Century of faith: One hundred years in the life of the Las Placitas Presbyterian Church

By Suzanne Sims Forrest

Book Overview

First published in 1995 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the 1894 founding of Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, this second edition of the award-winning history book has been significantly revamped to include additional information. Timeline Histories of the Church, Las Huertas Valley, and Las Placitas will aid the reader in following the chronological order of events in the Sandia Mountains region of New Mexico. Rather than being limited to the one hundred years of the Church's history, Century of Faith actually covers over 200 years, making the Placitas area one of the best documented communities in New Mexico. It begins with prehistoric settlements of the Las Huertas Valley, followed by the advent of the Spanish explorers and settlers. It then describes the struggle for the land between the settlers of Spain's 1768 San Antonio de Las Huertas Land Grant and outsiders concerned solely with obtaining mineral rights. After 1850, the seeds of Presbyterianism developed in this exclusively Catholic region, and Las Placitas Presbyterian Church was founded in 1894. The subsequent history is emblematic of the challenges experienced by many small isolated communities as they were confronted by technological advances in the 1800s and 1900s, young men going off to fight in WWI and WWII, and other outside influences destined to bring about changes both welcome and unwelcome-especially including, in this specific region, an influx of non-Spanish speaking people (hippies and other gringos). Century of Faith is a welcome documentation of the local history for those with ties to the broader Placitas area. It is also of interest to a broader audience as a highly readable source to help those new to or otherwise interested in the region obtain a better understanding of the unique history of the Placitas area in specific and New Mexico in general.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 172601987X
• ISBN13: 9781726019873
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Wow.

Unless you've written one yourself, there's really no way to understand just how much work it takes to write a book. It takes a LOT, sometimes years, especially to write a nonfiction one, in which facts have to be obtained and verified and all elements of your story have to come from some source other than yourself. That's why this book just staggers me. It's a good book, a well researched, well written, well indexed, thorough book...about a single tiny church in a single tiny town. Which just blows my mind. Suzanne Forrest, it seems, sat down and wrote a book about an obscure place, a book guaranteed to have a minuscule readership at most, and yet she wrote it as if she was writing a nonfiction tour de force that the entire world would see. Not only is this book the biography of a church, it's also the story of the town of Placitas and its surrounding communities. The church is expertly placed and described in the context of its setting, so well in fact, that I can say without hesitation that this is the best book about the community of Placitas...and I'VE even written a book about Placitas. The people of Placitas--and of this church in particular--are probably very grateful to Forrest for all the work she must have put into this. It really is impressive, and mind boggling that she wrote it at all. I would have liked a little more on the divisive contention between Catholics and Presbyterians that once threatened to tear the town apart, and maybe a little more about the church's reaction to the towns influx of hippies in the 1960s and '70s, but I can't really complain. Central New Mexico residents unable to find this book online can go directly to the Placitas Presbyterian Church and buy it there for ten dollars.