New Mexico History

In Questa, a church is more than a building. San Antonio del Rio Colorado Church has long stood at the heart of village life, a place where families gathered for worship and marked the passages of life together. That is why what happened around 2008 hit the community so hard: the historic adobe church partially collapsed.

One of Questa's oldest stories lies quietly beneath its VFW Cemetery. There, on a hilltop at the mouth of Red River Canyon, above the Red River and Cabresto Creek, sits El Pueblito, an ancestral village whose heaviest years of life ran from 1150 to 1225, some eight centuries ago.

Look up from Questa and you will see two high sentinels of stone: Sentinel Peak and Flag Mountain. Their names are not accidents of poetry. They remember a time when the survival of a small settlement depended on watchful eyes posted high above it.

The settlement was founded as Rio Colorado in 1842, after a grant to 35 families. Thirty-five families is a village, but a small one, and those families were planting their lives in an exposed place. Everything they built, planted, and raised depended on their ability to see trouble coming in time to respond.

Before 1915, getting over Red River Hill was an ordeal that wagon drivers planned their whole trip around. The old road climbed at grades as steep as 27 percent, far beyond what a loaded wagon could safely descend on its own brakes. Drivers coped the frontier way: they cut a log, chained it behind the wagon, and dragged it down the mountain as a brake, trusting friction and timber to keep them alive.

Some history lives in books, and some of it you can walk. The Questa History Trail belongs to the second kind. It is a living history project built by the people of Questa themselves, turning the streets and plaza of their own village into an open-air story of where they come from.

By 1941, the molybdenum workings above Questa had chased their high-grade veins deep into the mountain, about 260 meters down. Ore that deep is expensive to move, water down there is expensive to drain, and air is expensive to keep fresh. The mine's answer was ambitious: drive a tunnel a full mile long, north from Red River Canyon, straight to the deepest workings.

Every community has a figure who seems to stand at a crossroads in its story, and for Questa that figure is Francisco Laforet. He was a French-Canadian trapper, born in Montreal, whose life carried him from Canada to the mountains and rivers of northern New Mexico, where his name became woven into the founding of the village first known as San Antonio del Rio Colorado.

Questa's founding story begins on the trail. As Tessie Rael de Ortega told it, the first settlers walked the south Kiowa Trail driving their sheep, and when they made camp at the Rio Colorado, they gave their new home a name around the fire: San Antonio del Rio Colorado. It was a name spoken before a single building stood, a promise the families made to a place.

History in Questa is not only found in old buildings and photographs. It is also sitting in the memories of the village's elders, and a project launched in fall 2025 is making sure those memories are gathered, honored, and kept. It is called Voces de Nuestro Pais, which means Voices of Our Area.

When Monsignor Glenn Patrick Smith arrived in Questa in 1942, he became the village's first resident parish priest, and he wasted no time making an impression. Father Pat Smith, as he was known, brought an energy to the parish that people in Questa were still talking about generations later.

The most famous story comes from John Collier's 1943 account of the priest's early work in the village. Smith took an axe to the only bridge out of town. His reasoning, delivered as he swung, was disarmingly practical: "If I don't tear down the bridge, it'll fall down."