Bucher, William H., House

The William H. Bucher House stands at 300 West Main Street in Hillsboro, the small Sierra County village that grew up after the discovery of gold in the Black Range in 1877. Hillsboro briefly served as the county seat and supported a mixed population of Anglo miners, Hispano farmers, and merchants drawn from across the borderlands; the surviving fabric of the town reflects the modest scale of that frontier mining economy.

The Bucher House is a vernacular adobe of the southern New Mexico type. Its load-bearing walls are sun-dried mud brick laid on stone footings, with a low gabled or shallow-pitched roof carried on hand-hewn timbers and finished in mud plaster or lime stucco. Window and door openings are deep-set in the wall thickness, and the plan follows the long, narrow room file customary to small-town adobe construction in the region. No architect is recorded; the building was almost certainly raised by the owner and local masons using earth quarried near the Percha Creek floodplain.

The property is named for William H. Bucher, an early Hillsboro resident whose family was associated with the town's commercial life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The house represents the ordinary domestic environment of the Black Range mining camps, a building tradition that is now scarce because so much of Hillsboro's nineteenth-century fabric has been lost to fire, weather, and depopulation.

The Bucher House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 under reference 95000461 for its architectural and historical contributions to the Hillsboro townscape. It remains a private residence and is not open to the public, but it is visible from Main Street. The property anchors the southwestern end of the New Mexico adobe corridor, in the dispersed cluster of mining-era earthen buildings that survives between Hillsboro, Kingston, and the surrounding Sierra County camps.