Cornerstones builds community -- one mudbrick at a time

May 19—Jake Barrow is not particularly comfortable with America's throw-away culture, here today, trashed tomorrow. That's one reason he is attracted to historic preservation.

"I appreciate driving through the landscapes of villages and towns and seeing where people are living in older buildings," he said. "It's a good sense of history. I love really good modern architecture, but I appreciate that we can save some of the older buildings. To me, some of the older buildings are better built."

Barrow, 76, is program director for Cornerstones Community Partnerships, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that partners with communities "to restore historic structures, preserve cultural landscapes, encourage traditional building practices and conserve natural resources."

Cornerstones works a lot with mud, as in mudbricks or adobe.

May is Historic Preservation Month, so Cornerstones is celebrating that by presenting its Bricks on the Plaza program, which teaches people how to make adobe bricks, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, May 24, and Saturday, May 25, at the Hotel Albuquerque, 800 Rio Grande Blvd. NW. The event is free.

Barrow said Bricks on the Plaza is popular in Santa Fe, where Cornerstones has been doing it for about 15 years, but this is the first time it has been offered in Albuquerque. He said adobe bricks produced in the program are used in future Cornerstones restoration projects.

"We help people learn how to make good bricks, so we usually don't have many rejects," Barrow said. "Almost everything we do is hands-on training open to the public. We have been doing this from the beginning of Cornerstones in 1986. We started working on old churches (in northern New Mexico)."

Not just churchesOriginally, the organization was known as Churches: Symbols of Community and operated under the guidance of the New Mexico Community Foundation. In 1994, it was incorporated as a nonprofit and its name changed to Cornerstones Community Partnerships.

Cornerstones works only on publicly owned or publicly used structures, acting in advisory roles to communities that request its assistance. The organization provides technical support, materials, tools, equipment, fundraising assistance and organizational help, but Barrow said Cornerstones encourages the community to take the lead in the project, learning and preserving traditional building methods in the process.

"We are interested in the history and the culture of New Mexico," he said.

Barrow was born in Maryland, but lived for years in North Carolina and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He started out as a carpentry contractor in 1970.

"I started in construction right out of college," he said. "I got interested in historic preservation right quick, rehabilitating historic buildings in downtown Washington, D.C. I don't know how to do anything else."

Barrow worked in historic preservation with the National Park Service for 30 years, most of that time in the southwest, concentrating on earthen, stone and timber structures. He first volunteered with Cornerstones in 1987, not long after moving to Santa Fe for his Park Service work, and he joined Cornerstones as program director in 2009 after retiring from NPS.

"Our work is not limited to churches now," he said. "We do a lot of things."

According to its website, Cornerstones has provided assistance at more than 380 architectural and historic sites.

This month, Cornerstones was recognized with two awards for recent projects.

A lot of spiritBarrow said Cornerstones received a City of Santa Fe preservation award for solar-installation work it did at the city's San Miguel Chapel, believed by some to be the oldest Catholic church still in existence in the United States and perhaps the country's oldest church period.

The organization was also awarded the 2024 New Mexico Heritage Preservation Award for work on the Plaza del Cerro in Chimayó.

Solar panels, hidden from view by a parapet, were installed on San Miguel's flat roof last year. But Cornerstones' involvement with the church dates back earlier. From 2010 to 2014, Cornerstones supervised some 500 volunteers who worked to restore the church's walls.

"We took all the cement off the building and restored the adobe walls and replastered it with mud plaster," Barrow said. "There is mud plaster that was put on the chapel in 2011, and it's still there in 2024. A lot of people say I don't want to do a mud plaster because you have to redo it every year. I don't know about that. We have a mud plaster that's lasted 13 years."

He said there is some pretty special about preserving a church, which retains parts of the original walls built before 1628.

"That building has a lot of spirit to it," Barrow said.

An energized community

He is also pumped about the Plaza del Cerro project in Chimayó. Barrow said the plaza is some distance from El Santuario de Chimayó, the 19th-century Catholic Church famed for its holy or healing dirt.

The plaza, which dates back to the late 1700s, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

"It was built as a defensive plaza," Barrow said. "Aggressive tribes, the Apaches and Comanches, were making it difficult on settlers, so the Spanish king sent out a decree saying you have to build a defensive plaza. The Plaza del Cerro is the last we can find intact. Or about 90% intact."

Restoration work focused on Casita de Martina, one of the houses on the plaza. Barrow said the building was a 500-square-feet, two-room adobe in a total state of ruin, a couple of walls standing and big trees growing up in it.

"This building was in the worst shape," he said. "If we lost this one, it would be like losing a front tooth. We wanted to show the people there, some of them descended from the original settlers, that they could save it."

Funded in part by a Save America's Treasures grant, the project was launched as a cooperative effort between Cornerstones, Avanyu Contracting and the Chimayó Cultural Preservation Association. Youth interns were employed to learn adobe skills and community volunteers joined in.

Trees were removed, the building stabilized and plastered with mud inside and out, a new roof added and an earthen floor created.

"The project in Chimayó is something to be proud of in that it really got the community energized," Barrow said. "When we took this on, I thought we are not going to be able to do this. But the people are taking it on themselves to do it. It is done. The final touches are being put on it. If the community takes it on, it is going to survive and go forward."