American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus

Fe—notwithstanding the “Santa Fe” in the company’s name—and pass through Albuquerque instead. The local business community was devastated, and a group led by Abraham and Archbishop Lamy campaigned to pass a bond issue to aid in the building of a spur from the main line to the city. On February 16, 1880, the first train puffed into Santa Fe. The Ninth Cavalry Band, part of a Buffalo Soldier regiment,led a flag-waving parade of soldiers, carriages, and students from the Plaza to the depot, where the territory’s governor, its chief justice, and Abraham drove in the silver spikes. President Rutherford B. Hayes paid the city a visit later that year, the first presidential visit to the territory. Abraham served on the welcoming committee, and his brother Zadoc, visiting from New York, rode in the president’s coach from the train station.
    The city was growing more civilized. In 1881, the first streetlight winked on, and a “new gasometer and conduit” was erected to light the Plaza and the nearby streets. The first telephone line arrived in New Mexico around the same time. There were now “fresh oysters daily” at Miller’s, according to ads in the New Mexican —mollusks, hauled far from the ocean. Abraham built a plank sidewalk in front of his stores so customers didn’t have to slog through dust and mud; other establishments did the same.
    Now that Santa Fe was an American city, it was time for Abraham to build a mansion befitting his American dreams. He would build it for himself, certainly—but also for Julia. It would be a proper European house; one that might, finally, make her feel at home. He had vowed, under the chuppah in Germany nearly twenty years before, that he would provide for her. Perhaps he couldn’t make her happy—perhaps there weren’t enough nuns or sisters available for that. But he could build her a home. In 1881 Abraham purchased six acres directly east of Lamy’s growing cathedral on Palace Avenue—a fittingly royal street name for this merchant prince’s palace. Then Abraham imported, first by steamer and wagon train and later by railroad, masses of pressed brick, marble, and mahogany. His associates at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lent him masons from Kansas City.
    The house rose. Abraham’s construction went far more smoothly than the archbishop’s. The New Mexican made regular reports on the home’s progress. “Mr. A. Staab is doing a good deal of building. Goodfor him!” it reported. “The mansard roof of the new residence of Mr. A. Staab is nearly completed,” came an update a few months later. In early 1882, a reporter took a tour. “S. B. Wheeler, the architect, showed the reporter through the splendid new residence of Mr. A. Staab. It is truly an elegant structure, doing credit to Santa Fe. . . . It is rapidly approaching completion.” The house featured brass chandeliers, inlaid wood flooring, fluted door and window frames, and steam heat. The lower floors were conceived as receiving areas—two parlors, one for family, one for guests; a library; and a conservatory.
    A mahogany staircase led to the second floor, which housed the bedrooms. Separate bedrooms for husband and wife were a luxury that Abraham and Julia could now afford. Abraham’s lay to the left of the grand staircase. Julia’s—the one I would visit a hundred and thirty years later—lay to the right, with its arched windows overlooking Palace Avenue. She would have her own bathroom, with a claw-foot porcelain tub. The children would sleep in the back rooms. In the third-floor ballroom, the Staabs would host elegant affairs—fetes and formal dances, no fandangos there. For contemplation of the vistas, Abraham topped the home with an elaborately decorated widow’s walk.
    It was a structure that taunted the land around it. Mastery! Triumph! Not for Abraham the becoming modesty of the native architecture. Not for him the blending of house and land. “The Hopi villages that were set upon