A strong Hispanic presence dating from the 1750’s has been maintained on the Byway. The Santa Rita del Cobre mining site drew migrations from Mexico to the Mimbres River Valley. By the early 1800’s as many as 800 people converged on the area. Many early Hispanic family histories can be traced to the Mimbres Valley.
In the early 1800’s during the Apache Wars, settlers were driven out temporarily but later returned, especially to the lower Mimbres Valley. As protection for miners and settlers, Fort Webster was built at Santa Rita but was moved later to the banks of the Mimbres River near San Lorenzo.
Migrations to Santa Rita from Mexico, and from the eastern United States to nearby Pinos Altos continued, and many of the settlers established homes and farms. Although ancient acequias (i.e., irrigation canals) existed previously in the area, the new settlers constructed their own to irrigate crops in the 1850s. Acequia farming helped to evolve Hispanic customs in the Mimbres Valley. Old residents there still remember the rituals connected with the cleaning of the acequias in the spring and the pilgrimages with their patron saint, San Ysidro. Manuela Carrillo, of Faywood, still remembers the songs they used to sing during the events.
The Hispanic settlers also built churches. Dolores Andazola migrated from Chihuahua in 1870 and donated land for the San Jose mission. The San Lorenzo Catholic Church was built in 1899. Although some believe San Lorenzo was named by former territorial governor Mogollón in the middle 1700’s, others consider it more likely the town was named in 1869 by a settler from Pinos Altos. (Chihuahuans were among the settlers, and one of them may have wanted to name the new settlement for his patron saint. There is also a town named San Lorenzo in Chihuahua, Mexico.)
The settlers were active in farming, mining and business. Early newspaper accounts cite other enterprises. Narcisso Barela, for instance, made a rich strike near San Lorenzo, and Gorgonio Galaz owned a store in San Lorenzo in the late 1800’s. A post office was located in the store. N.Y. Ancheta was credited as one of the discoverers of the Pinos Altos mines.
With all the progress and bustle of mining and business going on, disasters and calamities also occurred. A smallpox epidemic was reported in 1877. Roaring floods came down the Mimbres River and destroyed orchards and crops in the 1890s and through the turn of the century.
The history of the Mimbres Valley and its Hispanic settlers is visible in the old adobe buildings in the San Lorenzo area. These adobes are home to the descendants of the Hispanic pioneers. The historic Hispanic town of San Lorenzo was founded in 1869, and the adjacent farms were surveyed soon after. San Lorenzo is characterized by a building tradition known as Hispanic Vernacular style. The grandest example is the 1899 church with stone foundation and bell tower, stuccoed adobe walls, and corrugated metal roof. The other buildings in this National Register Historic District are highly evocative of old Mexico. The teacher’s house, or teacherage, the 1890 school (there is also a 1936 school of stone construction), a 1920 dance hall, store buildings and homes dating from the 1880s through the 1930s, all give San Lorenzo the typical appearance of an historic Hispanic town with its low roofs and adobe.
A large 1895 adobe building at the south end of the district (the church is at the north end) is especially noteworthy. A feed store, the Galaz Barn, took in produce from Mimbres Valley farms in exchange for goods, thereby providing an important link in the local economy. In the 1890s the economy was based on the practice of sharecropping; the large landowners provided the predominately Hispanic sharecroppers homes on the farms in exchange for their labor in the orchards and fields. The sharecroppers received a percentage of the harvested crops, which they used for barter at the Galaz Barn. San Lorenzo remains nearly intact today, illustrating an authentic old Hispanic town and agricultural economy not found elsewhere in southwestern New Mexico.
At San Lorenzo, the Mimbres Valley achieves proportions reduced by the encroaching hills elsewhere along its course. The intersection of NM 35 and NM 152 follows travel routes a thousand years old. The Galaz ruin at San Lorenzo is one of many Mimbréno sites dotting the valley and one of the largest. The Mimbres people, though they vanished around 1300, left behind finely crafted pottery with unusual black-on-white designs, imitated by artists even today. The next wave of human occupation consisted of the Apaches, who cultivated small fields of corn in the valley and lived in the rugged Black Range, mother of Mimbres River waters. The Army established an outpost, Fort Webster, in the vicinity of San Lorenzo Flats in 1852 to supervise the Apaches, the earliest attempt in this area to do so.
