For nearly 5,000 years, people have used the towering sandstone walls of Canyon de Chelly as a place for campsites, shelters, and permanent dwellings. Managed through a partnership between the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation, Canyon de Chelly (pronounced d'’SHAY) National Monument, located on Navajo Trust Land, is one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in North America. The name "de Shelly" is a Spanish interpretation of the Navajo word for "rock canyon" testifying to the long history of interaction between the Navajo and Spanish explorers. The National Monument preserves the remains and cultural resources of various American Indian groups who lived within the canyon’s walls. The sites, cliff dwellings, and images on cliff walls, as well as the living community of Navajo people within Canyon de Chelly today, contribute to an understanding of the interaction between the Navaho people and the Spanish and the impact on the region's people and culture.

Canyon de Chelly National Monument preserves the distinct architecture, artifacts, and rock imagery of the Archaic people (2500-200 B.C.), the Basketmakers (200 B.C.-A.D. 750), the Pueblo (750-1300), the Hopi (1300-1600s), the Navajo (1700-present), and the Spanish interactions with these peoples. Archeological evidence suggests that people have lived in Canyon de Chelly for nearly 5,000 years. The original inhabitants were the Archaic people, who lived in seasonal campsites, hunting and gathering rather than building permanent homes. Their history is understood through the remains of their campsites and the images they etched and painted on the canyon walls. By about 200 B.C., a fundamental shift occurred in the way people lived within the canyon. The Basketmakers started to sustain their community through farming, instead of by hunting and gathering. As their agricultural skills improved, the Archaic people's lifestyle became less nomadic and they built communities of dispersed households with large granaries and rudimentary public structures.

Gradually, the Basketmakers’ style of dwelling changed. From c. 750 to 1300, they abandoned their pithouses in dispersed hamlets and built connected rectangular stone houses above ground. From these connected dwellings, the inhabitants eventually formed multi-storied villages that contained small household compounds and kivas with decorated walls. The name Pueblo originated with the Spanish explorers who referred to the compact villages of these people as “pueblos,” meaning “villages” in Spanish. These ancient Puebloan people are the predecessors of today’s Pueblo and Hopi Indians, and they are often referred to as Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning “ancient ones.”

Canyon de Chelly National Monument contains the remains of these ancient Puebloan villages. Built into a sheer 500 foot sandstone cliff, the White House was constructed and occupied between 1060 A.D. and 1275 A.D. The White House takes its name from the white plaster used to coat the long back wall in the upper dwelling. Visitors can view the White House Ruins either from the “White House Overlook” on the South Rim Drive, or by taking a 2.5 mile round-trip trail to the ruins (this is the only trail by which visitors may enter the canyon without a permit or an authorized Navajo guide). The largest ancient Puebloan village preserved in Canyon de Chelly is Mummy Cave. Situated 300 feet above the canyon floor, this village has close to 70 rooms. The east and west alcoves contain living and ceremonial rooms, and the walls are decorated with white and pale green plaster. Mummy Cave was occupied until about 1300. Visitors can view the ruins from the “Mummy Cave Overlook” on the North Rim Drive of the park.

By 1300, the Puebloan life in Canyon de Chelly abruptly ended. A prolonged drought in the 1200’s dried out what is now the Four Corners region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico; disease; conflict; and the allure of new religious ideas to the south prompted the Puebloan people to disperse. They left the canyon in search of a dependable water supply and eventually established villages along the Little Colorado River and at the southern tip of Black Mesa. The people of these villages, known as the Hopi, continued to occupy the canyon sporadically. The Hopi used the canyon for seasonal farming, ritual pilgrimages, and occasional lengthy stays. Life in Canyon de Chelly for the Hopi also led to interactions with the Navajo and the Spanish as both groups were carried to the canyon for agricultural and land.

While archeological records do not clearly indicate when the Navajo arrived in the canyon, patterns on the landscape indicate that the Navajo quickly adapted to an agricultural lifestyle, contributed to significantly by Spanish influence. The Navajo and Spanish were likely in contact since the 1500s and exchanged goods and skills. The Spanish introduced the Navajo to sheep and goats encouraging pastoral patterns of life for the Navajo. The Navajo used rock shelters in the canyon walls to keep their flocks of sheep, scenes depicted in detail on some canyon pictographs.

After the Spanish colonial government left, the Navajo continued to resist encroachment by subsequent troops sent by the Mexican and American governments to lands occupied by the Navajo. In 1846, the United States fought battles against the recently-independent Mexican government for control over present-day Arizona and New Mexico. Despite these military advancements, the Navajo attempted to maintain control of some lands and initiated raids against the US government. To indicate they would not tolerate such attacks, the United States military conducted a campaign against the Navajo in 1864. Colonel Kit Carson led an operation against the Navajo, resulting in the forced removal of 8,000 Navajos to a fort in eastern New Mexico. The Navajo people were made to walk the 300 miles from Canyon de Chelly to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. The forced removal was referred to among the Navajo as "the Long Walk." Many died during the Long Walk and with the conditions at Fort Sumner being equally grim, many others perished as well. After four years, the first reservation experiment the U.S. government used to manage the Navajo population proved unsuccessful, and the Navajo were permitted to return to their land in Canyon de Chelly.

Today, Canyon de Chelly sustains a thriving community of Navajo people. A visit to the park provides great insight into the present-day life and rich history of the Navajo community. Visitors to Canyon de Chelly National Monument can observe 1,000 foot sheer sandstone walls and well-preserved Anasazi ruins. Interwoven in these sites are also pieces of the history of Spanish interaction with the American Indians in the United States.

Canyon de Chelly National Monument, a unit of the National Park System that is managed in partnership with the Navajo Nation, is located in Chinle, AZ. The visitor center is 3 miles (4.8 km) from Route 191 in Chinle, AZ. The visitor center is open daily all year from 8:00am to 5:00pm, except for Christmas Day. The North and South Rim Drives and the White House Trail remain open all year. For more information, visit the National Park Service Canyon de Chelly National Monument website or call 928-674-5500.

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Born in Salamanca, Spain in 1510, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado lived there for 25 years before his journey to the Americas. While in Mexico, Coronado became a prominent figure in Mexico City’s council after developing a close friendship with the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza. Coronado acquired an enormous estate from his marriage to the daughter of a colonial treasurer and was governor of New Galicia by 1538. Despite his great fortune and status in Mexico, Coronado wanted to follow in the footsteps of other Spanish explorers who attempted to discover the “Seven Cities of Cibola or Gold.” When Mendoza commissioned Coronado to command the expedition to Cibola, he accepted the mission, and on February 23, 1540, Coronado and his crew sailed out from Mexico’s west coast en route to the golden cities.

Realizing his mission was a failure, Coronado and his crew -- except the priests who chose to stay and convert the American Indians to Christianity -- returned to Mexico City in 1542. To Mendoza’s disappointment, Coronado did not return with gold, but he did bring back great knowledge of the land and the American Indians they encountered. This information would prove useful to future explorers. Despite his failure, the Spanish viceroy cleared Coronado’s name and allowed him to resume his position as governor of New Galicia, where he would die ten years later at the age of 42. Although Francisco Vazquez de Coronado died in obscurity after his expedition failed to discover the seven golden cities, his voyage is significant today for the cultural influence the Spanish had on the territory and peoples of America’s Southwest.

Having first opened its doors to traders in the late 1800s, Hubbell Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona is one of the oldest operating trading posts in the American Southwest, where the differing cultures of the Indians, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans have come together for mutual benefit. For almost 90 years, the Hubbell family welcomed traders and notable visitors to trade with the Navajo. The Spanish roots and character of this family not only influenced the lives of the Navajo, but also of the visitors that they encountered. Although the Hubbell family eventually sold the post in the 1960s to the National Park System, the Western Parks Association has continued to operate it as a trading business as if it were still under the management of John Lorenzo Hubbell and his family. Today, visitors can learn about the Navajo’s heritage and their material culture, witness traders negotiating deals with American Indians, learn to weave Navajo rugs, and purchase crafts and art from the Indians at any of the trading post’s shops.

