San Antonito Church and Cemetery
Jct. of NM 14 and NM 536, NW corner, San Antonito, NMIn the late 1700's several communities settled in the East Mountain area. However, these early settlements were abandoned because of the Apache attacks. In 1819 the Governor of the New Mexico territory granted land to settlers in Carnue known today as Carnuel. The following year these settlers asked for more land as they found the farming to be better than they had anticipated. The additional land was given under the San Antonio grant.
According to JJ Bowden's, Private Land Claims in the Southwest, in 1840 a group of 27 residents petitioned the Prefect of the District of Bernalillo for a grant of 32,000 acres of vacant land known as San Antonito. This land was previously occupied in 1826 but had been abandoned. The land was granted and grant papers state that the land would be placed under the protection of Saint Anthony (San Antonio).
In his thesis, The Spanish of San Antonito, Jean Donald Bowen interviewed Manuel Gonzales in 1952. Manuel was 84 years old at that time. In this interview, he stated that San Antonito was settled in 1835 by settlers from San Antonio 4 miles to the South.
These settlers built a new community in the days when it took three days to get to Albuquerque and back by wagon, and the Albuquerque newspaper of the day still gave reports of Apache raiding. The people were mainly farmers but also worked with nearby lumber and mining industries. The road through San Antonito from Albuquerque to Santa Fe was also a secondary trail that cut off from the Santa Fe Trail at about the Pecos River and worked it's way to the Tijeras canyon.
In 1848, after the U.S.-Mexican War, the treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe gave the local residents citizenship and recognized their ownership of the land. However, the grants had to be proved.
In 1892 the heirs and legal representatives of the original San Antonito grantees sought confirmation of the grant. The US government rejected the grant on the grounds that it was given by a Prefect without proper approval by the Governor and the Provincial Assembly. This decision was upheld by the US Supreme court in 1897. Other lands granted by the Mexican government in New Mexico were rejected on these same grounds.
The community of San Antonito was left with no legal ownership of the land. It was up to each resident to apply for a patent for the land which he could prove belonged to him. Because of this, much of the communal lands were lost. In 1896 and 1899 land surveys of the San Antonito area were done, most likely because of the many land claims being filed. In the surveyor notes of 1896 it shows that there was a small chapel in the Southeast corner of File No 3008 Tract 6 which Julian Romero, a local farmer, was applying for a patent.
In the papers in which Julian Romero filed to receive a patent for the land, he signed an affidavit stating that he bought the land from Ramon Zamora (one of the original grantees) in 1879. The land was patented to Romero in 1902 who was listed as one of the petitioners in the confirmation suit filed in 1892.
This plot of land was deeded to the Archbishop Peter Bourgade of Santa Fe in 1905 by Julian Romero's widow Seferina Zamora de Romero.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.