Two Houses on Main Street

Stand on Trinidad's Main Street and look at two houses sitting side by side on the same block. One is a two-story adobe, thick-walled and earth-colored, with a widow's walk borrowed from some New England seaport and transplanted here to the Purgatoire River valley. The other is a three-story Victorian confection of locally made brick, its steep Mansard roof clad in metal, a four-story central tower rising above everything around it like an exclamation point in French.

Together they tell the entire story of what happened to southern Colorado in the span of a single generation. The adobe belongs to the Baca family. Felipe de Jesus Baca was born in Taos, New Mexico in eighteen twenty-eight, and for nearly three decades he built his fortune the way his neighbors did: sheep on the high grasslands, wool down the trade routes, flour wagons rolling north toward Denver during the Colorado gold rush.

Around eighteen sixty he was driving a flour shipment up through the Purgatoire valley when he recognized what he was looking at. Fertile bottomland, sheltered by the Sangre de Cristo foothills, sitting astride the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. He brought his wife Dolores and their children back the same year.

By eighteen sixty-two, twelve families from Taos had followed. Trinidad was a New Mexican town first. Baca donated land for the Holy Trinity Church.

He dug an irrigation ditch that watered four hundred acres. He helped start a school by offering land to the Sisters of Charity of Mount Saint Joseph. He was elected to the Colorado Territorial Legislature in eighteen seventy.

When he wanted a proper house in eighteen seventy-three, he did not deal in cash. He traded twenty-two thousand pounds of wool, valued at seven thousand dollars, for the two-story adobe that John Hough, a Santa Fe Trail merchant, had built a few years earlier. Baca died the following year at the age of forty-six, which means he barely had time to enjoy it.

The mansion next door belongs to Frank Bloom. Bloom arrived in eighteen sixty-seven, young and sharp-eyed, and went to work managing his father-in-law's mercantile. He found coal outcropping near Fisher's Peak and opened the first commercial coal mine in the Trinidad district.

He joined the Thatcher brothers to build the Bloom Cattle Company into one of the largest cattle outfits in Colorado, with herds running from New Mexico all the way to Montana. He moved into banking, briefly ran a newspaper. When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway rolled into Trinidad in eighteen seventy-eight, it arrived in Bloom's world, not Baca's.

Cattle went out by railcar now. Coal went east in bulk. In eighteen eighty-two Bloom built his mansion, and it announced exactly what Trinidad had become.

Twelve years separated the Baca House from the Bloom Mansion. Twelve years from a wool trade to a Gilded Age showpiece. The adobe and the brick sat on the same street, catching the same Raton Pass sun, but they were monuments to entirely different economies.

Both buildings are now part of the Trinidad History Museum, and you can walk through each of them on the same afternoon. The wool smell is long gone. The cattle dust is long gone.

What remains is the argument the two houses still make, quietly, about who built this valley and who remade it.