Mesilla Plaza

After the war of 1846 to 1848 put the Rio Grande valley north of El Paso in American hands, families who wanted to remain in Mexico moved to the west bank of the river and founded La Mesilla in 1848 on what they took to be Mexican ground, clustering their houses around a plaza. The Gadsden Purchase moved the border south, and in November 1854 the American flag went up over that plaza.

For the next decades the plaza was a crossroads. The Butterfield Overland Mail ran through it from 1857 to 1861 on the way from San Antonio to San Diego, and by the late 1860s Mesilla, with more than 2,500 people, was the largest town between those two cities. The adobe that served the stages later became the Corn Exchange Hotel, and since 1939 it has been La Posta, a restaurant still run by its founder's family. During the Civil War the plaza served first as Confederate and then as Union headquarters for the military district of Arizona.

In August 1871 rival political rallies met on the plaza, and the shooting that followed was one of the bloodiest political riots in New Mexico's territorial history. When the railroad came through the valley a decade later, it went to Las Cruces, and Mesilla stopped growing, which is much of why its plaza survives.

The Basilica of San Albino, yellow brick with square belfries, closes the north end of the plaza; it was built from 1906 to 1908 on the site of an earlier adobe church, in a parish founded around 1852. A bandstand from the 1930s stands in the middle, and the plaza and its buildings have been a National Historic Landmark since 1961.