The Palace of the Governors

The long, low adobe building at the north end of the Santa Fe Plaza does not look like the oldest continuously occupied public building in the continental United States. It does not look particularly old. Adobe is not a material that announces its age. It needs to be maintained or it returns to the landscape it came from, and the Palace of the Governors has been maintained, rebuilt, plastered over, and modified continuously since Spanish colonial Governor Pedro de Peralta first occupied it in sixteen ten.

Plymouth Colony would not be established for another decade.

The building has served as the administrative seat of three successive governments without interruption. Spanish colonial governors ran New Mexico from it for seventy years. When Po'pay led the Pueblo Revolt in sixteen eighty and the Spanish fled south, Pueblo leaders governed from the same building for twelve years. When Diego de Vargas led the Spanish reconquest in sixteen ninety-two, he took possession of the Palace and the Spanish resumed governing from it. When Mexico declared independence from Spain in eighteen twenty-one, the Palace became the seat of Mexican territorial administration. When the United States seized Santa Fe from Mexico in eighteen forty-six, American military and territorial governors moved in.

The building that stands today is not precisely the building of sixteen ten. Adobe construction requires continuous attention, and four centuries of maintenance, rebuilding, and modification have changed it substantially. The footprint is roughly the same. The location is precisely the same. The function, as a seat of government and then as a museum, has been continuous since the first year of the seventeenth century.

It is now the New Mexico History Museum. The oldest museum west of the Mississippi, running in a building that was old before the United States existed.