Three Wise Women

The three women worked from a house they finished in 1926 at 614 Acequia Madre, a territorial-style home that now keeps their archive. Eva Scott Fényes, who first came to Santa Fe in 1889, painted the adobe missions of California in watercolor, and the two Leonoras were founding members of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925. Leonora Curtin Paloheimo's Native Market opened on West Palace Avenue in 1934, with branches in Tucson and New York, and the house still holds tinwork and furniture made for it.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Three Wise Women Eva Scott Fenyes, 1849-1930 Leonora Scott Muse Curtin, 1879-1972 Three generations of one family worked more than 100 years to preserve the cultural heritage of New Mexico. Eva Fenyes created an artistic and photographic record of missions and adobe buildings, and preserved Spanish Colonial and Native American crafts. Leonora S. M. Curtin wrote Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, which documented the ethnobotany of the region and the plants used by traditional healers. Official Scenic Historic Marker Three Wise Women Leonora Curtin Paloheimo, 1903-1999 Leonora Curtin Paloheimo worked to preserve New Mexico's varied cultures. She researched Native American languages for the Smithsonian. During the Depression, she founded The Native Market as an outlet for Spanish American artisans who handcrafted traditional furniture and household items. She and her Finnish husband, George Paloheimo, established New Mexico's first living history museum, El Rancho de las Golondrinas, in 1972.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palace of the Governors — 16 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Bandelier National Monument — 19 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Fuller Lodge — 26 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 29 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Sisters of Charity — steps away
• Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Doña Tules — steps away
• Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) — steps away
• Bicentennial Celebration / La Bajada — steps away