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Article Excerpt
Santa Barbara was the tenth mission to be founded in Alta California when its ministers took possession of the site on December 16, 1786. By the time they celebrated the first anniversary of its establishment, the chapel, ministers' rooms, kitchen, dormitory for unmarried girls and women, granary, and carpentry shop, which doubled as a dormitory for boys and unmarried men, had been erected of palisades. During the following year the chapel was enlarged and a house built for the military escort. A new church was constructed in 1789, as were a larger granary, new women's dormitory, chicken coop, and jail. The new additions were all made of adobes with tile roofs. (97) Two artisans who probably had a hand in this early phase of construction were Manuel Baronda, a master carpenter, and Santiago Moreno, a master blacksmith, while the workforce probably consisted of both presidial soldiers and indigenous Chumash. (98)
When Vancouver paid a visit to the mission in 1793 there was a complete quadrangle. A back row of rooms had been added to the convento. Three rooms were given over to a carpentry workshop and the storage of agricultural implements. A guardhouse had gone up and two stone corrals been built. (99) The English captain found the building here, and at San Buenaventura, superior to all others he had visited, due to the abundance of excellent limestone for walls, flagstone for paving, and good earth for the manufacture of bricks and tiles. A new church was under construction. (100) That church, finished and dedicated the following year, was built of adobe with a front portico of fired bricks. The interior walls were decorated by Fr. Esteban Tapis. (101)
Between 1794 and 1799, a number of older buildings were reroofed and brick porticos attached to protect the adobe walls. Many new buildings of stone, brick, and mortar appeared. A weaving shop with its own patio was realized next to the women's dormitory. Four rooms were added to the fathers' residence. Five new granaries, three of which abutted the weaving wing to form a second square, attested to the growing prosperity of the mission. A wall now enclosed the cemetery. There was a new corral made of adobes capped with tiles. A neater village for the Indians was started with the erection of the first nineteen houses. (102)
The mission rancheria of San Miguel was improved with an adobe chapel in 1803, and in 1807 eighteen adobe dwellings were built there. (103) At the mission itself, 234 houses for the neophytes formed a new square by 1805. There was a house for the majordomo and a tannery with a corridor. Corridors with brick pillars and floors, and tiled roofs, now completed the inner walls of the mission's principal square. The addition of three large buildings for the storage of grain and lumber completed yet another square. A masonry reservoir was constructed in 1806, and during the following year four houses for the soldiers of the guard, a stone-and-mortar jail, and eighteen additional Indian residences went up. In 1808 a fountain with laundry and a pottery shop were added. Within the ensuing four years, a masonry corridor was added to the front wing of the mission building. Additionally, the church was equipped with glass windows and its facade finished. The ministers' residence was enlarged, an arcade added, and older rooms reroofed. (104)
The disastrous earthquake that struck southern California on December 21, 1812, caused major damage at Santa Barbara. The new church was beyond saving, and the next few years appear to have been devoted to rebuilding the church and repairing the other buildings. Apart from the construction of a new church, to be considered below, the only noteworthy new structure was a water-powered grist mill built in 1827. (105)
Some professional artisans are identified from Santa Barbara's second building phase, in which the more permanent edifices of adobe and tile were undertaken. Salvador Carabantes, the old master carpenter from Baja California, arrived at the mission in 1796 and was on the payroll into 1804. Another craftsman from Baja California was Miguel Blanco, an Indian master mason from San Ignacio, who probably headed up the crew engaged in the brickwork of the corridors and construction of the reservoir. (106) Jose Antonio Ramirez, the master carpenter who had been engaged earlier in the construction of San Carlos Borromeo, was at the mission during...
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