Jemez Springs, New Mexico - History

History

The Jemez Valley is thought to have been inhabited for the last 4500 years. The Spaniards who visited the area beginning in 1540 reported multiple Native American pueblos (villages), in the valley. The Franciscan mission church San José de los Jemez was built just to the north of the current village in 1621 but was abandoned around the 1640s. Today the ruins are the site of Jemez State Monument. Following the Pueblo Revolt the Jemez people began converging at the current Pueblo of Jemez. In the nineteenth century the valley was given over to mostly agrarian and pastoral uses.

Jemez Springs' post office opened in 1907. The village is named for the Pueblo of Jemez twelve miles to the south.. The 1907 post office was preceded by one established in 1884 named Archuleta. The village's current main bathhouse originates from this period.

In 1942, Jemez Springs was the second choice (after Oak City, Utah) for the location of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the proposed Manhattan Project research laboratory, but Los Alamos was chosen instead.

In 1947 two Roman Catholic retreats were founded nearby, the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete and the Handmaids of the Precious Blood. The village was incorporated in 1955. Following enthusiasm from supporters of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki in 1972, the Bodhi Manda Zen Center, a Rinzai training academy, was founded.

Read more about this topic:  Jemez Springs, New Mexico

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
    Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)