Although John Lorenzo Hubbell established the post in 1878, the story of Hubbell Trading Post begins in the early 1860s, when General James H. Carleton began forcibly removing the Navajo Indians from their homelands in an effort to find gold in the Navajo territory. Leading this gruesome campaign was Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson who, under the direction of Carleton, instituted a “scorched earth” policy in the Navajo territory. Under this policy, Carson’s troops were to destroy the Navajo’s livelihood by killing their livestock and by burning their homes and crops. To terrorize the Indians into leaving their homelands further, Carson and his men massacred Navajo men, women, and children.

By the winter of 1863, after suffering from starvation and fearing the loss of more people, the Navajo surrendered to Colonel Carson’s troops. The following year, Carson and his troops rounded up the Navajos who survived General Carleton’s vicious campaign, and forced over 8,000 Navajo to walk more than 300 miles from northeast Arizona to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. Known by the Navajo as the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, a 40 square mile reservation on the Pecos River, this episode changed the Navajo world and had a significant influence on their material culture and economic pursuits.

While living at the Bosque Redondo reservation, the Navajo attended school, practiced Christianity, and learned to incorporate in their daily lives the products that the mobile trader introduced into their society. They grew highly dependent on these new materials, which the people used to make the crafts that the Navajo exchanged with traders for food and other products that were essential for their way of life. Without the mobile trader, the people would not have survived in the world the white man created, especially after the government allowed the Navajo to return to their homelands in 1868.

Following the return of the Navajo from the Bosque Redondo, traders continued supplying them with the materials they had grown accustomed to using during their four-year exile. Among the traders to establish a successful relationship with the Navajo was John Lorenzo Hubbell. Hubbell not only developed an industry from the Navajo crafts, but also helped the Navajo adapt to their new environment and readjust to reservation life. He had become familiar with the Navajo’s language and traditions while traveling around the Southwest as a Spanish interpreter for the U.S. military. Hubbell was able to use his knowledge of the Navajo culture and language to establish perhaps the most successful trading empire in the American Southwest. He opened the trading post that is now Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in 1878, ten years after Navajo returned to their homeland from their Bosque Redondo exile.

Hubbell’s trading empire at one point consisted of 30 trading posts, two wholesale stores, a few curio shops, and some bean and apple farms in Gallup and Farmington, New Mexico. His facilities allowed the Navajo to display their art and crafts, while also providing the Indians with food and the material goods they required to make their crafts. This was also a place where artists and other travelers, including Theodore Roosevelt, could find shelter. Eventually, as his business developed, Hubbell was also able to build freight and mail lines, which he used to transport supplies and to send mail order catalogs that promoted Navajo crafts. Hubbell’s career as a trader served as a link between the Navajo and Anglo cultures.

Known to the Navajo as “Old Mexican,” Hubbell had both Spanish and American ties - his father was a Connecticut Yankee and his mother a Gutierrez Mexican. Hubbell’s empire and his attitudes about the role of land and the way family organization and lifestyle were connected reflected an affinity for Latino values and customs. John Lorenzo Hubbell was born at his mother’s family’s estate in Pajarito. There, he grew up among parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who all supported each other. This “big house” environment allowed them to function as a family institution. As Hubbell developed his own empire, this “big house” attitude remained and was crucial to his success as a trader. The Hubbell Trading Post remained in the family until 1967.

By the late 19th century, the Navajo trading became a family event, rather than an affair that the head males participated in alone. Also, the wealthier Navajo began to make efforts to support the poor Navajo in times of crisis. These supportive relationships strongly resembled the interdependent community that existed at the Hubbell Trading Post.

Hubbell also influenced Navajo silversmithing in a way that is still present to this day. He brought Mexican silversmiths to Ganado to teach the craft of silversmithing to the Navajo men of the area so their work would be more appealing to Anglo-Americans. This increased the demand for Navajo silverwork significantly and created a moneymaking enterprise for the tribe.

The store at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site is still in operation. Once inside the masonry post, visitors will find a sales room, a large storage room, and two office rooms that housed all of the trading post’s records from the time of its establishment. Today, these rooms house a unique collection of pioneer artifacts and Navajo art. Behind the trading post stands the Hubbell family home, which also displays a collection of Navajo artwork. Hubbell’s family sold the property to the National Park Service in 1965. The trading post and Hubbell home look much today as they did during Lorenzo Hubbell’s time.

At the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, visitors may begin their tour at the visitor center and learn from a skilled Navajo artist how to weave an authentic Navajo rug. Visitors can also purchase food and other goods at the bullpen; buy a Navajo rug, jewelry, and baskets; attend the “Sheep is Life” workshop to learn about the Navajo lifestyle; and attend a Native American art auction. Beyond the trading post, visitors can take a guided tour of the Hubbell family home and explore the grounds of the Hubbell family homestead with its barn, bunkhouse, guest hogan, historic farm equipment, horses, chickens, and Navajo Churro sheep. They can also view a private collection of Southwestern and Native American arts and crafts.

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In 1774, Juan Bautista de Anza, a captain on the Spanish frontier stationed at the Tubac Presidio, requested permission from the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio Maria Bucareli, to prove that a land route from Mexico to Alta (Upper) California was possible. Spain was in need of an overland route to Alta California, because existing sea routes were too dangerous, and the Spanish needed to secure their outposts in this area from Russian and English exploration and colonization. Bucareli granted Anza permission, and with the help of American Indian guides, Anza identified an overland route in 1774. With the success of this first expedition, Anza gained permission to recruit potential settlers for a second colonizing expedition.

By October of 1775, Anza had convinced nearly 300 people to take their chances on a new life. He persuaded people to join him on a colonizing expedition to Alta California by telling them stories of lush resources, plentiful land, and new opportunities. A culturally diverse mix of peoples of American Indian, European, and Afro-Latino ancestry put their trust in Anza and became a part of the expedition. The settlers, their military escorts, and the 1,000 head of livestock included in the expedition traveled to presidios, missions, and through the countryside for about five and a half months until they reached their final destination.

By June 27, 1776, Lt. Moraga, one of the main lieutenants on the expedition, led the settlers into the area that is now San Francisco. Anza had decided on this site as the final destination on March 28, 1776, after exploring while the rest of the group recuperated from the journey in Monterey. Anza made sure that the settlers reached their final destination and that Spain successfully established its outpost in Alta California. Anza’s expedition changed the course of California history, and descendants of the expedition live on today.

Travelers can explore the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail and experience this historic expedition. Commemorating the trailhead of the United States portion of the Anza Trail from Mexico is the Anza Trailhead Room with its exhibit on the expedition, located on the second floor of the 1904 Nogales Courthouse in Nogales, Arizona, where the National Historic Trail begins. Today, Nogales high school students study the trail's and their community's history through the Anza Trail Ambassadors program, coordinated by the Santa Fe Ranch Foundation in partnership with the national Park Service.

The Spanish Catholic visita at Calabazas lasted 30 years, between 1756 and 1786. During this time, Catholic priests baptized, married, and buried Piman residents and exposed them to Spanish culture. This acculturation of American Indians at Spanish missions was an essential part of Spain’s colonization strategy. At Calabazas, missionaries gathered together Piman residents and introduced them to European animal husbandry, European crops, the Spanish language, Catholicism, and European social values. The new food sources, like wheat and cattle, allowed the Pima to concentrate their population at water sources where the Spanish established missions and visitas. This increased the food yield for the Pima, but disease spread quickly among the American Indians there. To keep Calabazas running, the missionaries encouraged the neighboring O’odham to join the remaining Pima. However, Western Apache raids in the region forced the Spanish to abandon Calabazas in 1786, and its residents dispersed.

Twice during the 1850s and 1860s the U.S. military settled at Calabazas to help stabilize the region. In 1856 and 1857, the 1st Regiment of Dragoons under Enoch Steen lived in the old adobe buildings and called the base Camp Moore. This regiment fought to protect Americans, Mexicans, and Pimas from Apache raiders. Due to Camp Moore’s protection, civilians in the Calabazas area were able to establish gold mines and ranches. The second military occupation of Calabazas was during the Civil War, in 1864, when volunteer soldiers from California built Fort Mason. The military force at Fort Mason included the only regular Army unit in which all the officers and men were Mexican-Americans. They replaced regular troops who were sent east to fight in the war after the immediate Confederate threat to the Southwest ended. This volunteer company suppressed Western Apache raiders and assisted the Juarista governor of Sonora against the French incursions into Mexico.

