In the forensics field, DNA has been called the fingerprinting of today. The structure shaped as a double helix has helped solve many mysteries relating to crime and identification.

In New Mexico, a double helix of a different sort has served for another kind of mystery for nearly a sesquicentennial. The spiral staircase in Santa Fe’s Loretto Chapel is an architectural marvel, and, according to legend, a miraculous one as well.

The Loretto Chapel’s Spiral Staircase

The church, then known as the Chapel of Our Lady of the Light, was commissioned in 1873 by five nuns of the Kentucky-based Sisters of Loretto. Designed by French architects Projectus and Antoine Mouly in a Gothic Revival style and modeled after Paris’ Sainte-Chapelle, the house of worship was erected to house the Loretto Academy, a new girls’ school.

Construction was nearly complete in 1878 when the Mouly brothers incurred respective ill fates with Projectus dying of pneumonia and Antoine going blind and subsequently returning to France. They may have intended to add a staircase to ascend to the church’s choir loft, although many New Mexican structures of the time did not have them, and it was common to use ladders to climb to the gallery.

Some of the Sisters of Loretto, however, were elderly and feared they would have trouble scaling a ladder in their long robes. They sought to add a staircase to their new shrine.

The Loretto Chapel

Several carpenters were consulted, all of whom said a conventional staircase was unfeasible because too many pews would have to be removed.

Feeling they had no other recourse, the Sisters then decided to do what those of the cloth often do when all hope seems lost.

Did Not Include A Staircase

The nuns engaged in a novena, nine days of praying and mediating, to St. Joseph, the patron saint of workers. On the final day, a man accompanied by a mule is said to have arrived at the chapel. Identifying himself as a carpenter and said to have only three tools, a hammer, a saw, and a T-square, he proclaimed he could build the sisters their staircase.

Working around church services and functions without allowing anyone to see him, the man announced his task was completed after six months, (some accounts say three months, others say eight months.)

The Sisters Pray

The Sisters were awed by the carpenter’s craftsmanship, an architectural artistry of a double spiral (helix) encompassing two tight 360° turns without the support of a newel (central column) or support beams. Standing twenty-two feet tall with its weight self-supported at the base, the staircase was built primarily of wood and held together by wooden pegs. No glue, nails, or other hardware were used.

The Sisters had their staircase, but they also had plenty of questions. The reclusive carpenter never provided his name, and he had seemingly vanished without being paid for his labor or supplies, and, purportedly, leaving no record of his expenses.

No Santa Feans had had seen the man outside of the church, and no one knew where he had stayed while he was in town. Some of the Sisters are said to have seen wood soaking in tubs they provided him, but no bills of sale for his stock was found, and it had not been purchased from the city’s only lumber yard. Whatever the type used, it was not indigenous to the area.

The railings were installed to the staircase in 1887 by German-born craftsman Phillip August Hesch, and an iron bracket was later attached to a column for additional support.

The Chapel of Our Lady of the Light soon became, and remains to this day, a sort of tourist attraction, as countless people have visited the shrine to marvel at the sensational spiral staircase.

 

The Sisters Have A Spiral Staircase

Among the admirers was Oscar Hadwiger, an inventor and third-generation carpenter. After viewing the staircase in 1965, he recalled a family story of his grandfather Yohon Hadwiger, a renowned European carpenter, spending two years traveling across and building various structures in Colorado and New Mexico. Among his constructions he had mentioned was a staircase in Santa Fe in 1878.

In 1970, while going through the belongings of his late sister Bessie McBroom, Oscar came across his grandfather’s toolbox. Inside, he found some tools, a faded sketch, and several design plans of a spiral staircase having thirty-three steps, the number of the Loretto stairway.

At the time of Oscar Hadwiger’s death in 1980, his grandfather’s tools and design plans had disappeared.

                                           

                          Oscar Hadwiger                      Yohon Hadwiger

A photocopy of one of Yohon Hadwiger’s purported drawings found amongst Oscar’s belongings has not been authenticated as a scale of the Loretto Staircase.

A Drawing Of The Loretto Staircase?

The February 26, 1970, headline of the Santa Fe New Mexican reads “’Miracle Staircase carpenter identity revealed!” implying that Yohon Hadwiger was the carpenter in question.

In 1995, however, local historian Mary Straw Cook found a January 5, 1895, death notice in The Daily New Mexican (the former name of the Santa Fe New Mexican) for a Frank Rochas reading he was “an expert worker in wood [who] built the staircase in the Loretto chapel.” Cook also located a March 1881-dated entry in the nuns’ daybook showing a payment of $150 “for wood” to a “Rochas.”

François-Jean Rochas, AKA “Frenchy” or “Frank,” was a reclusive Frenchman who had emigrated to New Mexico in the 1870s. He was a rancher and a member of the Compagnons, a secret society of skilled craftsmen and artisans. I did not find a picture of him.

Cook believes Rochas fitted the Loretto Chapel staircase after it was built in France, and that his identity was concealed to perpetuate the legend of it having been divinely built.

After all purported efforts to locate the carpenter had failed, the Loretto Sisters began believing, or at least promoting, that Saint Joseph had answered their prayers by himself building their “Miraculous Staircase,” and that upon completion he had scaled his stairway to heaven. The Sisters perpetuated that it was not a coincidence that the number of steps, thirty-three, equaled the number of years Jesus is believed to have lived.

If You Pray,

He Will Come And Build It

Even with the developments of more tools and the advancements in technology, the staircase is still today considered a carpentry masterpiece and a mystery.

In Mysterious New Mexico, a modern carpenter says the stringers’ assembly from overlapping segments joined by wood glue created a stronger laminate than the wood alone, and that using wooden pegs instead of nails prevented the joints from degrading because humidity or temperature changes would have resulted in the wood swelling against the nails.

A United States naval scientist determined the wood was a form of Picea spruce likely obtained from somewhere far north, such as Alaska, but he was unable to determine the exact kind.

The Stairway Is Still An Enigma

In the below 1959 photo, approximately twenty Loretto Chapel sisters stand on the spiral staircase.

The Sisters On The Sturdy Spiral Staircase

The Chapel of Our Lady of Light, later known as the Loretto Chapel, was used by the students and nuns of Loretto Academy until the school closed in 1968. Afterwards, it became a privately owned museum and wedding venue, while the rest of the Academy campus was demolished.

The Chapel Now Serves A Different Purpose

The 1946 psychological/horror film The Spiral Staircase is not related to the swervy stairs in the Santa Fe shrine.

The structure, however, did make it to the screen. Adapted from Ann Rinaldi’s historical fiction novel, the 1998 television movie The Staircase, starring Barbara Hershey and William Petersen, is based on the Loretto Chapel’s “Miraculous Staircase.”

 

Keeping The Staircase Movies Straight

SOUCRES:

• Historic Mysteries
• History Channel: The Unexplained
• Independent (Gallup, New Mexico)
• Loretto: The Seven Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel, by Mary Straw Cook
• The New Mexican
• Unsolved Mysteries