from
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built in 1889 and was home to a former U.S. marshal in New Mexico's territorial days.
Also at the scene was Wanda Westerfield, who told KRQE News 13 that she had grown up in the house and had hoped to renovate the structure some day.
"My mom's house," Westerfield told News 13. "It's just been a wonderful house, and I'm so sorry that it's gone."
Then-U.S. Marshal Creighton Foraker originally built a two-room structure on a 60-acre farm just north of the Albuquerque Indian School in 2004, according to the Near North Valley Sector Development Plan.
Two additions were later added to make the building a two-story structure, according to the sector plan.
The building is on the city of Albuquerque's register of historic places and the state of New Mexico's register of cultural properties.
Foraker was featured in a 1910 New York Times article about "The Little Known Brothers of Well Known Men," the better-known brother being J.B. Foraker, a former governor of Ohio and longtime U.S. senator from that state.
Creighton Foraker was a well-known personage himself, at least in the Southwest, where he managed to capture "the band of desperadoes that, under the leadership of the notorious `Black Jack' Ketchum, had terrorized New Mexico for a number of years," the Times reported.
Foraker came to the New Mexico Territory in 1882 to work in the Burro Mountain mines in Grant County, then made enough money to go into the cattle-ranching business, which he expanded to become "one of the most successful cattlemen in the territory," according to George B. Anderson's "History of New Mexico."
He was named U.S. marshal for New Mexico in 1897 by then-President William McKinley and reappointed in 1901 and 1905, Anderson wrote.
