Albuquerque - New Mexico - History

Evidence of habitation near Albuquerque dates back 12,000 years. The Anasazi Indians settled in the area and lived here for 2 centuries, from 1100 to 1300, establishing several communities throughout north-western New Mexico connected by sophisticated transportation and communication networks.

In 1540, explorer-conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado came north from Mexico in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola. He and his troops, cooks, priests, and beasts reportedly spent the winter of that year in an Indian pueblo on the west bank of the Rio Grande 20 miles north of Albuquerque. The site is now a state monument just northwest of the town of Bernalillo.

Coronado left, but wealthy Spanish settlers began arriving in greater numbers, but the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680 discouraged further settlement until Spanish General Don Diego de Vargas arrived in1692. By the 17th century it was sufficiently populated to have acquired a name: Bosque Grande de San Francisco Xavier. In 1706, the ambitious provisional governor of the territory, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdez, petitioned the Spanish government for permission to establish the bosque as a formal villa and call it Albequerque, after Viceroy Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva, the Duke of Alburquerque. The "r" apparently fell out of use casually and over a long period.

The US claimed the territory when General Stephen Kearny established an army post here in1846. Confederate troops occupied Albuquerque briefly in the Civil War and installed 8 defensive cannons (4 of them are still on display in Old Town). Once the war was over, Anglo settlers, mostly merchants, tradesmen, artisans, doctors, and lawyers, began arriving in force.

The railroad arrived in 1880, affecting the development of specific sectors of the city and drastically altering the ethnic makeup of the city. By 1885, Albuquerque had become predominantly Anglo in population. The consequent influx of residents from the East and the Midwest brought enormous changes to the prevailing architecture of the city (and the region).

In 1885, Albuquerque incorporated as a town, and 6 years later as a city. In 1889, Albuquerque won the rather heated battle for the right to locate the state university in the city. In 1912, New Mexico was admitted to the US, the 47th state in the Union (Arizona, the 48th, was admitted later that same year).

Extending from Chicago to Los Angeles, the original U.S. Route 66, as it passed through New Mexico, was a circuitous (if all-encompassing) road running from Santa Rosa to Las Vegas to Santa Fe, down to Albuquerque, farther south to Los Lunas, and then back north and west along the railroad right-of-way. In1937, Route 66 was straightened , running right along Albuquerque's Central Avenue. It was the state's first completely oil-surfaced road, and the shortest east-west route through New Mexico.