In June 2026, I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico for work, staying a few blocks from Old Town and the adobe walls of San Felipe de Neri Church.
The church in this photograph went up in the 1790s, though an earlier one stood on roughly the same spot in 1706. I kept walking past it and wondering who else from home had stood here before me.
We are climbing down the mountains by this time and reached Albuquerque. We were given a chance to stretch our legs here and could see this wonderful Inland wholesale merchandise and prairie product shipping point. It made us mad that we couldn’t go west of Albuquerque because then we could have seen the Indian reservations and the petrified forest…
This is the section also where John H. Davis of St. Clair, was a great mining superintendent and did the first mining…
Albuquerque is a wonderful city of wide streets, a great distributing point and gathering in point, it has a relic in the shape of one of the oldest churches of the nation, but it is a wondrous town now and here’s where you can load up with curios…
There was general comment today over the cheerfulness of the men, not a single complaint being heard and the officers are delighted with the way they have taken the trip.
Photograph of Old Town Albuquerque, NM around the turn of the 20th century – LOC
Another soldier, writing as his train pulled out of the station, kept it shorter:
There sure are some nice cities out here. They are so clean and level, with so few people. We had sleepers [sleeping train cars] last night, and I went to bed at nine o’clock, and didn’t hear a sound until 6:30 this morning, but it was 9:30 in Pottsville. We’re starting so now I will stop.
Leaving Albuquerque, N. M.
We were just up in the city again for a walk. All the cities out here certainly are neat and clean. The population of Albuquerque is 22,000, 10,000 of which are natives. The big terminal has Indian relics for the people to look at.
There are Indian women selling some of the rings and trinkets that they make…
Photograph in Old Town Albuquerque, NM in 1906 – LOC
More than a century later, the historic church still stands, and the streets of Albuquerque still run wide and level — just as they did in the summer of 1916, when Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers passed through on their way to their camps near the U.S.–Mexico border.
Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers on the US-Mexico border in 1916
