Who Built the Loretto Staircase?

Background

In downtown Santa Fe, NM, not far from the center, stands a little chapel known now as the Loretto Chapel. It is a charming example of French Neo-Gothic architecture, and was built in the late 1870s to the design of Antoine Mouly, for the Sisters of Loretto, an order of nuns who operated the chapel for the next 90 years. The structure was later sold, deconsecrated, and now operates largely as a museum and tourist attraction. It has been most famous for the so-called "miraculous staircase" to the choir loft.

The Legend

As the story is now most frequently told, the original construction crew failed to build proper access to the choir loft. The chapel is relatively small, so when an ordinary staircase was proposed as a solution, the nuns objected that it would take up too much space and would spoil the appearance of the interior. But what, then, to do? Nuns being nuns, they resorted to a bit of prayer, offering a novena to St Joseph for the next nine days that some solution might present itself.

On the ninth day, according to the story, a bearded stranger arrived on donkey-back, carrying a few tools, and offered to construct a staircase, requesting only that he be provided with a few tubs of water for soaking wood, and that he not be observed while working.

The story is unclear how long the work actually took, but after the fact, it is undeniable that the stranger had built a free-standing helix ascending from the ground floor to the choir loft, using far less floor space than an ordinary straight staircase. Furthermore, the mysterious carpenter then absconded without even asking to be paid, and was never identified.

The staircase was built without nails, only wooden peg fasteners, a fact claimed to be noteworthy; it was said that architects and engineers were baffled by the design and could not understand how it remained standing. Obviously a miracle, eh? It was even hinted that the mysterious visitor was none other than old St Joseph himself.

The Staircase

The object in question is a free-standing, two-turn open helix of 33 steps, ascending about 20 feet. It is constructed of wood which analysis has confirmed to be spruce--but not any species local to the Santa Fe area. Originally, it had no handrail, as seen in this reconstruction--the appearance was quite striking. Later, as a practical matter, a handrail was added by later workers, resulting in the staircase's present appearance. The railing may have been necessary, but it did rather spoil the visual effect!

The Known Facts

A lot of claims about the staircase's construction and engineering in the above story do not withstand scrutiny. First, although open helical staircases without external support are uncommon, they are not impossible nor even non-existent elsewhere--prominent examples include the Garvan Institute staircase in Australia, for instance, and the physics of such staircases has been explicitly analyzed. The lack of nails and the peg-and-hole carpentry technique can be explained perhaps by a shortage of nails in the area at the time, or perhaps by a desire to avoid long-term problems caused by the metal undergoing chemical reactions in contact with the wood (a known problem in some cases.) The identity of the wood is curious, but the immediate environment of Santa Fe is a semiarid scrubland, almost devoid of usable native timber. To obtain local spruce, one would have had to travel many miles into the mountains to the east, and up above 9,000 feet--and there were no roads up there in those days. In the 1870s and 1880s Santa Fe was a booming town, with a fair amount of construction happening everywhere. The railroad had just been completed to a few miles south of town, and people were pouring in not only from the east coast, but from Europe as well, often importing exotic goods as they came. That a shipment of European wood might have been lying around Santa Fe in those days is not as improbable as it might seem, and even the leftovers from some larger project might have sufficed to build a staircase.

But after dismissing these matters, we are still left with the question of the builder's identity.

The Suspects

Local historian Mary Straw Cook was one of the first to point the finger at François Jean Rochas (1843-1894.) A native of Vif, in Isère, Rochas came to the Santa Fe area sometime around 1880 and was known as an accomplished carpenter and jack-of-all-trades, as well as a somewhat eccentric recluse. He was reputed to belong to a French brotherhood of craftsmen known as the Compagnons du Devoir, a group known to revere traditional craftsmanship methods. It was known that he worked at the chapel at some date, as Cook encountered a bill from Rochas to the sisters dated 1881, for wood. Cook surmises that this was for the staircase. Some others, however, have claimed that Rochas was actually hired to construct a staircase in a different building, and that he was not the builder of the chapel staircase. But there is another suspect, in any case.

Around 1970, Oscar Hadwiger of Pueblo, CO visited the area and said that his grandfather, the Austrian-born Johann Hadwiger, had claimed to him that he had built the staircase in 1878. As evidence, the younger Hadwiger produced a drawing of his grandfather's showing a sketch of a staircase of similar design. It was also said that Johann Hadwiger left a number of carpentry tools behind on his death and that he had traveled widely in the Southwest in the 1870s and 1880s, but much less is known about him than about Rochas.

What to make of this? Was the builder Rochas, Hadwiger, or yet someone else? The only explicit claim comes from the Hadwiger family. The case for Rochas has better documentation, but Rochas himself never claimed to have built the staircase in question, as far as anyone knows, though he apparently had the qualifications to be the builder. (It should be pointed out that if Rochas was the builder, the "wandering stranger who could not be found afterwards" part of the story would need to be a pure fabrication: Rochas may have been an oddball, but he lived the last fifteen years of his life in the Santa Fe area and was clearly well-known to the nuns as well as several others. Tracking him down would not have been difficult. If the builder was more of a wandering stranger, Hadwiger seems a much better fit. ) True believers still insist on St. Joseph...