Tafoya, Domingo, House

The Domingo Tafoya House, 10021 Edith Boulevard NE, is a well-preserved pre-Civil War home, one of the few still standing in Alameda, a historic 18th-century Spanish settlement in the Rio Grande valley north of Albuquerque. Built on the high ground at the eastern edge of the valley, it has survived numerous floods which by 1904 had erased almost all signs of the original Alameda settlements near the river. The house has remained in the same family since the mid-19th century and has been carefully maintained by the descendants of the early, and probably the first owners. It stands today as a rare example of a typical Hispanic 19thcentury residence.

No recorded building date exists for the house, but Tafoya family records show that Nicholas Tafoya, grandfather of the present owner, was born in the house in 1858. Nicholas's parents, Domingo Tafoya and Anna Maria Martinez are listed as residents of Alameda in the 1850 Territorial census and on the 1847 birth record of their daughter Maria Conception, so they may well have been living in the house for 10-11 years prior to Nicholas' birth. Domingo's brother, Tomas Tafoya, is recorded as owning land in Alameda in 1844. Since there is no mention of Domingo's birth in the San Felipe de Neri records in the period 1822-28 (Domingo was 25 in the 1850 census), the family may have come from elsewhere in the territory to settle in Alameda. An 1839 transaction of land on the east mesa of Albuquerque lists Domingo, his brothers and sisters, and Juan Ignacio Tafoya - "the father of them all" - as the grantors, which would place them at least in the Albuquerque area in the late 1830s. The house, then, dates back to 1858 in family records and perhaps earlier, given the Tafoya family's recorded residence in Alameda in the 1840s and early 50s.

The construction and style of the Tafoya House support an early building date. The house has many elements of an early to mid-19th century building: two-foot thick walls, few and low set windows, low (5-6 feet) doorways, land-adzed vigas, and a linear 'L' shaped plan. It's sitting also indicates an early building date: it is clearly related to a compound of early adobe structures which are set at the intersection of two historic roads: Edith Boulevard, the old high ground road to Bernalillo and Santa Fe, and Alameda Road which runs west from Edith toward the site of the old Alameda Plaza near the river and which, in the past, connected on the east to a maze of roads leading to the Sandia Mountains.

Tafoya family records, brought together by Father Arthur Tafoya, nephew of the present owner, clearly show the family's long residence in the house. Nicholas Tafoya, born there in 1858, married Anna Maria Martinez, and their son Manual, born in the house in 1887, married Francesquita Maldonado in 1910. They had at least three children, Nicholas, Patricia, and Lorencita; Nicholas, born there in 1911, died in the mid-1940s and Lorencita continued to live at 10021 with her mother. Arthur Tafoya is Vicar General at the Catholic seminary in Santa Fe. The family have traditionally been farmers; Lorencita Tafoya remembers traveling to their "farm" a little farther up the valley. This unbroken ownership of the ancestral home makes this house especially rare in Albuquerque's north valley, where most of the old adobe homes were sold to Anglo owners in the decades just before and after the Second World War.