Redding, William, House

The William Redding House stands in the Mimbres Valley of Grant County, along the corridor of New Mexico Highway 61 that follows the river through a region of small Hispano farming settlements and later Anglo homesteads. The house was built as a single-family residence and was associated with the Redding family during the period of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century settlement that produced the surviving rural building stock of the valley.

The dwelling is a vernacular adobe structure of the kind common to the Mimbres and upper Gila drainages. Walls were laid up of sun-dried adobe bricks made on site from local clay, set on a low stone foundation, and finished with mud plaster on the exterior. The roof is a low-pitched gabled or shed form carried on milled lumber rafters, an adaptation that became standard in the region after sawn material reached the area by rail in the 1880s. Window and door openings are modest in size and aligned to a simple rectangular plan, with the deep wall thickness that characterizes adobe construction visible in the reveals.

The house belongs to the cluster of adobe and adobe-with-frame residences in the Mimbres Valley that were entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 as part of a multiple-property study of vernacular building in the region. The study documented the persistence of adobe construction techniques among Hispano and Anglo settlers into the early twentieth century, and the William Redding House contributed to that record as a representative example.

The property is in private ownership and continues in residential use. Within the broader adobe tradition of New Mexico, the William Redding House represents the rural southwestern variant of vernacular adobe, smaller in scale than the great northern Hispano houses and Pueblo villages, gabled rather than flat-roofed in its later form, and built by working farm families from materials drawn directly from the land. It documents the southern extension of the state's earthen-building practice into the Mimbres watershed during the era of homesteading.