials with well-known regional architectural styles.

125’L x 40’W x 33’H, with walls up to nine feet thick the building is made up of around 200,000 individual adobes supported by a hidden steel frame. The Reredos dominates the otherwise barely adorned altar. A window above illuminates the textured form of the stone carving, while also drawing attention to the area upon which the liturgy is focussed. 14 Stations of the Cross with frames of handworked tin line the side walls. And that’s about it. Just the way it should be out here.

 

Over the years we’ve been able to sample several stops on the spectrum of sacred art – from Old World complexity to New Mexican minimalism. Meanwhile Barcelona’s La Sagrada Famiglia is becoming less like an outgrowth of the earth and more and more of a cathedral – iteratively transcending even our own state’s aspirationally ambitious motto. It grows, as it goes, as it goes, as it goes…

Speaking of which. Theodore Roosevelt once said “Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.” From what we’ve learned visiting and living here, that would be just perfect as an expression of New Mexico’s beliefs and ideals. It certainly has become our preferred aesthetic viewpoint.