After the War, Calabazas changed hands multiple times as the American government determined the legality of private land claims within the Gadsden Purchase. Ultimately, in 1964, the land was sold to the Gulf-American Corporation. Calabazas was entered into the National Register of Historic places in 1971 and the corporation donated the land to the Arizona Historical Society in 1974. Calabazas was made a National Historic Landmark and incorporated into the Tumacácori National Historical Park in 1990.

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As Spanish colonists moved northward from Mexico into present day Arizona claiming more land for New Spain, Jesuits founded a chain of missions along the Sonoran Mountain range. The San Xavier del Bac Mission, a National Historic Landmark, was founded in 1700 by Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit explorer who worked to spread Christianity in New Spain. Completed by the Franciscans in 1797, the historic white stucco church stands on the site Father Kino chose. Often called the “white dove of the desert,” the mission is located in the San Xavier Reservation, part of the Tohono O’odham nation, southwest of Tucson in Pima County, Arizona.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Catholic missions were an integral part of Spanish colonization. Missions, usually run by Jesuit or Franciscan friars, created European settlements that allowed colonization to expand the boundaries of Spanish culture and influence. The missions intended to Christianize and Hispanicize Native Americans. At San Xavier del Bac, Jesuits first introduced the Tohono O'odham, a Piman-speaking group, to domesticated horses and cattle. The Spanish also brought European crops, like wheat. Missionaries transformed the lives of semi-nomadic Native Americans with animal husbandry and permanent, rather than seasonal, settlement. The settlement of San Xavier del Bac near the Santa Cruz River was a Tohono O'odham town called Wa:k, a Piman word for water. The mission’s name reflects the mixing of Spanish Catholic and O'odham desert cultures.

The mission’s founder, Father Eusebio Kino, was a leader of the mission system in New Spain. Born in Italy and educated in Germany, Father Kino was an explorer and a cartographer as well as a Jesuit missionary. He entered the Jesuit order at Freiburg, Germany, and soon chose a missionary life. He arrived in Mexico in 1681 and worked to spread Catholicism, by way of Spanish colonization, throughout the region. Prior to his death in 1711, Father Kino hoped to take up residency at San Xavier del Bac Mission. At that time, he was the resident priest at Mission Dolores in Magdalena, Sonora. He was still waiting for his replacement to arrive when he passed away. For his work in bringing European culture to southern Arizona, his statue sits in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Pilgrims still travel each year to Mission Dolores in Sonora, Mexico to celebrate the feast of Father Kino’s patron saint, St. Francis Xavier, and to honor Kino’s contributions to O’odham life and culture.

The mission church that still stands at San Xavier del Bac was completed around the time that the Spanish Empire in North America waned. Construction began in 1783 under the residency of Father Juan Bautista Velderrain, a Franciscan. A loan of 7,000 pesos provided the funds to build the mission. In 1821, Mexico became a Republic after 11 years of revolution, and the new government demanded allegiance from the Franciscan priests. In 1828, San Xavier del Bac’s resident priest, Father Rafael Diaz, refused to align himself with what he believed was an anticlerical regime and left his church. Father Diaz was the last priest to reside at San Xavier del Bac for 36 years.

The middle decades of the 19th century were an unstable period for San Xavier del Bac. In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase land treaty between the United States and New Mexico made the mission a U.S. possession. In 1859, the Catholic Church placed the church under the jurisdiction of the Santa Fe diocese. The diocese, under Bishop Lamy, repaired the church’s exposed adobe brick, and in 1864, Jesuit Father Carolus Evasius Messea resided there for eight months. During Father Messea’s time at San Xavier del Bac, he founded the first public school in Arizona, but the local Pima community lacked interest in the church and limited funding forced the parish to close. In 1874, the U.S. government established the San Xavier Reservation.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Bishop Henry Granjon ordered renovations and new construction on the church and oversaw repairs to the church façade and mortuary wall, which were damaged by an earthquake in 1887. Granjon had the entire church replastered and repainted. He also built a wall along the front of the convent and placed an arch at its east end. Grotto Hill, three hundred feet east of the church, is a small hillock topped by a white cross. On the north side of the hill is a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes. Bishop Granjon oversaw the construction of this shrine to the Virgin Mary in 1908.

The church received its first priest since Father Messea in 1913, a Franciscan and native of Tucson named Father Ferdinand Oritz. Since the arrival of Father Oritz, California Franciscans have run the church and served the San Xavier Reservation. In 1947, they founded a school for local Pima children. In 1949, they installed new floors within the church, repaired the roof and walls, and improved living conditions within the convent.
Unlike many other historic Spanish missions from the era, the architecture of the current church at San Xavier del Bac Mission is entirely European. It has no Piman influence on its Baroque style, a mix of Byzantine and Moorish architecture, aside from the desert materials and aspects of the interior imagery. The main building is in the shape of a Latin cross. Two octagonal towers topped with belfries stand at the front of the building. One large dome covers the transept crossing, and smaller domes flank it to the north and south. The mission property includes the main church, mortuary chapel, dormitory, patio, garden, and convent.

Built by O’odham laborers, the main building is composed of adobe bricks set in lime mortar. The exterior walls are painted white stucco. The interior is decorated with intricately painted and carved religious imagery, which covers the walls and vaulted ceilings. Wooden statues of Saint Xavier and the Virgin are set into a molded background behind the altar, and throughout the church there are carved wooden statues of Native Americans and other saints. Frescoes depicting the lives of Catholic saints decorate the choir loft and main chamber.

The beautiful Spanish colonial church at San Xavier del Bac endures. The Secretary of the Interior designated the mission a National Historic Landmark in 1960. The church continues to serve the residents of the San Xavier Reservation. The church is open to visitors daily, except during special services, and the public is welcome to join the San Xavier community for regular masses.

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After the tumultuous middle decades of the 19th century when the United States fought the Mexican-American and Civil wars, Americans found new challenges and sought new opportunities in the western territories. New England native Colonel Henry Clay Hooker founded the first permanent cattle ranch in the Arizona territory in 1872 on the ruins of an earlier Spanish colonial estate. Hooker’s historic Sierra Bonita Ranch is located in spring-fed Sulphur Valley between the Galiuro and Pinaleño Mountains, which are part of the Coronado National Forest. A National Historic Landmark, the Sierra Bonita Ranch continues to support cattle ranching, and Hooker’s descendants still occupy their ancestor’s adobe house.

Arizona became a U.S. possession after the Mexican-American War in 1848, but civilian American immigration to the new territory was slow at first. During the Spanish Colonial and Mexican Republic eras, Arizona’s Spanish and Mexican settlers were unable to suppress the region’s powerful American Indian nations. After the Civil War, the United States ordered soldiers to occupy Arizona and New Mexico in order to colonize the Southwest, where they fought a series of American-Indian Wars that lasted into the 20th century. The military presence in the western territories provided American ranchers and mine prospectors security to settle the region. The American soldiers also created a demand for resources. In the late 19th century, cattle rancher Henry Hooker (1828-1907) capitalized on these violent conflicts and the growing Arizona economy by founding Sierra Bonita Ranch, the first American cattle ranch in Arizona.

Colonel Hooker, a descendent of Rev. Thomas Hooker who founded the Connecticut colony, moved west as a young man in the 1840s. After working for the Indian Department in Kansas and at a mine in California, Hooker began trading livestock when he herded 500 turkeys between California and Nevada. In 1867, he received a contract with the United States government that made him the leading beef supplier to the American troops and government administrators in the Arizona territory. As he drove his cattle through the Sulphur Valley that year, the rich land so impressed him that he decided to settle there, and he founded the Sierra Bonita Ranch in 1872. During Hooker’s reign, the Sierra Bonita Ranch peaked at 250,000 acres and held up to 30,000 head of cattle. The ranch became famous for Hooker’s hospitality and his organized ranching techniques. Unlike other ranchers who let their herds run free with little oversight, Hooker fenced-off ranges to control breeding, kept a separate herd of milk cows, and provided medical care for sick or injured cattle. He carefully managed his herds to maximize profit and quality.

