The history of Domicilio Cerro Gordo is a fabric of people and place woven over perhaps 250 years. Cerro Gordo (literally, “fat hill”) was part of the Lucero Land Grant in 1732. Ownership of the property that included the original Cerro Gordo farmhouse passed from one generation to the next and the thread of related ownerships of the Lucero, Armijo and Gonzales families remained unbroken until 1959.
For these families Cerro Gordo was both a physical feature and a home, a domicilio. In the adjudication of private land claims in 1896, Juan Bautista Lucero, who was born in 1807 and whose great grandfather, Jose Antonio Lucero, was the grantee of the Lucero Land Grant, testified that he was “born at that place . . . Cerro Gordo,” and lived “here at the Cerro Gordo, near the river. . . always . . . was brought up there.” Petrolino Armijo, who was born ca. 1836, testified in what were probably the same proceedings, that he lived in “precinct 18 at Cerro Gordo, born there.”
From photographs of the Upper Canyon of the Santa Fe River it is readily apparent that as late as just after the first World War, the entire area was still devoted to farming, with irrigation ditches and cross-fencing for livestock, and the only buildings were the Cerro Gordo farmhouse and several adjacent structures. Today’s relatively dense development did not start in the Cerro Gordo area until after World War II.
An archeological/architectural study of the farmhouse discloses that it went through four stages of growth. In Stage 1 the initial house consisted of what is now the master bedroom, the entry hallway and the dining room. The east wing consisting of the present-day kitchen and study was added in Stage 2. In Stage 3 the balance of today’s master suite was added, making the house into a “U.” The construction of the sala in Stage 4 closed in the “U”and completed the existing footprint. The house had a dirt roof in its origins, but after the “U” was filled in with the sala, a tin standing seam pitched roof was built over the dirt roof. Juan I. Gonzales, a grandson of Petrolino Armijo and the brother of the then owner of the property, Tiburcita Gonzales de Varela, stated in 1959 (when he was in his 70's), that the tin roof had been there as long as he could remember. Thus we know that well before the end of the 19th century the house had assumed its current exterior configuration and appearance.
When Bob Harris, an architect with the National Park Service, purchased the property from Tiburcito Gonzales in 1959, the Domicilio included 1520 and 1522 Cerro Gordo and an extension of the property lines up to the top of Cerro Gordo. Tiburcita had previously given the lower five acres on the flats down to the Santa Fe River to her daughter and son-in-law, Joe Garcia, so that they and their six children could move out of the Domicilio into a house of their own. Garcia apparently did not have the funds to complete his house, and Tiburcita used part of the proceeds of the sale to Harris to finish the Garcia house, where she joined her daughter and son-in-law after the sale.
The farmhouse, while an imposing adobe structure of then significant scale, had never been brought into the 20th century. The kitchen, which was located where the master bedroom now is in the northwest corner of the house, had a cold water faucet and bucket underneath for drainage. In 1959 that was the extent of the indoor plumbing. The outhouse was located south of the house. The flooring was 1x6 boards laid on dirt, covered by layers of linoleum "rugs." Cardboard kept the old dirt roof from sifting down through the ceiling boards and vigas. What are now the entry hall and dining room were sealed up and the doorways bricked in. Access to the house was by a driveway from Cerro Gordo Road to the patio in front of the sala. The northerly hillside in back had eroded down to the exterior walls.
Harris reopened the interior circulation of the house, installed plumbing and central heating, changed the kitchen to its present location and installed new doors in the sala and entry hallway from an old house in San Antonio owned by the Maverick family. An intermediate owner acquired 1520 Cerro Gordo from Harris in 1972.
The current owner purchased it in 1995, and with his wife undertook a major remodeling to recapture the inherent grandeur of the structure. The original roof of 18" of dirt above the ceiling vigas was removed, skylights were installed, and an interior second floor was added for storage, darkroom, bath and gallery work space or additional bedroom. The area above the entry hall and dining room was left open to the underside of the pitched roof, bringing borrowed sunlight into previously dark spaces and producing a sense of volume rarely found in adobe structures. The kitchen was remodeled and a small “greenhouse” service area added to it. Two small bedrooms were combined into a single master suite. Fireplaces were added to or restored in all rooms. Pine flooring from an 18th century barn in New England was installed in the dining room, kitchen and sala. The interior doors, shelving and kitchen counters were made from a large white fir on the property that was felled in 1995 due to old age and disease and subsequently milled at a local lumber mill. The upended stump of the tree has been retained as a natural wood sculpture in the upper terrace of the yard.
The historic restoration has created a house that respects its heritage as Domicilio Cerro Gordo while at the same time provides amenities for current living. Whether sitting in the sala or outside on the patio, one still feels the presence of the past.
