Fort Marcy Officer's Residence

The Fort Marcy Officer's Residence stands at 116 Lincoln Avenue, immediately north of the Santa Fe plaza on the slope leading up to the site of the original earthwork fort built by the United States Army in 1846. The surviving residence is one of the few buildings left from the long military presence on the hill and represents the adaptation of frontier army quarters to the materials and methods of northern New Mexico.

The house is a low, flat-roofed adobe building of one to one and a half stories, with load-bearing mud-brick walls finished in mud plaster and, in later campaigns, in lime stucco. The plan is the linear room file customary to officer's housing in the territorial period, with deep-set window openings, hand-adzed wooden lintels, peeled-viga ceilings, and the stepped silhouette that characterizes the larger Pueblo Revival district downtown. Successive owners introduced Territorial-style milled detailing at doors and windows, but the underlying earthen fabric remains substantially intact.

Fort Marcy was the first American military installation built in New Mexico after the United States took possession of the territory during the Mexican-American War. The post was used intermittently through the Civil War and Indian Wars and was decommissioned at the end of the nineteenth century, after which most of its buildings were demolished or absorbed into the expanding city. The Officer's Residence stayed in continuous occupation and is the most intact survivor of the military complex.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 under reference 75001168 for its architectural and historical significance. It is privately owned and used as a residence and is not regularly open to the public, although it is visible from Lincoln Avenue. The house sits within the dense ring of historic adobes that wraps the Santa Fe plaza and contributes to the city's recognized Pueblo Revival downtown district.