I just returned from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where St. Joseph is credited with building a miraculous stairway for the Loretto Chapel. Jesus’ stepfather may have passed away some 2,000 years ago, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of us who believe he may have come back in 1879 to complete this amazing feat of carpentry.
Some background
The Sisters of Loretto traveled west to set up educational opportunities for the primarily Mexicans and Indians who lived around Santa Fe in 1873. A block away, two French architects, Antoine Mouly and his son Projectus, had designed and were finishing the Cathedral of St. Francis. As they were finishing the large cathedral, Bishop Lamy suggested they also design a chapel for the nuns. They agreed to model the chapel after their favorite Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
It was a wonderful design in the Gothic Revival style, with a spire rising 60-feet toward the heavens. The sisters raised the funds for its construction, and work began in 1878. Unfortunately, during the construction, Antoine died suddenly, leaving Projectus to complete the project. By this point, construction was coming to an end, and the only way workers could access the choir loft was with a straight ladder. A conventional stairway would have taken up too much space needed for seating.
Only a spiral staircase would do
The only answer was a circular staircase, and Antoine may have hoped a masonry one he saw in Europe could be done. Again, with a sad twist of fate, before Projectus could find a craftsman to build one, he suffered an illness and died also. That left the sisters with no way to access their choir loft, and the ladder was not something they felt comfortable with while wearing their long habits. Legend has it that local craftspeople tried to build it of wood but didn’t have the skills or proper materials to complete a twenty-foot tall staircase that required two complete 360-degree turns. The sisters had almost given up hope, when they decided to pray a nine-day novena to St. Joseph, patron of carpenters, for assistance with their problem.
On day nine
According to the diary of the Mother Superior of the Loretto Sisters, she opened the door to the knock of an older, gray-haired, gray-bearded man with a donkey. He offered to build the staircase, and with an immediate verbal agreement, she gave him the job. With just a hammer, a saw, and a carpenter’s square, he began work, telling the sisters they were not allowed to come inside while he was working.
Reports vary, but less than eight months later, he came and told them he was done. By the time they had marveled at what he accomplished and came out to thank him, he was gone and had left without asking for any payment. Checking with the local lumber yards, they had no records of supplying him with any materials. The sisters also placed an advertisement in the area newspapers asking if anyone knew him or saw him getting materials delivered. No one responded. But the carpenter delivered what they asked for. This mysterious carpenter had built a staircase unlike any other. Unbelievably, it had no center column for support. Further, there were no nails, steel braces or glue used in the construction. The only thing holding it all together were square wooden pegs. (During renovation of the building in the 1970’s, they discovered that the floor had sunk, pulling the stairway slightly apart from the choir loft above by about an inch. Two steel braces were added at that point so that no further movement would occur.)
The original staircase was built without handrails as this sketch shows. The sisters used the staircase for eight years, but were constantly in fear of falling, which they never did. At that point, they hired Philip August Hesch to add some final decorations, balusters and railings. After that, the sisters continued to use the stairs for almost one hundred years until closing their school in 1968 and moving back east.
The chapel has been sold now to a private company, which uses it as part museum and part rental chapel for weddings. For posterity’s sake, people no longer use the staircase, as it is roped off. (You can still visit the stairs, or rent the chapel for a private event by visiting their website: https://www.lorettochapel.com/visit-us.)
Can you explain the physics?
In 1978, 170 master stair builders had their annual convention nearby and came to look at the staircase. All agreed that it would have taken a fabulously talented person to build this staircase by themselves, even today with today’s tools – much less over 100 years ago with limited tools. (Ref: Experts consider miracle stairs in Santa Fe’s Loretto Chapel; By Andy Stiny | The New Mexican | Apr 27, 2018 Updated Jun 20, 2024).
“In fact, no engineer to date has even been able to determine the weight-bearing capacity of the staircase,” says Bill Brokaw in his book, The Loretto Chapel – The Miraculous Staircase (C) 2002.
The most logical theory of the dozens I’ve heard is this: The stability of the staircase has been studied recently using the Continuum Elasticity formalism in Theoretical Physics. As revealed in this study, the rigidity of the unsupported helical staircase results from the connection between the strained outer and inner stringers of the double-helix under load by stairs playing the role of incompressible spokes. https://nanoten.com/travel/Santa-Fe/ see reference in a paper by David Tománek and Arthur G. Every, “Origin of Unusually High Rigidity in Selected Helical Coil Structures”, Phys. Rev. Appl. 8, 014002 (2017).
Are you sure it was St. Joseph?
Two people came forward after many years to claim they were actually the ones who built it. One was Francois-Jean “Frenchy” Rochas, a French immigrant who was also an expert woodworker. His only evidence was a receipt for $150 for “Wood” purchased about the same time period. No one knows whether the wood in question was for the chapel or for work at the sister’s home. The wood he purchased can be easily disputed as not the wood used in the staircase, as seen below.
Johann Hadwinger was also proposed as the builder of the staircase because of a sketch he supposedly created showing a circular staircase with 33 steps. Somehow, that sketch has since disappeared and can’t be found. Ref.(Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack – Season 3, Episode 10 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfiT5gHtjT4&ab_channel=UnsolvedMysteries-FullEpisodes )
Consider: If the sisters had, in fact, hired either of these two gentlemen to build their staircase, why would they have placed that ad in the newspapers?
And where did the wood come from
The sisters agreed that no one ever saw anyone making a delivery of wood to the chapel. Even more intriguing is the fact that the wood is a never-before-discovered subspecies of spruce. The closest known subspecies only grows in Alaska, some 3,600 miles away.
According to Forrest Easley, a 40-year veteran forester and wood technologist from Colorado State University, who examined a piece of the wood with a compound microscope at 450X power, there are no other Spruce species in the world that has a square cell structure like the wood used in the chapel. (Ref: Loretto Chapel Museum Staircase Wood Analysis published 12/28/1996).
But again, where was this flawless wood discovered and how did it get to Santa Fe? Can it be anything less than miraculous? After reading dozens of articles and hearing from dozens of “experts,” nothing I can fathom will ever solve this mystery in our lifetime.
Related:
We took a side trip from our Route 66 RV trip in a Blacksford RV rental to come see this marvel. Read more about how much we loved our rental RV and Can you see Arizona in One Week. BTW, Blacksford has a Black Friday sale going on until December 2, where you can save $200 if you’d like to duplicate our trip.
