Page 62 - 2019 Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide

The Early History of the Plaza Hotel
by M.C. Gottschalk
The Las Vegas Hotel (l) and the Pendaries saloon(r) was replaced by the Plaza Hotel and the Great Emporium. WCitizens’ Committee for Historic Preservation, Las Vegas Photographic Archive #1489, Detail.
hether boom or bust, the center of the which was to launch the earliest Territorial styled community has always been here. First buildings in Las Vegas, and in New Mexico.
ri, gathered in earnest right in front of the Hotel when the Plaza was essentially an open field.
After running the hotel for sometime, retail grocers Jean Pendaries and his wife Mathilde Gallaquet operated the Billiard Saloon on the north side of the plaza. The Pendaries were from Gascony, France and undoubtedly felt at home on this frontier where other French-Canadian ex-trappers resided, and a local culture based upon Catholicism. In the 70s, they leased the ho- tel to cook Theodore Wagner, calling it Wagner’s Hotel & Feed Stable. The Trail travelers that Wag- ner accommodated entered this dusty highfalutin barnyard ringed with majestic adobe behemoths looking for sanctuary from the boring, endless plains.
But the times were changing, and the railroad brought the industrial American economy with it. The Trail merchants would not stay pat with an adobe hotel on the Plaza, a relic in its own time: not when wealthy businessmen from the East were arriving everyday into Las Vegas. The charge towards a Victorian plaza was surprising- ly led by the native Nuevo Mexicano mercantile family of Romero. The Las Vegas Hotel & Im- provement Co. was incorporated for the purpose of “building furnishing operating and leasing one or more hotels in the County of San Miguel.”
Gottschalk Collection
With the financial backing of many Plaza mer- chants, Benigno Romero, the President of the Improvement company, commenced the estab- lishment of what has historically been known as the Plaza Hotel. Romero’s business specialized in a tonic called La Sanadora, marketed as a “Carmi- native and Stomachic.” In December of 1880, the Improvement Co. bought the lot that the adobe Las Vegas Hotel stood upon for $7,500 from the Pendaries, to erect a three-story Victorian-styled brick hotel to be called the “American Hotel.”
The architect for the planned American Ho- tel was Charles Wheelock and the contractor was John Wooten. The Tennessean Wooten had moved to Las Vegas in the 60s and built a planing mill at the end of Valencia St., next to the Gal- linas River. Wheelock, from Massachusetts, was Las Vegas’s premier Victorian architect, having
there was the lofty two-story wooden Las Vegas Hotel and then they built the grand Victorian Plaza Hotel. Facing, watching the growth and the events of the Old Town Plaza, this spot was always at the heart of the happenings in Las Ve- gas, New Mexico.
The location was important, even before there was a hotel. When Las Vegas was just a village, Alcalde Juan de Dios Maese had a grocery here. When the Plaza was a U.S. Army fort, Sutler Ar- thur Morrison had his shop here. Then a hotel was erected on the northwest corner of the Plaza in the 1850s, quite likely by merchant John Dold. The first existing deed for the “Las Vegas Hotel” was dated April 1, 1864, when John Dold sold it to Jean Pendaries for $5,000. Dold had been an investor in the Hot Springs sawmill in 1856,
These were substantial adobe structures that were faced with imposing two-story balconies made of rough sawn timbers, and pediment windows and doors.
The Dold brothers were pioneer merchants from the Kingdom of Württemberg who together owned over $150,000 (in today’s currency, about $4,000,000) of inventory and equipment, as list- ed on the 1860 census. The Dolds’ wealth ‒ both among the top five richest individuals in New Mexico ‒ was built on the Santa Fè Trail trade. They directed a crew of 17 teamsters and 21 la- borers – with cook Ramon Bernal and two ser- vants feeding everyone – to operate their supply company. The enormous caravans of mule trains loaded with lana y cueros, or wool and hides, that headed each year from New Mexico to Missou-
Gottschalk Collection
62 | Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide 2019