Taos MainStreet

Constructed 1860. Kit Carson gained national fame during the Santa Fe Trail era as a scout and military leader. Originally from Missouri, Carson settled in Taos and married into the local Jaramillo family. His house on Kit Carson Road near the plaza retains its distinctive Territorial style portal and is Read more…

Constructed 1870. La Loma Plaza was one of the first settlements in the Taos area, established in the 1870s by settlers of the Don Fernando de Taos land grant. This plaza was built as an enclosure of homes with common walls, creating a defensive style plaza for the inhabitants. Most Read more…

Constructed 1918. Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan, an author and friend of prominent artists and intellectuals, was born in New York in 1879. She was well-known in the New York art scene, holding salons for artists and writers, before moving to Santa Fe in 1917 to join her third Read more…

Constructed 1940. Nicolai Fechin was a supremely talented Russian artist who emigrated to the United States in the early Twentieth Century and ultimately settled in Taos about 1920. Fechin was trained in Russian folk arts and used his skills to create a unique fusion with the New Mexico folk arts Read more…

Constructed 1932. The 1932 Spanish-Pueblo Revival style courthouse was built with partial funding from the PWAP and is located on the north side of the Taos plaza. The second floor courtroom was decorated with ten frescoes of subjects related to the use and misuse of the law. The frescos were Read more…

Constructed 2005. As an educator and publisher, Padre Martinez established the first co-educational primary school in Taos in 1826, and in 1833 he established a college preparatory Latin school for prospective native New Mexican seminarians. Realizing the American invasion of New Mexico was immanent; he expanded his curriculum to include Read more…

Constructed 1936. Closed cinema. Southwest Plaza Taos, NM 87571 Photo by Elmo Baca.

“The acequias of southern Colorado and New Mexico are the oldest water-management institutions in the United States of European origin. These irrigated agro-systems date to the time of Spanish settlement in the northern borderlands of Nueva Espana during the late 16th century with the Juan de Onate colony in 1598 Read more…

Constructed 1850. After the period of Mexican rule, New Mexico was claimed as a territory for the United States in 1846. President Fillmore established New Mexico as an official territory in 1850, and Taos became a county in 1852. Taos Valley flourished during this period and other cultures found their Read more…

Constructed 1990. Born in Saguache, Colorado, artist and muralist George Chacon inherited his fathers and grandfathers good hands, as he says in a YouTube interview.Since childhood, those hands have gripped crayons, held paintbrushes, and cut through stone and wood. He studied art at Colorado State University and Western Washington University, Read more…