The Synagogue on the Santa Fe Trail

Pull off a moment and look up Maple Street toward the corner of Second. That red brick building with the onion dome and the pointed-arch windows is Temple Aaron, a Moorish Revival synagogue sitting on a hillside in a southern Colorado ranching and coal town. It has been here since eighteen eighty-nine, and it is the second-oldest known synagogue in continuous use in its original location west of the Mississippi River.

To understand why it exists, you have to go back to the Santa Fe Trail, which ran directly through Trinidad. Jewish merchants began arriving here in eighteen sixty-seven, drawn by the same logic that had drawn Jewish traders to frontier commercial hubs across the West: a crossroads town with no established merchant class, hungry for dry goods, hardware, clothing, and credit. They were mostly young men from Hanover, Bavaria, Bohemia, and Alsace-Lorraine, and they were extraordinarily good at building trade networks. By eighteen seventy-four, Trinidad had only two non-Jewish mercantile firms left in the entire town. The Jewish community did not just participate in Trinidad's commerce, for a stretch, they essentially were Trinidad's commerce.

The names are still legible in the historical record. Samuel Jaffa became Trinidad's first mayor when the town incorporated in eighteen seventy-six. His brother Solomon served as city alderman. Together the Jaffa brothers built Trinidad's opera house. Frank Bloom, who arrived in eighteen sixty-seven, grew the Bloom Cattle Company into one of the largest cattle outfits in Colorado, with leased land stretching into New Mexico, Montana, and South Dakota. His eighteen eighty-two mansion still stands a few blocks from here, now a state museum.

In eighteen eighty-three, fifty-four families organized Congregation Aaron, named for the brother of Moses, the first high priest, meeting at Sol Jaffa's home. Six years later they hired the young architect Isaac Hamilton Rapp to give them a building worthy of what they had built. Rapp reached for the Moorish Revival vocabulary then fashionable for synagogue design across the country: the onion dome, the small minarets, the pointed arches, the brightly colored stained glass. The organ and the hand-carved pulpit were brought to Trinidad by wagon train. The building cost twelve thousand dollars, a fortune in this town in that year.

Rapp, for his part, went on to become one of the most influential architects in the Southwest. He is credited as the originator of the Santa Fe Style, the adobe-inspired regional vernacular that still defines the look of New Mexico. His career began here, with this dome on a hill in a cattle town.

The congregation held two hundred fifty members at its peak in nineteen seventeen. Then the cattle economy shifted, the coal economy collapsed, and Trinidad slowly emptied. By twenty sixteen the last caretaking family had exhausted their savings maintaining the building. Torah scrolls were sold. A for-sale sign went up at three hundred ninety-five thousand dollars.

What happened next is its own kind of story. Strangers across Colorado, Jewish and not, mobilized to save a building most of them had never seen. A nonprofit formed. The roof was patched. On December eleventh, twenty twenty-three, the United States Department of the Interior designated Temple Aaron a National Historic Landmark, recognized for its distinctive architecture and for its role in the westward migration of Jews. The dome is still there. The stained glass still throws colored light across the sanctuary floor. Services are still held inside.