Trujillo, Maria J. and Juan, House

The Maria J. and Juan Trujillo House stands in the Mimbres Valley of Grant County, near the small settlement of Dwyer along the New Mexico Highway 61 corridor. The house was built as a working family residence and is associated with the Trujillo family during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Hispano settlement of the valley, when small farming households built and rebuilt adobe homes along the river.

The dwelling belongs to the vernacular adobe tradition of southern New Mexico. 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 plan is a compact linear arrangement of rooms entered from the yard, with door and window openings sized to the structural limits of the wall and lintels and frames in milled lumber. The roof, in its surviving form, is a low-pitched gabled configuration carried on sawn rafters, an adaptation that replaced or supplemented an earlier flat earthen roof once milled timber became available in the region by rail in the 1880s.

The house was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 as part of a multiple-property study that documented the surviving vernacular adobe building stock of the Mimbres Valley. The study recognized the persistence of Hispano construction techniques among small farming families through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and identified the Trujillo House as a representative example.

The property is in private ownership and continues in residential use. Within the broader adobe tradition of New Mexico, the Maria J. and Juan Trujillo House represents the southern Hispano rural variant of the state's earthen-building practice: modest in scale, gabled in its later configuration, and built by a working family from the materials of its own ground. It contributes to the documented record of how the adobe tradition of the upper Rio Grande extended into the Mimbres watershed and survived as a living domestic form well into the twentieth century.