Much was changing in the village of Antonchico as it entered the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By then, the town boasted of a water power flouring mill, two churches, a town druggist, two general stores with the typical run of daily needs plus livestock and grain, a carpenter and blacksmith, not to mention a town lawyer, constable and a postmaster. Anchoring one end of the main street in the lower plaza, named for the town itself, was the Abercrombie Mercantile Store, a rare two-story building with a six-post portico stretching across its front entrance, and an updated gabled-roof warehouse and storage addition. Built from the proceeds of a herd of stolen cattle, it became the center of social life, a traveller’s hotel and stop for the tri-weekly stage to Las Vegas thirty miles to the north; it is reported to have been a regular refuge of Billy the Kid. The building is now a shell of its former self, closed up and locked away with bars across the doors and windows, the rear plazuela enclosed by three foot walls is abandoned, and the remnants of the old haciendas within the inner contents buried under a layer of dust and dirt showcase that anything from lipstick to horse collars, ammunition to caskets, notwithstanding the groceries and liquor as a mainstay to everyday life in the frontier town could once be procured there.
On the opposite end was the twin-spired la Yglesia de San Jose, raised as the Rael family began to take its place among the village’s farmer elite not only because the town had grown so large it required a second church but as a morada meeting-house for the Los Penitentes brotherhood, overlooked during the purge of Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit missionaries. When they were replaced with a much lesser number of secular priests the many remote communities, like Antonchico, received services only once a year. The brotherhood filled the gap. They did not perform the sacramental acts of the Church, but they did provide community aid and charity as a secondary benefit to their memorial and dedication to penance and the Passion of Christ.
Father John B. Guerin was the first of the priests to serve the residents of villages that dotted the landscape of San Miguel County. Emiterio and Antonia travelled to San Miguel del Vado, some forty miles across rough terrain for the baptism of their first two children, twins, rather than wait for what might have been months for him to come to Antonchico. He was soon re-assigned permanently to the parish in Mora, to be replaced by Reverend Juan B. Fayet, the first priest to make Antonchico his permanent mission, who prayed over the baptism of six more children, and the burials of five, during his nine years in the village. Then came Father Augustin Redon who presided over the baptisms of three more of your siblings, and the deaths of two, before you, as the last of Emiterio and Antonia’s children was born in 1874.
Emiterio died unexpectedly sometime after this, ministered and buried no doubt by the selfless Father Redon. That this tragedy may have taken place during the smallpox plague that took so many lives in Antonchico in 1877 would explain why there is no record of his death or burial. He left behind only the two boys—Anastacio the eldest being only about eleven years old—along with his mother and wife to manage the farm that had more than doubled its value in real and personal property until Anastacio could come of age. The two women lived side-by-side with Abrana, the elder daughter who married quickly thereafter, and her husband who occupied himself as a freighter rather than a farmer, completing the enclave and beginning a family in the house on the other side of her mother’s.
By 1880, the number of Rael family farms had increased to six. But the next five years would prove devastating. Antonia lost another daughter in 1882, and her mother-in-law passed in 1883. Anastacio married a year later. I might say that he worked so hard to preserve the farm that he and his new wife were delayed in starting their own family for a full three years. There remains no record of the loss of the farm and the land, the loss of the large haciendas, with the house and outbuilding combined into an enclosed unit creating a plazuela in the center where there was once the huertos with fruit trees and flowers, that was surely the home of this prosperous family.
In 1885, the number of farms owned and operated by a Rael family had dwindled to two, and Anastacio was recorded as working merely as a farm laborer; his mother with his younger brother and sister were left to subsist on what he and Abrana could spare and what the three of them could grow in their little garden. Whether there was an inverse relationship between the decline of the family and the rise of the town, associated with the Santa Fe Railway which reached Las Vegas during this time, is a question left unanswered and lost to the history of the imagination.
So when the opportunity arose for you to marry, and marry well enough, the main consideration was not the wishes of a young girl, still a child by all accounts, but for a transaction of benefit to the households, the carrying on of a patrimonial tradition, and of course the honor of the family names and reputations. Family. Honor. Duty. These required you to accept, without question, whatever arrangement Anastacio, the head of what was left of the family, would make. It was la Yglesia de San Jose, at the end of the bustling street, during the height of Antonchico’s existence, and the Reverend Father Redon to whom you turned for your marriage blessing at sixteen in 1890.
Gone are any signs of a mercantile center, gone are the long contiguous rows of houses though there still remains some sign of the larger enclosed haciendas. Gone is the plaza that was the center of town life in Antonchico. What remains is the twin-spired church, rebuilt using the ancient adobe walls but with a metal embossed roof and Gothic style windows to replace the wooden shingles and folk territorial building style.
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