Tome is a highly interesting back-in-the-past place. Cotton-
woods hover over ancient sun-dried adobe houses that face on
the sleepy plaza. Water from the old acequia madre nourishes
fruit trees and flower gardens of the comparatively few people
who still live here.
Tome was settled in 1779 by a land grant baron, Don Ignacio
Baca. He later sent colonists out to places like Manzano, Peralta
and La Jolla where their descendents still live in little all-Spanish
villages.
Tome is a folklore kind of village. Old customs, old music and
art and legends are still here. In the early-day Franciscan church
here you'll see ten religious paintings that made the journey up
over the Chihuahua Trail from Mexico nearly 200 years ago.
Each Easter in Tome the crucifixion story is enacted with
colorful pageantry. Legendary characters on an improvised stage
in the churchyard portray the death and resurrection of Christ.
Used in the passion play are life-sized santos. One feminine
figure wears hair cut from the living head of a parish girl. The
body of Christ, laid in a crude bier, is depicted just as it was taken
from the cross. This Old-World religious drama is enacted with
deep reverence and feeling.
Tome once was a prehistoric Indian village, the capital of an
alcadia, a Spanish army post and, for some time, it was the
county seat of Valencia County. People stayed on in Tome
despite Comanche and Apache raids, flood, crop failures,
epidemics and revolution. They stayed on, too,in spite of its
change of governments from Spanish to Mexican and then to
American.
But larger towns and better opportunities finally lured many
of the people away, especially tire younger ones. Today Tome is
a gentle little shadow of the old Tome. It never seems haunted by
the thought that possibly Tome will some day join the used-to- be
places of the past.
To reach Tome, drive south 24 miles from Albuquerque,
State Highway 47. On your way you pass Isleta Indian pueblo and
the old settlements of Peralta and Valencia.
NEXT