Sunday, January 26, 2014

Chamita Walls


Weather: Cool mornings, warmer afternoons; men in village building a cement block wall along the road boundary; last snow more than a month ago, 12/22/2013.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds, mice active.


Weekly update: It’s easier to say, "if there are rocks in an area, there will be rock walls," than it is to say, "if there is a need for a barrier and rocks abound, they might be used to build a wall."

In November I drove through Chamita, which is near the base of the northern Black Mesa. It lies on the tongue of land just north of the confluence of the Rios Chama and Grande. The land is the usual layers of soil and rock deposited when glacial waters were washing down bits of the Sangre de Cristo.


Later volcanic eruptions left a cap of lava along the top.


Rocks of all sizes fall down or wash out. It’s probably the source of much of the rock used in local walls.


With easy access to water and potentially fertile soil, the area has been settled for centuries. In 1541, Francisco de Barrio-Nuevo led a military unit looking for winter provisions for Coronado’s expedition. The Tewa speakers of what is now San Juan abandoned their pueblos on the two banks of the Rio Grande, when the Spanish drew near.

The men found good stores and well-made glazed earthernware. The glaze was made with silver.

Antonio Trujillo of Santa Cruz claimed he had been granted rights to the land by Juan Ignacio Flores Magollón, governor between 1712 and 1715. At the time he built an irrigation ditch and opened a field. He reapplied for his grant in 1724.

I wondered, since lava rock is now the preferred building material, if people there had pioneered its use.

The first thing I realized is the original settlements and out buildings were probably closer to the river than they are today. Road builders prefer harder, more stable ground. Insurance companies won’t cover flood plains, and banks won’t lend. What you see today from the road probably came after the road was improved.

The original community grew to 1,300 people and served as a trading center. However, by the time Manuel Trujillo was petitioning the United States for rights to his land in 1859, the population was closer to 300. Today it’s nearer 900 living in some 320 households sprawled along the roads.

The oldest wall I saw, that is the one made with the roughest cement, was along a road leading to the village.


Someone had hit it, and the damage had not been repaired. It was possible to see the interior was primarily cement.


There are walls that show the Española taste for extruded grout.


The local aesthetic, however, prefers large, irregular rocks embedded in cement rather than the rounded, more uniform ones used here.


One person did try to modernize his wall. Unlike people here who add more grout, he incised his to highlight the boundaries.


Notes:

Bowden, J. J. "Town of Chamita Grant," website for New Mexico Office of the State Historian

Winship, George Parker. The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542, translator (1904)

Photographs: Most of the photographs were taken in November of 2013. Wall below was made from the cobbles we call river rock that lay beneath the lava.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Barbed Wire


Weather: Warm afternoons have tempted men out to burn; last snow 12/22/2013.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: Fences have been built for both functional and cultural reasons.

The first probably evolved from the first attempts to domesticate animals. Then, the need was to keep animals in. Later, it was necessary to keep predators out.

Neolithic villagers seem to have been the first to use them to demarcate space, to separate the sacred from the ordinary, the domesticated from the wild. Post holes indicate they were built around their villages. Or rather, the remains of wooden posts that altered the soil when they decayed bear witness.

Mette Løvschal believes fences first appeared in the south of England about 3500 years ago. About 3000 years ago, the idea spread to "Belgium, Holland, Northern France to Northern Germany, Denmark, Scania and all the way to the Baltic countries."


Defensive uses apparently arose in the Iron Age, about 2500 years ago. Their use as signifiers of private property came later.

Romans preferred living fences, that is hedges grown in ditches. Once created, they required little maintenance. They also had the advantage they provided firewood. On Britain’s Land’s End peninsula, rock walls were built because glacial debris had to be removed.

Oliver Rackham noted hedging was not universal in England or Europe. Hedgerows tended to develop in hilly terrain or near woodlands. Broad valleys and prairies didn’t tend to support them. When fencing spread from Bronze Age England around 1000 BC, the major lowland river valleys were being settled.


Dead fences developed where there were no stones and no water to support hedges. American barbed wire was introduced in the 1870s. It only required wood for posts. It was promoted in the west as the only fence capable on restraining cattle. They became the first fences in this area, and still are the most common.

When I bought my land, the man handling the sale had a board in his office with pieces of barbed wire he had collected in the area. Each manufacturer had a slightly different design for the barbs. He must have had a dozen different types.

What I notice when I drive through the country are the posts. I assume those scavenged from trees are older than those manufactured from trees. Some used just branches.


Some used more substantial limbs.


With these fences, the posts both space the strands of wire and support their weight. Eventually, man began creating corner posts which were more substantial. Many, in fact, were structured like doorways.


They were so strong, the fence wire could be strung taut between the them. The intermediate posts supported less weight, but kept strands separated.

Today, hollow steel posts are used, but often still are buttressed into triangles for greater strength.


Modern posts are steel.


Men spaced them so far apart, they no longer were as effective. Some now have added spacing chains which both keep the strands separated and make it harder to part the wires to walk through.


Once constructed, fences tend to stay around. When the old posts fail, new ones replace them.


When the wire rusts or is cut, new wire is strung.


Even dead fences have life cycles.


Notes:
Petersen, Irene Berg. "Privacy hedges date back to the Iron Age," ScienceNordic website, 2 January 2013, discusses work of Mette Løvschal.

Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside (1986).


Photographs: Except for the fence in snow, the pictures were taken in the past few years in the area. The snow scene is from the San Juan mountains this past November.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Cement


Weather: Calm, dry weather in the valley protected by the Sangre de Cristo from the cold fronts that have been sweeping land to the east; last snow 12/22/2013.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on Apache plume, German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, Oregon holly and coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: Rock walls, as we know them, require mortar, which in turn requires lime.