The National Historic Landmark is 320 acres at Sierra Bonita Ranch that contain the historic ranch buildings, which are the main house, bunkhouse, adobe corrals, and barns. The main house is in the Spanish Colonial style. Made of adobe (straw and clay) bricks, the house is a three-sided U-shaped building that wraps around a central patio enclosed by a wall. A well and root cellar that was in the patio area was later filled and the patio planted with grass. The exterior walls are made of two rows of adobe bricks, 16 feet high and 20 inches thick. Initially, the house had no doors or windows on its exterior walls with access only from the patio, but the Hooker family added exterior openings after the threat of marauders and the Apache subsided. On the opposite side of the patio wall is a courtyard surrounded by a stable, storerooms, and workroom.

Other historic buildings beyond the main house include the original barn, built mostly of wood, decorated with the words “Sierra Bonita Ranch 1872,” which the family added in 1972 in honor of the ranch’s centennial. North of the main house is an adobe bunkhouse with a tin roof and a large adobe corral for storing hay. Other historic corrals at the ranch are made of adobe and wooden planks.

Sierra Bonita Ranch was the first permanent American cattle ranch in Arizona and, still operational, is one of the oldest ranches in the United States. Descendents of the Hooker family reside in the historic adobe house, the site of an 18th century Spanish colonial settlement, and operate a 39,000-acre ranch at Bonita for grazing cattle and growing alfalfa. In popular culture, Hooker is perhaps best known for his role in the Wyatt Earp saga. In March 1882, Hooker allowed Wyatt Earp and his posse to rest at the Sierra Bonita ranch house during their escape from the Arizona authorities, and even agreed to speak to the governor on their behalf. Cochise County sheriff Johnny Behan stopped at the ranch during his hunt for Earp, but Hooker refused to help him. Notably, Academy Award-winning actor Charlton Heston played the character of Hooker in the movie Tombstone.

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Tumacácori National Historical Park in Southern Arizona protects the ruins of three missions founded during the Spanish colonial era. Two of the missions, Los Santos Ángeles de Guevavi and San José de Tumacácori, were among the twenty-four founded by Jesuit Father Eusebio Franciso Kino in the region the Spanish called the “Pimería Álta,” meaning “land of the upper Pimas.” The third, San Cayetano de Calabazas, was founded later by Jesuit father Francisco Pauer. From the establishment of these missions in 1691 and 1756 until the final departure of the residents from Tumacácori, the last remaining mission of the three, in 1848, Kino and the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who followed baptized thousands of native people and settlers. Tumacácori National Historical Park preserves the history and tells the stories of these Spanish missions and their influence on the American Indian communities of the Pimería Álta and on the continuing culture of the American southwest.

The native people who lived in the vicinity of Tumacácori called themselves “O’odham,” meaning “people” in their language. The Spanish called the O’odham that they found living along rivers “Pima,” and those that they found living in the desert, “Papago.” Their homeland included the area that is now southern Arizona and the northern part of the Mexican state of Sonora. A peaceful people unless the need arose to defend themselves, the O’odham were farmers, raising corn, beans and squash using flood irrigation. The people called “Papago” by the Spanish are known today as the Tohono O’odham, or “desert people.” Their famous basketry – once necessary for gathering and storing food – is made today using the same material-gathering and weaving techniques as were used by their ancestors.

Founded by Kino in January, 1691, mission San Cayetano de Tumacácori was the first mission to be located in what is now Arizona. Originally located on the east side of the Santa Cruz River, the mission moved – following a nearby rebellion in 1751 – to its present location on the west side of the river, where it was rechristened San José de Tumacácori. By 1757, the community had built a small adobe church. Beginning around 1800 – by this time under the administration of Franciscan missionaries – the community began construction of a larger church. Although in use by the early 1820s, the structure was never entirely completed. The last residents left Tumacácori in 1848.

The ruins of the larger church remains, a landmark in the Santa Cruz Valley. Also still visible are the remains of the priest’s residence and community area known as the convento, the granary where food was stored, the lime kiln where lime was heated to make mortar and plaster, and parts of the orchard and acequia, or irrigation ditch. Behind the church are the ruins of a cemetery and a mortuary chapel. A reproduction of a ki, or traditional O’odham house, is also on the site.

The Calabazas and Guevavi mission churches are in a more degraded state than Tumacácori, and are not open to the public. Visitors can tour these sites as part of reserved tours during winter months, and can learn about their history and stories at the Tumacácori museum. Founded a day after Tumacácori, Guevavi was designated the cabecera, or headquarters mission for the area. The name Guevavi was derived from the O’odham name for the community, Gu waihe, or “big well.” Like Tumacácori, the Guevavi mission church is an adobe structure. The newly arrived Franciscan missionaries moved their headquarters to Tumacácori in 1768, and within a few years the Guevavi mission was abandoned. The ruins of the 15 by 50 foot church built in 1751 are all that remains of the mission today.

Father Pauer founded mission San Cayetano de Calabazas, a few miles north of Guevavi, in 1756. By 1786, primarily due to the continuous danger of attack by Apaches, the mission was abandoned, its residents moving to Tumacácori. It became a ranching outpost for the Tumacácori mission.
Visitors enter Tumacácori National Historical Park through the Tumacácori visitor center. The visitor center offers a 15 minute video, an excellent museum, and a bookstore. A self-guided interpretive tour booklet, “In the Footprints of the Past,” is available for loan or purchase in the bookstore. Guided tours are available at 11:00 and 2:00 January through March, and may be available at other times and seasons. Special tours, such as guided walks to the Santa Cruz River, may also be available. The park website describes tours currently available (nps.gov/tuma).

Tumacácori National Historical Park hosts La Fiesta de Tumacácori each year on the first full weekend in December. This event celebrates the many cultures that have historically been associated with the Santa Cruz Valley with traditional foods, crafts, music, and dance. A mass is held inside the mission church in October in conjunction with Tubac Presidio State Historic Park’s annual Anza Day event. The Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail passes through the park, providing opportunities for walkers, bird watchers, and equestrians.

Plan Your Visit

Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area is a cultural crossroads offering visitors a diverse and intriguing history. The first National Heritage Area west of the Mississippi covers 21-square miles encompassing the town of Yuma, Arizona, near the Californian and Mexican borders. The history emphasizes three major cultural groups—American Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo-American. The crossing point attracted many over the centuries because of the natural narrowing and calming of the Colorado River. Although bridges now span the river, it is still possible to view the granite outcroppings and significant historic buildings and sites throughout the heritage area. Yuma Crossing was an important transportation and communication gateway between New Spain and Alta California during the Spanish colonial period and between the American Southwest and California during the time of the American westward movement.

As it is today, the Colorado River was the lifeblood of the entire region, yet the rushing water, so vital for life, made it nearly impossible to cross the river safely. Pre-contact American Indian tribes were the first to discover the natural granite outcroppings that settled the mighty Colorado River enough to make crossing feasible. Many peoples, including the ancestors of the modern day Quechan and Cocopah tribes, settled near the river.

Hoping to establish a trading post with the American Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley, Frenchman Henri de Tonti built the first European settlement along the Arkansas River in 1686. The French settlement began to trade with the Quapaw tribe of Osotouy. The trading post proved unsuccessful, and the French, unable to compete with the British fur trade, abandoned the settlement in 1699. The French reinstated the post as a military garrison in 1720, after King Louis XIV granted land along the river to Scotsman John Law and a group of German settlers. The new inhabitants of the trading post were unable to survive, and John Law’s plans to develop an agricultural colony ultimately failed.

Although settlers sporadically took over the post as time passed, the French did not officially establish another post in the Mississippi Valley until the late 1740s, when the French-Chickasaw war and constant flooding encouraged the settlers to move the post to a better location. In 1751, French Commandant Pelletier de La Houssaye built the new post further up the river near the Quapaw village and away from the Chickasaw to avoid further conflict. Realizing the post’s significance for the defense of French claims in the Mississippi Valley during the Seven Years War, Captain Charles Marie de Reggio moved the post further down the Mississippi River to protect French fleets. When the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the defeated French ceded the Western half of Louisiana, including Arkansas Post, to Spain. Although Spanish troops occupied the Post, resident French traders and settlers remained, far outnumbering the Spanish soldiers.

