The Lost Twin: Rochas’s Second Staircase at St. Vincent
The 1895 newspaper notice that first tied a name to the Loretto carpenter named two staircases, not one. Right after crediting him with the chapel stair, it added that he “built the handsome staircase… at St. Vincent sanitarium.”
That second stair is gone — lost to fire — and its absence is easy to skip past. It shouldn’t be: a second spiral by the same hand is one of the better arguments that a real, mortal carpenter did the work.
The sentence that names two stairs
Rochas was shot dead in Dog Canyon in December 1894. His death notice in the Santa Fe New Mexican (5 January 1895) described him as “an expert worker in wood” who “built the handsome staircase in the Loretto chapel and at St. Vincent sanitarium.”
Source: Santa Fe New Mexican, 5 January 1895 (Rochas death notice)The phrasing matters. A 19th-century paper, writing for readers who knew the town, treated his authorship of both stairs as a plain fact worth listing in an obituary — not as a legend, not as a mystery. The chapel stair was famous; the St. Vincent stair, evidently, was good enough to name in the same breath.
What St. Vincent was
St. Vincent was Santa Fe’s Catholic hospital and sanatorium, run by the Sisters of Charity, operating in the same period and the same small city as the Loretto convent.
A spiral staircase there would have been an ordinary commission for a skilled local carpenter — which is precisely the point. The old sanatorium buildings did not survive; the staircase was reported destroyed by fire, and no detailed description or photograph of it is part of the popular record.
Why a lost twin strengthens the human story
The legend’s force comes from singularity: one impossible stair, one vanished stranger, never to be repeated. A second staircase by the same builder quietly dismantles that frame. Saints in the tradition do not take repeat commissions at the local hospital; working carpenters do.
The St. Vincent stair is the kind of evidence that doesn’t prove the chapel attribution outright but makes the mundane explanation far more natural than the miraculous one. It fits the case historian Mary Jean Straw Cook built for Rochas, laid out on our who built it page.
What we genuinely don’t know
We should be honest about the gaps. We don’t have a photograph of the St. Vincent staircase, a builder’s contract, or a structural description — only a one-line credit in a death notice.
Whether it shared the chapel stair’s no-central-pole construction, or was a more conventional spiral, isn’t recorded in the sources that circulate. What survives is the attribution itself, and the attribution is what counts: in 1895, the man who built the Loretto staircase was named in print, and he was credited with building another.
Keep exploring
- Who built the Loretto staircase? The Rochas case
- The St. Joseph legend — the faith version of the story
- Debunked or miracle? Every claim vs the evidence
- Back to the Loretto Chapel staircase overview
Researched & fact-checked by the Loretto Volunteers Editorial Team
Loretto Volunteers is an independent research project documenting the history, architecture, and enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel staircase. We work from primary and archival sources and show our evidence. Last reviewed: June 2026.