Felipe Chaves’ landmark mausoleum in Belen (Part II)

Last week’s edition of La Historia del Rio Abajo described Don Felipe Chaves’ construction of a beautiful mausoleum to honor his late wife, Doña Josefa, when she died in early 1899.

As one of the richest men in New Mexico, Don Felipe spent lavishly to make a final resting place fit for his wife, his three grown children and himself.

Don Felipe’s burial in his mausoleum

Felipe Chaves was never the same after Josefa’s death. More misfortune followed. While living with her family in Denver, Don Felipe’s daughter, Margarita, died from some form of food poisoning in 1903.

Margarita was buried in a Denver cemetery rather than in the Chaves mausoleum, a decision that may have upset her father, setting him further back both emotionally and physically.

As Don Felipe’s health deteriorated, he became less and less engaged in his business affairs and other interests. Attended to by a single servant, he was seldom seen beyond the walls of his mansion.

In 1905, realizing that his death was near, Don Felipe summoned Dr. William Radcliffe to provide constant private medical attention in his final days.

Learning of this turn for the worse, Don Felipe’s only son, Jose Chaves, raced by train to be at his father’s side. Despite his best efforts to rush from his home in New York City, he arrived in Belen too late.

Dying alone, Don Felipe succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on April 11, 1905. He was 71 years old.

Predictably, Don Felipe had planned his funeral beforehand, going so far as to list many details in his will. As with Doña Josefa’s funeral, Don Felipe allotted funds for a special railroad car to transport friends, relatives and an orchestra from Albuquerque to Belen.

After a brief service at his mansion, Don Felipe’s remains were transported to Our Lady of Belen Catholic Church, where a High Mass was celebrated by Belen’s new French priest, Fr. Jean Antonie Picard, assisted by Fr. Docher of Isleta. Belen merchant John Becker, R.A. Frost, Jacobo Chaves and Don Felipe’s son Jose served as pallbearers.

A headline in the Albuquerque Morning Journal announced the “eccentric old man” was buried in the “handsome” mausoleum he had built just six years earlier.

What became of the mausoleum?

With its distinctive beauty, the Chaves mausoleum became a celebrated landmark in Belen. Even before Don Felipe’s death, the Santa Fe New Mexican featured the building in a front-page photo of its Dec. 19, 1904, edition.

Don Felipe’s will directed Jose, the executor of his estate, to maintain the structure with profits made from the Chaves family orchard.

For several years, memorial services were held at the mausoleum on the anniversaries of Don Felipe and Doña Josefa’s deaths. Music from the large music box was played on each occasion.

Parishioners recall that the mausoleum was occasionally used as a baptistry, perhaps when larger activities, such as weddings and funerals, were being held in the church itself.

Over the years, Felipe and Josefa’s adult children passed away, but only one, Manuelita, who died in 1939, was buried beside her parents in the family’s mausoleum.

Margarita and Jose were buried near their own families in Denver and Los Angeles, respectively. Also, by the time of his death in 1930, Jose had left the Catholic Church, joining the Episcopal Church in California.

About 35 years after Don Felipe’s burial, plans were made to extend the road in front of the church to lead directly to the church’s entrance. To complete this construction, the Chaves mausoleum, which lay in the new road’s path, would have to be moved.

In a massive undertaking, the large structure was moved several feet to the north in the Catholic cemetery. But the move was not without consequences. By 1952, a visitor found that the mausoleum’s original interior granite floor was covered with a bright yellow and brown checkered linoleum. The plastered inner walls were painted with a “dreadful brownish yellow” paint.

Sealing its fate

The mausoleum’s fate was sealed in the early 1970s when church officials made the highly-controversial decision to demolish the Our Lady of Belen church and build a modern structure in its place.

This meant that the cemetery in front of the old church would have to be moved to the west side of the new church, with the mausoleum either destroyed or moved along with the rest of the parish’s coffins, remains and headstones.

Moving the mausoleum a few yards may have been feasible in the 1940s, but moving it several hundred yards to the new cemetery created an even greater challenge in the early 1970s.

Larry Guggino Jr. was attending St. Mary’s Catholic School at the time. He recalls seeing the mausoleum one afternoon after school when the workers who were moving it had left for the day.

Approaching careful, Larry and his friends peered into the building’s interior. Larry has never forgotten seeing a wood floor and a single casket. The casket was open. Beneath a glass cover, Larry saw a badly decomposed corpse dressed in a remarkably well-preserved black suit.

Once moved, the mausoleum faced other problems. Although, according to Felipe Chaves’ will, profits from the Chaves family orchard were to cover the cost of maintaining and protecting the building, the orchard was long gone and no other private funding was available to ensure security.

As a result, the mausoleum became vulnerable to vandalism. Delinquents broke in and even shattered its stained-glass windows.

Other mausoleums in New Mexico experienced similar violence. As early as 1905, vandals broke into New Mexico’s largest family mausoleum, the Manderfield mausoleum in Santa Fe’s Rosario Cemetery. Later, caskets were opened and jewelry was stolen from several corpses.

Funds were raised to restore the Manderfield mausoleum. But no money was available to save the mausoleum in Belen. Without better security and maintenance, the building would have to be dismantled.

We do not know who made the decision to use limestone and marble from the mausoleum to construct a memorial wall for the Chaves family in the northwest corner of the new cemetery. We do know that Hilario “Lalo” Romo, an expert Belen stonemason, accomplished the remarkable feat.

The 18-foot-long Felipe Chaves Memorial Wall stands 10-feet, 7-inches high. Don Felipe, Doña Josefa and their eldest daughter, Manuela, are buried under a 29-foot concrete slab in front of the memorial wall. With only slight damage, the mausoleum’s original exterior statues, representing Faith, Hope and Charity, stand on tiers along the top.

Don Felipe, Doña Josefa and Manuelita’s remains were later joined by the remains of Fr. Jean Antonie Picard, the French priest who had said Mass at Don Felipe’s funeral in April 1905.

When Fr. Picard died in late 1916, he had been buried under the old church’s altar, an honor preserved for priests. But when the old church was demolished in 1973, church leaders were faced with the dilemma of what to do with Fr. Picard’s remains. The solution was to honor him by burying him with the Chaveses at their memorial wall.

Filomena Baca and Martha Trujillo, who managed the Our Lady of Belen cemetery for many years, remember when mass was said at the memorial wall each Memorial Day. Large crowds attended. The church choir sang on these special outdoor occasions.

What became of the rest of the materials and art left in the mausoleum? It is likely that some of the art, such as the expensive music box, were removed or stolen over the years or when the structure was dismantled.

Images of the mausoleum still exist to remind us of its grandeur. Stella M. Cordova, a 1954 graduate of Belen High School, painted a snow scene of the mausoleum and the old church in winter. A photo of Stella holding the painting appeared in the News-Bulletin on July 27, 1988.

Fortunately, Don Felipe’s memorial wall and adobe mansion remain to remind us of one of the Rio Abajo’s most influential citizens and his remarkable landmark mausoleum.

(La Historia del Rio Abajo is a regular column about Valencia County history written by members of the Valencia County Historical Society since 1998.

The author of this month’s La Historia wishes to thank Filomena Baca, Larry Guggino Jr., Margaret Espinosa McDonald, Sandy Schauer, the late Jim Sloan and Martha Trujillo for their generous help and kindness.

Opinions expressed in this and all columns of La Historia del Rio Abajo are the author’s alone and not necessarily those of the Valencia County Historical Society or any other group or individual.)