In 1779, Spain moved the post back to the location of the original French settlement of 1687 to avoid flooding, renamed the post Fort Carlos III after the Spanish King, and used it as a base to develop a successful fur trade with the Quapaw Indians. The trade allowed the Spanish to gain valuable military allies, which proved useful during the American Revolution when British Captain James Colbert led an attack against the Spanish fort on April 17, 1783 with 60 British men, a dozen Chickasaw, and a few African Americans. Captain Jacobo Du Breuil had only 30 Spanish soldiers, 4 Quapaw, and a handful of French settlers to defend the Post. Knowing that the attackers did not fear the Europeans protecting the Post, Du Breuil ordered his men to act like attacking Indians. To give credence to the plan, one of the four Quapaw ran into the midst of the attackers and threateningly planted a tomahawk in the ground. Believing the deception, Colbert’s forces fled. Ultimately a Spanish victory, Colbert’s Raid is significant as one of the last engagements of the Revolutionary War. Following this British invasion, the Spanish post never faced another attack or engaged in battle. In the early 1800s, Spain returned Louisiana to France.

Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States gained control of Arkansas Post and soon began to transform the European garrison and trading post into an American frontier community. Initially, the United States attempted to maintain a trading empire in the Mississippi Valley by converting Arkansas Post into a government trading center, but the American government was unsuccessful in competing with private trading companies. By 1810, American families began to populate the Mississippi Valley, and in 1819, Arkansas Post became the capital of the Arkansas Territory. Within three years, the town began publishing its first newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, which brought greater interest in the territory. In 1821, Little Rock became the capital of the Arkansas Territory, which caused the economy and population of Arkansas Post to decline.

By the 1830s, Arkansas Post had gained new significance, this time for cotton production in the area and its location as a major river port; however, in 1844 the town declined again after Arkansas Post lost its position as a county seat. General Thomas J. Churchill recognized the town’s importance for the defense of Little Rock, and in 1862, the Confederate army erected Fort Hindman at Arkansas Post. Although the fort was in a strategic location along the Arkansas River, its earthen structure could not withstand the force of the Union army’s gunboat attack on January 10, 1863. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the town was unable to recover from the shelling, and as increased railroad usage led to a decline in river traffic, Arkansas Post eventually faded away.

Since 1912, only half of Arkansas Post has been visible because of erosion and changes in the course of the Arkansas River that have left its historic resources underground and underwater. Arkansas Post National Memorial today has a park-like appearance with an overlook where visitors can view the Arkansas River. In 1964, when Arkansas Post became a national memorial, the National Park Service began to restore the visible remains at the site to their original 18th century appearance. The park preserves reminders of the history of America's Spanish and French heritage and restored segments of the 19th-century town, so visitors can experience the overall history of Arkansas Post's transition from a Spanish and French trading and military post to an American community.

Today, visitors can walk along trails, stop at wayside exhibits, participate in activities, attend the historic weapons demonstration, and watch interpretive films at the visitor center and museum.

Plan Your Visit

In search of the seven wealthy cities of Cibola and hoping to find the mythical Strait of Anian, a passageway from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic, explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo instead was the first European to discover the west coast of the United States when he landed in 1542 in the harbor of San Diego Bay. Today, Cabrillo National Monument commemorates Cabrillo’s voyage and the cultural interactions that occurred between American Indians and the Spanish and Portuguese explorers. Visitors can also visit the Old Point Loma Lighthouse, learn about how the military used the site, and explore nature.

The place and date of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s birth are uncertain, but the 16th century historian, Antonio de Herrera, believed he was from Portugal. The first documentation of the young conquistador’s existence dates back to 1519, when Cabrillo’s name appeared among the list of officers who served in Hernan Cortes’ army. While in the Americas, Cabrillo gained recognition for his service as captain of crossbowmen during the conquest of the Aztec empire and greater fame after his successful expeditions with Pedro de Alvarado in Guatemala and San Salvador.

By 1530, Cabrillo had settled near Guatemala’s Pacific Coast with his wife and two sons and acquired great wealth through the discovery of gold. He also became a prominent businessman from his shipbuilding and trading companies. He remained in Guatemala until 1542, when an Indian uprising killed Pedro de Alvarado, the governor of Guatemala, who was planning an expedition to explore the Pacific. On June 24, after the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, placed Cabrillo in command of Alvarado’s vessels -- The San Salvador, La Victoria, and San Miguel -- the conquistador led his men on an expedition along California’s coast.

On September 28, 1542, after setting sail from the port of Navidad in Mexico, Cabrillo’s vessels discovered and entered San Diego Bay. Landing on Saint Michael’s birthday, Cabrillo named the bay Puerto de San Miguel to honor the Spanish archangel. The bay bore that name for 60 years until explorer Sebastian Vizcaino reached Puerto de San Miguel and renamed it San Diego Bay. Once on land, Cabrillo and his crew explored the harbor and the surrounding territory. No evidence remains of Cabrillo and his men having been in the bay area. Historians agree, however, that Cabrillo did make contact with the Kumeyaay Indians.

The American Indians Cabrillo found waiting on shore had long braided hair they adorned with feathers or shells and clothing made of the skin of sea otters, seals or deer. The Kumeyaay Indians were already accustomed to meeting Spaniards from previous invasions that occurred further inland, and they informed Cabrillo how the Spanish army destroyed their homes and murdered their people. Instead of attacking the Kumeyaay Indians, Cabrillo offered them gifts. Cabrillo remained in Puerto de San Miguel until January 1543, when he died from an infection caused by an unfortunate accident that broke his arm during an earlier expedition to the Channel Islands. The location of Cabrillo’s death remains a mystery, and archeologists continue to search for his grave.

In 1852, the United States Congress authorized construction of eight lighthouses along the Pacific Coast. The Federal Government built one of the lighthouses on the highest elevation of Point Loma overlooking the bay to aid navigation to America’s newly acquired territories on the California coast. Completed in 1854, the Old Point Loma Lighthouse became operational the following year after installation of the Fresnel lens. The light shone over the entrance of San Diego Bay until 1891, when keeper Robert Israel extinguished the lamp for one final time. The lighthouse closed because fog and low clouds often obscured its light. Navigators could only see the light on clear nights.

The Point Loma peninsula forms a natural protective barrier at the entrance to San Diego Bay, providing views of the harbor and ocean. In 1852, the Federal Government recognized its importance and designated the area a military reserve. In 1899, the War Department dedicated Fort Rosecrans and built a series of gun batteries over the years. During World War I and II, military facilities on the Point provided vital coastal and harbor defense systems. Between 1918 and 1943, the Army constructed searchlight bunkers, fire control stations, and gun batteries.

Despite its inability to serve as a watchful light over San Diego Bay, Old Point Loma Lighthouse became a favorite tourist destination that continues to illuminate past events that have shaped America’s history. In 1913, recognizing the significance of the San Diego Bay location and the importance of Cabrillo, the first European to discover it, President Woodrow Wilson designated the lighthouse and the surrounding one-half acre as Cabrillo National Monument. Original plans called for demolishing the lighthouse and placing a statue of Cabrillo or plaque in its place that would commemorate the discoverer of San Diego Bay. During World War II, the US Army took over the Old Point Loma Lighthouse, painted it in camouflage colors, and converted it into a signal station. At the end of the war, the Army returned the lighthouse to the National Park Service, which restored it to resemble its 1880s appearance.

The National Park Service also added a visitor center at Cabrillo National Monument and erected a statue of Cabrillo near the lighthouse. The original statue at the site by Portuguese sculptor Alvaro DeBree suffered great damage from the marine air. In the 1980s, the National Park Service hired Portuguese sculptor Joas Chartes Almeida to carve an exact replica of the original statue out of a more resistant stone. The duplicate statue stands on an overlook where it continues to commemorate the voyage of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his discovery of California.

The visitor center offers an "Age of Exploration" exhibit, films, and ranger-guided programs about the history of Cabrillo. Visitors can tour the Old Point Loma Lighthouse and learn about what life was like for light keepers and their families and view interactive exhibits about lighthouses of Point Loma in the nearby Assistant Keeper's Quarters. In a historic military building close by, another exhibit interprets the history of Fort Rosecrans. Visitors can also enjoy the panoramic views of the harbor and explore the natural surroundings and wildlife while walking on the Bayside Trail.

