Not As Simple As They Look

If you’ve been fortunate enough to tour an adobe home here in New Mexico, you may have noticed the corner fireplaces which are a signature element in these houses.

Often built in a corner, the traditional fireplace, or fogón, had a low hearth, between six and eight inches high. The structure was usually roughly a quarter round with a narrow opening of about twenty inches. The firebox was relatively shallow. In fact, the wood was usually placed upright and leaned against the back of the space, instead of flat on the hearth.

If one fireplace couldn’t warm the room sufficiently or wasn’t large enough to cook a meal for the entire family, there were several options. One was to build another cooking area in the opposite corner. Another was to build a larger bell-shaped one, up to four feet, four inches wide, that could accommodate more wood. A third alternative, especially useful when there was more than one cook, was to construct a double-arched bell-shaped structure.

In every case, the arched opening was constructed using two large specially shaped adobe bricks. The chimney was usually a rectangular cuboid roughly 10 x 10 inches in diameter and made of thin adobe bricks set on edge with their ends fit into channels cut into the supporting walls

Not all adobe fireplaces were placed in the corner of a room. If a heat source was needed elsewhere, a “spur” of adobe would be extended out from the wall in the desired location and then a fireplace was constructed in the resulting corner.

As the Americans began to pour into New Mexico after 1846, they began remaking the traditional adobe houses to meet their Eastern expectations. This included encasing the adobe fireplaces with wooden chimney breasts and mantel shelves.

Personally, I prefer the older style. All the little indentations in those fake pillars would have just collected dust. And probably soot. Give me the clean lines of traditional adobe anytime!

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico and Of Earth and Timbers Made, New Mexico Architecture.