Chavez, Juan, House

The Juan Chavez House stands at 7809 Fourth Street NW in the village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, the strip of historic Hispano farming settlements that line the Rio Grande north of the old Albuquerque plaza. The exact construction date 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 Fourth Street served as the principal north-south road through the valley.

The house is a vernacular adobe of the middle Rio Grande type. Its load-bearing walls are sun-dried mud brick laid on stone footings, finished in mud plaster and, in later years, in lime stucco. The plan follows the long linear room file characteristic of farmstead construction in the valley, with deep-set window openings, peeled-viga ceilings, a low flat roof drained by canales, and hand-adzed wooden lintels. Such houses were raised by their owners using earth quarried from the floodplain and were almost indistinguishable from the contemporary domestic architecture of the surrounding villages of Corrales, Alameda, and Los Griegos.

The property takes its name from Juan Chavez, a member of one of the Hispano families that farmed the bottomland along Fourth Street through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The house represents the ordinary agricultural environment of the Rio Grande valley before the postwar suburban expansion of Albuquerque overtook much of the surrounding land.

The Juan Chavez House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 under reference 84002849 for its architectural and historical contributions to the North Valley. It remains a private residence and is not open to visitors, but it is visible from Fourth Street. Together with the surviving farmsteads of Los Ranchos and Corrales, it forms part of the central New Mexico adobe corridor that runs along the Rio Grande from Bernalillo south through Albuquerque to Belen.