Cabrillo National Monument is the home of a Whale Overlook where visitors can watch gray whales in their natural habitat in January and February. Visitors at the Maritime Museum of San Diego can visit the Spanish Landing Site to watch the construction of a full-size replica of Cabrillo's ship, "San Salvador." Once complete, the National Park Service will use the ship for living history programs.

Plan Your Visit

During the mid-19th century, the United States, which began as a cluster of States hugging the East Coast, had its sights set to the west like never before. The California Trail was just one of a vast network of wagon roads and footpaths that brought Americans from the country they knew to the unfamiliar frontier – and eventually west to California and the Oregon Territory. This was the greatest mass migration in American history.

Crossing 10 States, the entire California National Historic Trail system spans approximately 5,665 miles. About 1,100 miles of trail still have obvious remains on the ground such as trail ruts and other remnants, many on public lands. More than 320 historic sites are located along the trail system. The California National Historic Trail helps tell the many stories of its diverse travelers: some seeking new farmlands, others seeking gold, all finding a daunting journey across some of the harshest land in the interior of North America. Despite the treacherous route, more than 200,000 people traveled west from Missouri along the California Trail during the 1840s and 1850s. This migration forever changed the cultural, religious, and architectural practices of formerly Spanish-owned territory.

The California Trail reflects a complex and layered story, one of mass emigration, commerce, hope and perseverance, but also of the amalgamation of cultures as Easterners (many of Anglo-descent), met Westerners (of Spanish-descent or American Indians) for the first time. The opening of the West had a profound effect on national policies, international borders in North America, and the eventual admission of California and Oregon as States before 1860.

The California Trail and the other routes that carried people west-- the Oregon, Mormon Pioneer and Pony Express National Historic Trails, offer extensive historic and scenic resources for today’s travelers. Hundreds of historic sites linked via these trails and driving routes that follow them allows modern adventurers to experience the original path of the trails and learn about their contributions to mid-19th century westward expansion.

Placing the California Trail in the context of American landholdings and politics at the time of its creation only underscores its importance. The dawn of the 19th century brought great change to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the country’s land. When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, a victorious United States gained the large territory of Alta-California fulfilling what many saw as its Manifest Destiny to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

These changes opened up vast amounts of under-populated and unsettled land “out west” that caught the imaginations of Americans further east. Most people had only the vaguest idea of what conditions lay beyond the Mississippi River, but tales of bountiful forests and fertile coastal farmlands tempted thousands. Spanish and later Mexicans, after Mexico gained its independence from Spain, had already colonized much of coastal California. American explorers, trappers and traders had contact with these Californians and brought home stories of expansive cattle ranches and ideal agricultural conditions.

Getting to the riches of California was, of course, the challenge. Though American frontiersmen forged various trails in the 1820s and 30s, none of these earlier trails were suitable for the average family with a wagon in tow – especially through the brutally steep Rocky Mountain region. Luckily, by the early 1840s, travelers discovered that the South Pass through the Rockies was practical for wagon travel. In 1841, the Bartleson-Bidwell party left Independence, Missouri and successfully used the South Pass to make the long journey to California. Thousands of others soon followed.
The 2,400-mile trip was far from easy. At the time, the entire journey took five to six months to complete. Along the route, travelers not only faced the treacherous Rockies, but also the barren deserts of Nevada and the frigid Sierra Nevada Range. Early on, very few supply stations existed and travelers had to be self-sufficient in finding food, water, and shelter. Those who took the trail quickly had to acquire skills such as building fires, chopping wood, capturing clean water, and setting up camp nightly. Extreme temperatures and threats of violence, stealing, mortal accidents, and American Indian raids were all constant concerns. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, cholera outbreaks along the trail killed travelers by the thousands.

Despite the risks, Easterners could not resist the possibility for a new and prosperous life, especially during the California Gold Rush years. In 1848, James Marshall, a young emigrant from New Jersey, discovered gold by accident. Word quickly spread, and by 1849, tens of thousands of people poured into California seeking the precious mineral. Some of these so-called “49ers” traveled via ship around the tip of South America at Cape Horn, and others crossed the Isthmus of Panama via mule train. Those who could not afford these less arduous routes flooded the California Trail.
Prospectors mined an estimated $216 million in gold from the earth during the first five years of the California Gold Rush. The miners quickly depleted the gold supply but moved on to follow gold strikes made elsewhere during the latter half of the century. By the 1860s, the railroad system in the United States vastly changed the way both people and goods traveled throughout the country. The Transcontinental Railroad connected the east and west coasts in 1869, bringing the age of the California Trail to a close.

By the late 1700s and early 1800s, Spain extended its New World Empire by establishing permanent settlements on the west coast of North America. In order to colonize Alta (Upper) California, the Spanish constructed presidios (forts) and missions. In total, the Spanish established four presidios and 21 missions throughout Alta California. The Carmel Mission (San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo Mission) was the second of Spain’s missions and is today a National Historic Landmark. As at many of the historic Spanish missions that still exist throughout California, visitors can tour the restored Carmel Mission.

On June 3, 1770, Captain Gaspar de Portola and Franciscan Father Junípero Serra founded the Carmel Mission and the Presidio of Monterey beside Monterey Bay. Over the course of the next year, presidio soldiers often mistreated the local American Indians living in the area. The American Indians, who associated the mission with the presidio, became leery of Father Serra and his attempts at converting them to Christianity.

In August of 1771, Father Serra moved the mission to nearby Carmel because it offered better agricultural land and a safer political environment for the growing mission. In this new location, the mission thrived. It was closer to fresh water and land more suitable for growing crops. Importantly, it was removed from the tense environment surrounding the presidio. While construction progress was slow at first, the mission eventually had temporary structures including dwellings, a storeroom, and a wooden church.

Carmel Mission became the headquarters for Father Serra and Spain’s expanding California mission system. From Carmel Mission, Father Serra directed the building of seven other missions in California. Father Serra passed away at the mission on August 28, 1784. Today, visitors to the restored Carmel Mission can see the room in which Father Serra slept and where he passed away. Father Serra’s grave is below the mission’s present church altar.

During Father Serra’s time at Carmel Mission, the mission buildings were of wood and mud and then eventually of adobe. These first structures were temporary and lasted only as long as their roofs could protect them from the elements. In 1793, Father Lausen, Father Serra’s successor, supervised the construction of a more permanent stone church, which visitors to the mission can see today.

Laborers quarried sandstone from the nearby Santa Lucia Mountains to construct the church on the site of the original adobe church. The church has two dissimilar towers flanking a round-arched portal. The bell tower, which exhibits Spanish-Moorish influence, has a dome surmounted by a wrought iron cross. At the height of its use, the church had as many as seven large-scale side altarpieces, over 20 statues, and a large crucifix flanking statues of Our Lady and St. John. The church’s interior wooden tunnel vault, shaped in a parabolic arch, is unique among the California mission churches. The church is also unique because it was the first of three California mission churches built from stone – the rest of the mission churches are of adobe.

The mission continued to thrive under Father Lausen’s leadership. He directed the construction of additional adobe buildings around the property. Today, the reconstructed mission buildings sit on top of the foundations of those Father Lausen directed to be constructed. Father Lausen passed away in 1803 and rests beside Father Serra.

By the early 1820s, a series of events negatively affected life at the mission. Sickness, death, and depredation by the military overwhelmed the mission throughout this time. In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain and Alta California became a part of Mexico. The Mexican government did not have the necessary financial resources to maintain the mission system as the Spanish had done. By 1834, the Mexican government secularized the mission system and began the process of converting church property to private property. Mexican citizens who were helpful during the war for independence and new settlers coming to California bought most of this property. Due to the secularization of the missions, the American Indian converts and Spanish Fathers left Carmel Mission and the mission’s buildings faced deterioration and decay.

Many of the mission’s adobe buildings returned to the earth, becoming piles of mud, while the church’s roof collapsed leaving the interior exposed to the elements. By 1859, the United States government, which was now in control of California, returned the missions’ lands to the Catholic Church. Carmel Mission lay in ruin. Restoration of the mission began in 1884 when private funds provided a new roof for the church. By 1936, private funds and church funds became available for a full-scale renovation of the property. Over the next two decades the mission’s buildings were rebuilt and restored, and in 1961, it was designated a Basilica. A Basilica is the highest honorary rank for a church and implies great historical and artistic importance.

