Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Polvadera, NM

Polvadera, formally La Polvadera de San Lorenzo, is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Socorro County in central New Mexico.

Polvadera is located on the west bank of the Rio Grande, near the mouth of the Rio Salado, and on the western spur of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the historic royal road.

Polvadera was founded as a farming community in the 1620s, when Spanish settlers came north after Juan de Oñate established the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México and settled among the Piro Pueblo Indians.

The original Piro pueblo at Polvadera was destroyed by Apaches in 1629, rebuilt, and then abandoned as a result of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; the area was not resettled until the early 19th century, after Governor Fernando Chacón reopened it for settlement.

The name Polvadera may derive from a Piro name altered because polvareda means "dusty" in Spanish — U.S. Army Lieutenant Emory noted in 1846 that the place certainly was dusty.

Polvadera's church is dedicated to San Lorenzo, whose feast day, August 10, is the local fiesta; the current Church of San Lorenzo was built in 1898.

Camp Connelly, sometimes called Fort Connelly, was established by Colonel Edward Canby in 1862 adjacent to Polvadera and maintained until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

The Santa Fe Railroad came through Polvadera in 1882, and its post office was established in 1895; the village has its own ZIP code, 87828.

Polvadera has always been subject to flooding by the Rio Grande, with major floods in 1898, which destroyed the earlier church, in 1929, and in 1937; after the 1929 flood, the county's main irrigation diversion was moved upstream to San Acacia.

Polvadera is primarily a farming community: before Prohibition it had large areas devoted to grapes for wine production, and more recently chile has been the main crop.