Lime may undergird most of the state from sea animals buried in the Paleozoic era, but outcrops are rare. The most active mines today are in Tijeras, with some around San Ysidro in the southern Jémez.

Before Columbus, natives along the Carribean coast in México learned to process snail shells for the lime used in making corn flour. In the southwest, women substituted ashes from burned plants, especially sagebrush.

The adhesive qualities of heated lime were known by the Romans, but the technology for making cement was lost until the mid-1700s. John Smeaton mixed pebbles and powdered brick in 1756 in England. Joseph Aspdin created the first Portland cement there in 1824 by burning ground limestone and clay together. Thomas Edison introduced a low-cost processing kiln to this country in the 1880s.

Any stone walls built before 1900 in this area would have been held together with dirt, probably clay, perhaps with something like the mud plaster used to protect adobe. If any survive, they probably have been covered over with cement.

Ideas for new construction forms usually are introduced by the leaders of society - here the churches or the ones who made the first money from the railroads or trade. The first ones I’ve seen here are along the contemporary street side of one of the large homes on the hill overlooking the old rail yard.


Early masons had to mix the cement with sand or stones and water. The early mixtures were often rough. The walls on the house above have been built in several sections. In the oldest, small rocks were laid in rows in deep beds of rough cement.


Other walls along the ridge overlooking the tracks also have rough mortar. The stones usually are laid in courses.


Eventually, men began piling the rocks closer together. This one was built on a road that probably paralleled the tracks north of town.


The idea for a stone wall spread to already settled areas. One in Santa Cruz probably began with rocks laid in courses. Then, it was raised by laying newer style stones on top.


The wall in front of an territorial style house probably was built after traffic increased on the road in front.


In the early 1940s, Gene Winchester saw the problems with individuals mixing their own cement. He started offering premixed bags of Portland cement, sand and gravel. Rough cement work probably disappeared after World War II, except for nonvisible uses likes topping off old walls


or reinforcing ditch walls.


Winchester’s Quikrete products now fill an aisle in big box retailers or older lumber yards storage buildings.


Larger quantities of cement are provided by the truckload by descendants of one of the families that profited from the early railroad. Their company also provides sand for masons who still need to mix their own grout or stucco.

Notes: See entry for 30 November 2008 for more information on processing corn.


Photographs: Photographs taken in the area. The pile of sand and the grading conveyor are at a local sand and gravel company.

Sunday, January 05, 2014

Foundations


Weather: More cool mornings and warm afternoons; last snow 12/22/2013.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on Apache plume, German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, Oregon holly and coral beardtongue leaves.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: Foundations probably are one of the less obvious contributions the railroads made to local construction techniques.

Low adobe buildings, like the one above, could be built directly on the ground.

General knowledge of foundations, which existed in México, apparently was limited. Camilla Trujillo says that, when the south tower of the Santa Cruz church collapsed in 1999, they found the original foundations were sandstone like that used for the original sanctuary floor.

Railroads reintroduced stone foundations in much of the country. Steel rails were laid on wooden cross ties. In the early years, the ties were laid on beds of local soil. When those washed away or collapsed from the weight of the increasingly heavier freight cars, engineers studied the properties of rocks. Poorly constructed beds were replaced with harder rocks that could be carried over the rails from quarries opened by the roads.


When the first of the transcontinental roads was built in the 1860s, the Union Pacific used two crews. One built the bed, the other laid the tracks. They hired whoever they could, but mostly relied on Irish immigrants. Farther west, Chinese were used. After Congress limited Chinese migration in 1882, railroads recruited Mexicans in El Paso.

The construction crew was supplied daily by a train that traveled the freshly laid rails. It brought rails, ties, spikes, and food to the men, who lived in rail cars.

The grading crew lived in primitive conditions, camping on the land. It probably had a few highly skilled men with surveying skills who oversaw the cutting, filling, and, through the mountains, blasting. Most of the laborers executed their instructions with picks and shovels.

The Denver and Rio Grande was less well financed that other national roads. Camilla Trujillo has a photograph of the road in Velarde where the rails are covered with dirt, not rocks.

The Texas, Santa Fe and Northern, which continued the line from Española to Santa Fé, was even less well endowed. One picture she includes, does not have full ties. Instead, small pieces are laid under the rails, with no rock or dirt fill. In one from the 1920s the ties extend the width of the bed and are covered with dirt.

No doubt, both roads hired local men, especially for the less skilled bed work. Once the roads were completed, they hired local men to repair wash outs. The Velarde picture includes Luis Borrego and another man with shovels and picks doing maintenance.

Men repairing the roads already were using lentils above window and door openings. They would have observed the similar role played by ties on the ground that spread the weight of the trains. They also would have learned about the importance of stone underpinnings.

An adobe building in Chimayó has a wooden sill and frame for its second story.


An adobe building on the road to Angel Fire not only has a wooden beam supporting the second story,


but it also has a still log under the adobe wall built on uneven, moist terrain.


Stones bases began to be used, at least for freestanding walls. One near the Santa Cruz church has been battered several times.


When you look closely, you can see the original wall was adobe. Once it was stuccoed over, rocks and blocks were used for repairs


Farther along, the stucco does not quite reach the ground. You can see the base was stone.


Incidentally, the church tower didn’t collapse because of the stone. They built it over an existing well in 1867. Rising moisture escaped through the porous mud plaster, until they resurfaced the exterior with hard plaster and stucco in the 1950s. Then, moisture slowly built up inside.

They rebuilt it on a concrete base reinforced by rebar.


Notes:
Cahill, Marie and Lynne Piade. The History of the Union Pacific (1989)

Trujillo, Camilla. Española (2011)

Photographs: Railroad pictures taken in Albuquerque; others taken over the past several years.