Corrales Chronicles: How the village looked in 1893

Published October 14th, 2024 at 3:45 pm

By Mary Davis, Corrales Village Historian

The image is a detail of an 1893 map prepared by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) showing our section of the Rio Grande Valley. The map is clearly not definitive. Roads were not so neatly laid out—they were dirt and meandered widely depending on their condition. The grade lines shown here were later drawn with far more sophisticated instruments, and the location of the buildings is reduced to the simplest placement. Buildings we know were in Corrales in 1893 (the old church and its neighboring houses located away from Corrales Road), do not appear.  But still, using the map and connecting what it shows with the stories told by Corrales old-timers as well as physical evidence, helps one connect the village today with the settlement of 130 years ago. This reconnecting is something I love to do and I hope readers will come along on this work of imagination based on the map.

The map shows two river crossings from Corrales, one to the north to Sandia Pueblo and one to the south possibly connecting with an old version of Rio Grande Boulevard. Old-timers remember that the road to the southern river crossing headed diagonally southeast from roughly La Entrada and Corrales Road (such as they were) and led to a river crossing approximately east of the old Candido Gonzales house at Coroval Road. An existing diagonal line of telephone poles beginning at the northwest corner of the Farm Stand lot (best seen from Camino del Sol) is said by old-timers to mark the route! The northern crossing may have been identified by longtime resident Jim Findley on his daughter’s property in the northeast corner of the subdivision at Camino de Lucia (roughly located in the area just north of the big bend in the river shown on the map). He thought that the straight row of old cottonwood trees running northeast from her land was in all likelihood the path of the road to the crossing. Indeed, when she followed the route of the trees they led to the river’s edge opposite Sandia Pueblo.

A small cluster of buildings is shown at the intersection of what I take to be the forerunner of Corrales Road and a road stretching west up across the sand hills and onto the llano where Rio Rancho now spreads. I surmise that this road is the one identified by Hector Gonzales as La Entrada. Mr. Gonzales was a descendant of the founding family of Corrales and a student of the Village’s history. He believed that La Entrada was the pathway established by his ancestor Facundo Gonzales as the only route across the Alameda grant, the boundaries of which were the Rio Grande and the eastern edge of the Rio Puerco.

La Entrada appears on Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District maps as a county road, the only road besides Corrales Road identified as such. Its modern path lies halfway between, and parallels, Coronado Road and West Ella Drive. The western portions of these two roads now edge the sides of a wide arroyo, thus placing the path of La Entrada roughly at the arroyo’s low point. La Entrada now ends at a huge retention pond below the Tiffany subdivision in Rio Rancho; the pond’s outlet pipe marks the low point of the arroyo. Early pathways usually took the easiest route possible. Although the route shown on this map does not follow an arroyo, a more detailed 1934 USGS map of the Corrales area indeed shows the westward extension of La Entrada running up a broad arroyo with ridges on either side. 

A cluster of buildings would be expected at what must have been at the time a notable intersection and one is shown. Perhaps one of the buildings was the Ignacio Gutierrez Store pictured in last month’s history article and affirmed by Mr. Gonzales to have been located on La Entrada. 

Arroyos can also be seen at the north end of Corrales, one of which must be the Montoyas Arroyo and the other is perhaps the arroyo that empties into the river at La Barranca just north of the village boundary. Old-timers remember the old road to Bernalillo running close to the river’s edge and dipping into and out of arroyos.  

The map shows another group of buildings on the road in this area. This cluster might be the “las Montoyas” settlement remembered often by old-timers and which was wiped out by the 1904 flood according to a contemporary news article. 

The outward curve of the river above this area left this part of Corrales open to flooding by the then uncontrolled Rio Grande. In a 1996 interview, Ernest Alary, descendant of Frenchmen who in 1879 settled in what is now the area south of Alary Lane, remembered his family’s stories about that devastating flood. A Sandia Indian who was watching sheep at the north end of Corrales came “whooping and yelling that the river was coming in…. All the people living in this area went on the west side of the acequia since it’s higher there…. The sad part of it was, these people up there at the north where the river turns and valley turns, they were taking in people and the following evening, that arroyo came down and only two homes remained. There is only one standing today. That is where Courtney Koontz has his office.”