Who Knew? Three Buildings at Historic Casa San Ysidro Are From the East Mountains

Spring is the perfect time to visit the extraordinary Casa San Ysidro, and you’ll have an opportunity to see it with fellow members when we get together for a members-only tour of the sprawling compound at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, May 21. One of the biggest surprises at this museum in Corrales, managed by the City of Albuquerque, is three historic buildings originally from the East Mountains, each of which was dismantled, moved and painstakingly put back together under the supervision of the museum’s founder, Ward Alan Minge. Back in 1999, Alan Minge responded to my inquiry about the origin of these three buildings – a wood bunkhouse structure, a log cook house and a stone barn:

  “… The stone barn was a gift from Lorenzo Barela on the Barela ranch near Tajique. The family furnished most of the firewood for Casa San Ysidro. On a visit to the ranch in the late 1950s, the Barelas were dismantling the barn and when they saw how interested we were, they offered to bring the entire barn to us in Corrales. The stones were not marked, but we had the measurements of the original. It took me over 15 years to reassemble. . . The Barelas enjoyed visiting the barn while delivering loads of wood because, they explained, they played in the barn when they were little children. Lorenzo also told me his ancestors went by wagon to get the stone, originally from the abandoned pueblo ruins at Quarai.  

   “The two log houses (fuertes) I bought from a Mrs. Engelbrecht (note: Engelbrecht Road in Cedro is named after this family), who claimed to inherit the homesteads, land and buildings from a Mr. Griego in Escobosa. She sold these buildings after dismantling them, so we had to puzzle how to rebuild them. She sold the fuertes (in the 1960s) because she feared “hippies” might otherwise burn them. She said the log buildings had been used by families who worked for the Griegos. I had a crew to help with assembly and we started with the bunkhouse. We had to erect and re-erect five times before we got the building stable and right. With this experience, we only had to re-erect the cook shack twice. We were very impressed by the size of the lower logs used in both buildings.”  

These substantive pieces of East Mountain history make up just a segment of the remarkable breadth of Casa San Ysidro. Also known as the Gutierrez/Minge House, the complex was started in 1952 when Minge, a noted historian, and his wife Shirley Jolly bought an old, Corrales adobe home from descendants of Don Felipe Gutierrez, a recipient of the Bernalillo Township Land Grant in 1704. Because the Gutierrez house is located across from the old San Ysidro Church, it is named after it, which honors the patron saint of farming, San Ysidro Labrador. The broader name is appropriate because Casa San Ysidro, acquired through donation and purchase by the Albuquerque Museum in 1997, came to include much more than the Gutierrez house. In fact, farming will return to the compound this year thanks to a partnership between Casa San Ysidro and ARCA Organics. Tours start with the original Gutierrez house. Completely restored, with kitchen, hallway, parlor and bedrooms filled with period furniture, the house welcomes visitors as if they were keeping an appointment with Don Felipe himself. Items in the home range from the rare – like a Mexican choclatera (used in preparation of chocolate), to common helpers like the cazo, a huge pot for making soap, dying wool, doing laundry and bathing. A chandelier, made of tiered tin cans cut into rings like paper, hangs with practical elegance in the hall. While each room appears painted a different color, each is actually plastered. The vivid colors come from mud Alan Minge collected around New Mexico: pink from Acoma, brown from Corrales, dark plum from La Bajada (appropriately, in the Victorian parlor). Extending from the restored house one encounters Minge’s “recreation” of early New Mexican history. It starts with a courtyard of bricks, vigas, doors and details taken from early New Mexican structures, authentic down to its garden of wild rose, blackberries, grapes, hollyhock, lilac and yarrow. Off one side of the courtyard is a room with an elaborate French brass bed that once belonged to Gov. Manuel Armijo. To the west is a huge sala built specifically to accommodate the entire roof of a church from Tomé. To the south is a weaving room with European treadle loom from 1785; just west of that is a room featuring a sheepherder’s fireplace; built-in bancos let up to two herders warm themselves by a fire. And past the courtyard are the many outbuildings Minge collected from around the state, stocked with wagons and tools appropriate to each. Inside the Tajique barn one can see rare tools, including utensils to measure grains, coffee grinder, ox goad, double-handled saw, wine press, bear trap and wooden rake. Most unusual was a pitchfork made of a single piece of wood; someone had specifically pruned and trained a young tree to create it. The Albuquerque Museum’s Casa San Ysidro Collection contains more than 2,500 pieces, of which at least 265 are always on display.   

 Editor’s note: Parts of this Casa San Ysidro story originally appeared in EMHS newsletters in 1998 and 1999.