On Saturday, May 21, 1853, Baptist missionaries in Santa Fe began construction of the first Protestant church in New Mexico, located on the corner of what is now Grant and Griffin Street. The Reverend Henry W. Reed and the Reverend L. Smith officiated.

Henry Reed had arrived in Santa Fe in Summer 1846 and opened a school. Smith arrived several years later. They seem to have been focused on converting New Mexicans to Protestantism rather than serving the Anglo population. In 1851, Reade reported to his constituency back East that he’d been in Taos to share information about his Baptist school curriculum with Padre Martinez and had attended the Catholic services there. He disapprovingly described the mass as “not above a whisper and in Latin.”

The Baptist church services in Santa Fe were apparently in Spanish and English. At the cornerstone-laying ceremony on May 21, Reverend Smith spoke in Spanish and Reverend Read in English. This bilinqual approach doesn’t seem to have been enough to attract a large congregation. The adobe brick building was sold to the Presbyterians in 1866, at the end of the Civil War.

The Presbyterians eventually pulled the adobe building down and replaced it in 1882 with a brick structure. That building was replaced in 1939 with a Pueblo Revival building designed by John Gaw Meem, which is still in use today.

Sources: Thomas Harwood, The History of New Mexico Spanish and English Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1850 to 1910, Vol. I. Albuquerque: El Abogado Press, 1908; E. A. Mares, ed., Padre Martinez: New Perspectives From Taos, Taos: Millicent Rogers Museum, 1988; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Vol. II. Cedar Rapids: The Torch Press, 1912.