Today, visitors to the restored and reconstructed Carmel Mission will see the mission, with its complete quadrangle courtyard. Only part of the mission buildings date from the 18th and 19th centuries while others are of more recent construction but still in the California mission style. Many of the church’s interior furnishings are original. In 1851, Monterey Pastor Father Villarasa removed the church’s statues, paintings, and other artifacts when the church’s roof showed signs of collapse. The Old Presidio Chapel in Monterey then used the furnishings until the early part of the 20th century when they returned to Carmel Mission. Visitors to the mission will also see California’s First Library (founded in 1770) that contains Father Serra’s 400 year-old Bible.

Plan Your Visit

Around the time of Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, soldiers of the Presidio of San Diego began building their homes outside the adobe walls of this fortified settlement. One the finest example of these homes is the Estudillo House, a National Historic Landmark located in the Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. Built between 1827 and 1829, the Estudillo House, or the La Casa de Estudillo, is one of the oldest surviving examples of a typical large Spanish-Mexican one-story town house in California. Since its construction, the house has served as a residence, a town hall, a chapel, a shelter, an early 20th-century tourist attraction, and a museum.

Construction of the house began in 1827 on a land parcel that overlooked the Old Town San Diego plaza and under the direction of Captain José María de Estudillo, a commander of the San Diego Presidio. The great U-shaped one story house is built around three sides of a large patio and originally contained 13 rooms set in a straight line. The rooms are connected only by an external veranda. The adobe walls, averaging three to five feet in thickness, are coated with white plaster and gave protection in heat and cold. Originally a small round wooden cupola, used by the family and guests to watch the bullfights and festivals in the plaza, topped the house. When José María de Estudillo died in 1830, the house passed to his son, José Antonio Estudillo and his son’s wife, María Victoria Dominguez de Estudillo.

The house was to become the social center of life in Old Town San Diego. The building was so central to town life that, from the early 1830s to 1856, a large hall in the house served as the town chapel and as a school. José Antonio and María Victoria fostered within the Estudillo House an atmosphere of social, political, and community involvement in what was considered at the time to be one of the finest houses in Mexican California.

Both José Antonio and his wife María Victoria were active and influential members in their community. By 1829, José Antonio owned three ranches in California, and as his wealth grew, so did his importance in the community. From 1828 until his death in 1852, José Antonio held many public offices in San Diego. He served as revenue collector, treasurer, mayor, justice of the peace, judge of San Diego under Mexican rule, and later as treasurer and assessor of San Diego County under American rule. While José Antonio played an active role in the development of early San Diego, his wife fully participated in the life of the Mexican pueblo and the new American city.

María Victoria lived in the Estudillo House for over 40 years until her death in 1873. Known for her charm, compassion, and hospitality, María Victoria and José Antonio entertained some of the most brilliant and aristocratic citizens of Upper California in the Estudillo House. During the Mexican-American War, instead of joining her husband at one of their homes in El Cajon, María Victoria remained in San Diego. While the “Californians” held the area, María Victoria gave courage and spirit to the women and children of San Diego providing them with refuge behind the thick walls of the house.

In the early 1850’s, when peace had returned to California after the war, unexpected deaths in the Estudillo family left nine children orphaned. María Victoria immediately welcomed these children into her home, and she bore the responsibility of raising this new family alone for José Antonio passed away shortly after in 1852. For the next 21 years, María Victoria continued to live in the Estudillo House, raising her new family, taking care of the sick, and performing acts of charity where she could.

The Estudillo House remained in the Estudillo family until 1887, when family descendants moved to Los Angeles and left the home with a caretaker. Around this time the house gained prominence through its association with Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 novel Ramona. Set in Southern California, the novel painted a romanticized portrait of Mexican colonial life, and it effectively generated a nationwide interest in the region. Publication of Ramona coincided with the opening of railroad lines to the region. This provided interested tourists with the means of transportation to see the locations discussed in the novel. While the novel was a work of fiction, tourists flocked to the Estudillo House nonetheless, because they believed it was likely the location of Ramona’s (the beautiful half-Spanish and half-Indian heroine) marriage. The Estudillo House became known as “Ramona’s Marriage Place” and was converted into a commercial venture.

Due in part to tourist vandalism and the caretaker selling off pieces of the house as Ramona-related relics, the house sat nearly in ruins by 1906. Nat R. Titus purchased the worn-down house and sold it a year later to the San Diego Electric Railway Company, owned by sugar magnate John D. Spreckles. In 1910, Spreckles financed its restoration under the supervision of Architect Hazel Waterman. Restored to a condition closely related to descriptions in the novel, the Estudillo House remained a Ramona-related tourist attraction for many years to come. On one day in 1940, “Ramona’s Marriage Place drew 1,632 visitors.

Donated to the State by Mr. Legler Benbough in 1968, the house became part of the California State Park System. Restored as a house museum identified with the Estudillo family, the museum now features furnished rooms, including a living room, master bedroom, child’s bedroom, workroom, dining room, chapel, a working kitchen, and a large courtyard. Through self-guided or docent lead tours of the Estudillo House and the many other historic sites throughout the Old Town San Diego Historic Park, visitors can experience the transformation of San Diego from a Mexican pueblo to an American settlement.

Plan Your Visit

Across the centuries, the sheltered waters of San Francisco Bay and the rich, fertile lands that surround it have attracted people of different nations. Fort Point National Historic Site reflects the strategic importance of the area. In 1776, the Spanish established the Presidio of San Francisco to protect Spain’s interests in the San Francisco Bay area. After Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, it too recognized the importance of fortifying San Francisco against enemy attack. Once the United States gained control of California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the fort that stands today at Fort Point National Historic Site. Constructed between 1853 and 1861 as part of a defense system to protect San Francisco Bay and its important commercial and military installations against foreign attack, this fort has stood guard at the narrows of the Golden Gate for over 150 years.

In 1966, “The Forty Acres,” a parcel of land in Delano, California, became the headquarters for the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), the first permanent agricultural labor union in the United States. The Forty Acres is nationally significant for its role in the farm worker movement and for its close association with the influential career of Césario Estrada Chávez (César Chávez), its most significant leader from 1962 to 1993. At Forty Acres, César Chávez held his first public fast that brought the farm workers movement to national attention and the UFW first successfully bargained contracts protecting the rights of farm workers and ending a five–year table-grape strike.

The Forty Acres preserves the legacy of the farm workers movement and César Chávez and helps tell their story. The buildings, the park, roads, and landscaping features are all intact. A visit to this National Historic Landmark provides visitors with the opportunity to see the buildings and grounds that developed as the UFW grew in importance and strength.

César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona in 1927. About ten years later, Chávez and his family were forced to leave Arizona after they lost their land during the Great Depression. They went to California where they moved up and down the State searching for work. In these early years of his life, Chávez experienced the poverty and discrimination that often went hand-in-hand with migratory farm work.

After serving in the United States Navy for two years beginning in 1946, Chávez returned to California and became involved with the Community Service Organization (CSO). The CSO organizers helped people in Mexican-American neighborhoods with the everyday tasks of filling out tax forms, getting children into school, and studying for citizenship exams. The organization promoted the idea that community involvement, support, and togetherness could and would positively affect everyone’s lives. The CSO greatly influenced the way in which Chávez eventually organized the farm workers’ movement and future union.

Between 1962 and 1965, Chávez and a small group of fellow activists traveled throughout California’s agricultural regions talking to workers, helping them with problems, and identifying what they needed and wanted from an organization. Chávez and his group of organizers invited the workers to join their new organization, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). They were careful not to call the new organization a labor union for most farm workers associated “unions” with false promises, empty hopes, and lost strikes. All of this changed on September 8, 1965 when a predominantly Filipino farm workers organization, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), went on strike against the Californian Delano table-grape growers. Seeing this as a great opportunity to fight for the rights of agricultural workers, within one week the NFWA voted to join the strike.

