Magoffin Home State Historic Site

The Magoffin Home grew in three stages, and its plan still shows them. The first part, built in 1875, is a three-room wing at the back with cottonwood vigas, ceilings of reed latillas and small windows and doors, built the way adobe houses had long been built in the valley. About 1877 a main wing went up some thirty feet in front of it, roughly four times larger and grander, with rooms about fourteen feet high and ceiling beams of milled lumber. In the 1880s a wing of bedrooms on the east side joined the two into a U.

The house mixes two traditions. The walls are thick adobe, but the plan has a central hall and interior fireplaces, which Mexican houses of the time seldom had. The windows and doors wear the pedimented trim of the New Mexico Territorial style, and in the 1870s the white plaster front was scored with lines to look like coursed stone. The orchard and garden that once surrounded the house were built over in 1966 by the Sun Plaza senior housing, whose nine-story slab now stands beside it.

The family lived here until 1986 and kept many of its furnishings, though the state and the city of El Paso had bought the house in 1976. The Texas Historical Commission has run it since 2008. The house is closed through 2027 while its adobe is restored, but the visitor center, in a Queen Anne cottage across the street rehabilitated in 2014, is open, and the commission offers a virtual tour.