One of the Strangest Buildings in New Mexico

   We went to Ojo Caliente Hot Springs to look for cactus flowers, soak in the springs, and check on the Rio Ojo Caliente that runs past the resort. Before we splashed in hot water, we walked up the river, swollen with snowmelt coming from the South San Juan Mountains to the north. We were stunned to find an adobe round barn sitting quietly by the creek, guarded by a red and a blue antique trucks. The Ojo Caliente Round Barn.

   At first, I thought a round barn in New Mexico was the product of some eccentric person in the past, making his mark by building a unique building. It’s true that this is the only round barn in New Mexico, but it turns out there are hundreds of round barns in other states. This fact leads me to wonder about the barn’s builder and how he brought this idea to Ojo Caliente.

  Other than numerous kivas at various Pueblos, both contemporary and prehistoric, few round buildings exist in the Land of Enchantment. Building circular structures is challenging but they have many advantages over boxes. Farmers and dairy ranchers realized you could get more volume in a building by making it round, or nearly round and you could have freedom of movement inside that made operations like cattle feeding more efficient. You could go round and round with your cattle.

  George Washington built a round barn in 1793 in Virginia but the movement that Ojo Caliente tapped into involved a rash of round barn building centered in the Midwest from 1880 to around 1936. After that rationality again prevailed and rigid rectangular construction returned to the cultural conservatism of America’s rural farm country.

   Apparently round barns were cheaper to construct and needed less materials than  rectangular barns, but building a sloped round roof is tricky and requires attaching supports to a round center point and radiating beams to the walls. The circular shape has a greater volume-to-surface ratio than a square barn. The walls have to be able to hold the outward pressure of roof weight and the weight of snow in the winter.

The Ojo Caliente barn could be truly round, built with adobe bricks, unlike barns built with lumber that would need some straight runs. The roof of the Ojo barn is double pitched with a hexagonal cupola in the center.

   How did a round barn come to be built at Ojo Caliente, in the heart of Hispanic New Mexico and in a very remote place?  The barn was conceived by Antonio Joseph, a New Mexican born in Taos in 1846. Joseph attended Bishop Lamy’s high school in Santa Fe before heading off to St. Louis, Missouri for Bryant and Stratton’s Commercial College.

There he must have been exposed to round barns and those who advocated their virtues. He returned to New Mexico and bought the Ojo Caliente Spa and most of the Ojo Caliente Land Grant in 1868. He built the first bath house at the property ad saw its popularity rise. He must have had plans for the barn drawn up but he died in 1910 before he could build the barn which was completed in 1924.

    Anthony Joseph was an interesting guy. He acquired enough wealth to buy large areas of land in New Mexico, including Ojo Caliente and he was a member of the US Congress, representing the New Mexico Territory from 1985 until 1895, a time of turmoil and conflict in northern New Mexico, when many of his constituents wanted nothing to do with the American government at all. He was also a judge in Taos.

 When you visit the round barn today, you will find the doors guarded by two old trucks. The red Chevy (from Montana) dates to the early 1950s while the blue Dodge is likely mid 1940s. The barn is on the National Register of Historic Places, which is a historic registry maintained by the National Park Service.

When you are done marveling at the round barn you can go to the bar at the historic hotel (built 1917) and have various New Mexico beers on tap and good food in the dining room.

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