Barela-Reynolds House

The Barela-Reynolds House stands just off New Mexico Highway 292 in Mesilla, the small plaza town in the Mesilla Valley that briefly served as a Confederate territorial capital and as a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail. The exact construction date of the house is not recorded in the registry data, but the building is generally understood to date from the second half of the nineteenth century, the period when Mesilla's central plaza and surrounding lanes were laid out in the dense, contiguous adobe pattern still visible today.

The house is a vernacular adobe of the Mesilla Valley type. Its walls are load-bearing sun-dried mud brick laid on shallow stone footings and finished originally in mud plaster. The plan is the long, narrow room file typical of the region, with deep-set window and door openings, low ceilings carried on peeled vigas, and a flat roof drained by canales. Such houses were built by local masons using earth dug from the floodplain of the Rio Grande and were almost indistinguishable from the contemporary domestic architecture of neighboring Chihuahua.

The property takes its compound name from two successive owning families, the Barelas and the Reynoldses, whose tenure linked the Hispano agricultural community of Mesilla with the Anglo merchants who arrived after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 under reference 78001815 in recognition of its representative vernacular character and its place within the larger Mesilla Plaza historic district.

The Barela-Reynolds House remains a private residence and is not open to visitors, although it can be seen from the public street. Together with the surrounding rows of plaza-front adobes, it preserves the building tradition of the lower Rio Grande, the southernmost of the New Mexican adobe corridors that runs from Socorro down through Doña Ana County to the Texas line.