By the spring of 1966, as the strike gained support and a few months before the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (later known as the United Farm Workers of America Union (UFW)), the NFWA purchased 40 acres of barren land in Delano, California to develop into a farm workers’ service center. Chávez wanted Forty Acres to be a place where lower-income Spanish-speaking farm workers could find assistance, goods, and services that would positively affect their lives. At the service center, he wished to offer health care, banking, legal services, child care, automobile repair, and reasonably priced gas and groceries. Once a barren landscape featuring alkaline soil where little would grow, the UFW transformed “The Forty Acres” into a regional farm workers’ service center and the headquarters of a national movement that would transform the agricultural industry in the United States and inspire thousands of Latinos and other Americans to social and political activism.

From The Forty Acres, Chávez led the UFW grassroots movement to success during the Delano table-grape strike. Construction began on the first major structure to go up at Forty Acres in August 1967, a cooperative gas station facing Garces Highway. The rectangular single-story adobe was built in the Mission or early California style that César Chávez loved and was simple and functional in design. After touring all of the Spanish Californian Missions on his honeymoon, Chávez fell in love with the missions’ architectural style and associated it with feelings of stability, simplicity, and permanence—all of the things he sought for his movement. Richard Chávez, Cesar’s brother, directed the building of the station using volunteer labor, little modern equipment, and donated material. Construction of the service station exemplifies the farm workers movement’s limited financial resources, but also its resourcefulness. Farm workers bought “Huelga Co-op Gas” (strike gas) at the station, which eventually housed a three-bay mechanics shop to fix broken-down union cars.

Completed in late 1967, the Station saw its first major use when Chávez put his own body on the line to revitalize the movement and to focus his followers on the benefits of non-violent tactics in the fight for the cause. Chávez completed his first public fast of 25 days during February and March of 1968 in a tiny 8x9 windowless room off the service station’s breezeway. The room was so small it hardly had room for a single bed. Chávez took a short walk across the station’s breezeway to a large storeroom to attend Mass every day. Chávez’s fast drew national attention to the movement. Supporters flocked to the station every day–a makeshift tent city of hundreds of followers even grew around the station. At the Service Station, Chávez met U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy before ending that fast at an outdoor Mass in Delano.

The movement grew in momentum as strikers appealed to church groups, student activists, pesticide-conscious consumers, and other labor unions and civil rights groups across the nation. The UFW utilized consumer boycotts, marches, community organizing, and nonviolent resistance, to achieve the goals of better pay and working conditions. Between 1967 and 1968, the movement and union received a considerable amount of media attention and gained in strength after they targeted the Giumarra Brother Fruits Company, the largest table-grape grower in California, and decided to boycott the State’s entire table-grape industry, and after Chávez conducted his first public fast. As the movement expanded, they needed a place with office space and began building an administration building in 1968.

With no real time to focus on elaborate architectural plans, the UFW built the Roy L. Reuther Memorial Hall using a functional design, simple and affordable materials, and volunteer labor. Reuther Hall cost only $9,000 to complete and included offices, a services and utilities area, and a multipurpose space. The “multipurpose” space encompassed the entire southwest portion of the building and served as the hiring hall, boycott organizing space, day care facility, and site of social events.

By 1970, the UFW had succeeded in reaching a collective bargaining agreement with the table-grape growers, affecting more than 70,000 farm workers. The signing of the contracts that ended the strike occurred in Reuther Hall at The Forty Acres. The contracts raised wages, protected farm workers from dangerous pesticides, replaced a labor contracting system with union-run hiring halls, funded health care plans, established grievances procedures, mandated that growers provide fresh water and toilets in the fields, and established a fund for community service projects.
After the signing of the contracts that ended the table-grape strike, union leaders knew that the farm workers would have more money to spend on healthcare and began to build a permanent health clinic at The Forty Acres. Resourceful union leaders acquired two county administrative buildings scheduled for demolition and moved them to The Forty Acres for use as the base of the health clinic. Volunteers offered hours of manual labor, adapting the moved buildings with adobe in the Mission style consistent with the rest of the Forty Acres. While most of the clinic was consistent with modern health care facilities at the time, contractors designed the waiting room with brown brick walls on three sides and rich, brown clay floor tiles. The room had large windows and glass doors, which filled the space with daylight. UFW leaders wanted the farm workers to feel at ease and a part of the landscape while waiting to use the clinic, and this waiting room provided that comfort.

Signing the contracts also helped fund another building project for the Paolo Agbayani Retirement Village. The retirement center was the union leaders’ answer to the plight of elderly and displaced Filipino farm workers. Most of the Filipino farm workers had migrated to the United States as young men during the 1920s and 1930s. Strict immigration laws prevented Filipino women from immigrating to California, and California law prohibited the Filipino male immigrants to marry women outside of their own race. This left the Filipino farm workers to live as single men most of their lives at the labor camps on the farms they worked. During the strike, the grape growers evicted most of these men. Since they had been unable to marry and start families, many of the men had nowhere to go.

The union leaders designed and built the Paolo Agbayani Retirement Village to provide the Filipino farm workers with a decent place to live. Constructed in the Mission style, the village provided 59 single room units, bathrooms, telephone lines, central air conditioning, a central courtyard (landscaped with eucalyptus, Chinese pistache, blackwood acacia, carob, camphor trees, and garden plots) and a lounge and dining area that provided daily meals. The Filipino farm workers who retired here had come full circle; they now lived in a place that provided them with a high quality of life, human dignity, and respect. Chávez performed his last and longest public fast, for 36 days, in a small room at the Village in 1988. This fast was a protest against the pesticide poisoning of farm workers and their children.

Although the union relocated its national headquarters to a newly-acquired property in the Tehachapi Mountains in 1971, The Forty Acres remained the NFW’s model service center. The services offered at Forty Acres were ultimately refined and then offered throughout other regional service centers. Today, visitors to The Forty Acres can readily see the historic connections between the site’s buildings and grounds and the legacies of César Chávez and the farm workers movement.

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Golden Gate National Recreational Area encompasses more than 30 scenic and historic sites that chronicle hundreds of years of San Francisco’s history and invites visitors to explore the area’s American Indian, Spanish, and Mexican cultural heritage. American Indians have occupied the San Francisco Bay area for more than 10,000 years. The Ohlone, or Costanoan, and Coast Miwok American Indians lived throughout the area when the Spanish arrived in 1769.

The story of San Francisco’s Spanish heritage begins on November 4, 1769, when Captain Juan Gaspar de Portola came over Sweeney Ridge and saw “a large arm of the sea or some sort of harbor within the mountains.” Although his intention was to find Monterey Bay, his expedition instead came across San Francisco Bay. Golden Gate National Recreational Area commemorates this moment in history at the Portola Site Acquisition Monument, located within the San Francisco Bay Discovery Site. In 1968, the National Park Service erected a small Serpentine rock at Sweeney Ridge where Portola and Sergeant Juan Ortega first glimpsed the breathtaking sight of San Francisco Bay, one of the world’s greatest harbors and the finest on the Pacific Coast. The San Francisco Bay Discovery Site is a National Historic Landmark.

Following Portola’s expedition and recognizing the value of the bay, the Spanish settled the San Francisco area in 1776. In that year, under the direction of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, they built the Presidio of San Francisco, a military garrison, to fortify the bay’s entrance and keep an eye on foreign fleets as they entered and exited the bay. Today, just to the east of Pershing Square within the “Main Post” of the Presidio of San Francisco, is the site of the original Spanish Presidio; visitors will see a boulder by the sidewalk that approximates the northwest corner of the original Presidio. A few miles inland, the Spanish constructed the Mission San Francisco de Asís (now Mission Dolores); Mission Dolores is the oldest intact building in San Francisco and stands as a lasting testament to the legacy of Anza’s Expedition. Spanish troops were also responsible for monitoring the American Indians who lived near the Presidio.

The Guajome Ranchhouse near Vista, California is a remarkably intact example of a large Spanish Colonial style ranch complex. Built in 1852-1853, the large, one-story adobe hacienda with a double courtyard occupies land that was once part of the Spanish San Luis Rey Mission. What makes Rancho Guajome so unusual is that not only the main house but service buildings are still standing-- including the jail, blacksmith shop, horse stalls, carriage house, harness room, family chapel, servants' house, barns and sheds.

The Luiseno Indians first inhabited this region. In 1798, the Spanish founded Mission San Luis Rey De Francia. The Indians lived in a “rancheria” associated with the mission. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1822, Mexican Governor of California, Jose Maria Echeandia, initiated the secularization of all California missions in 1826. Secularization became official under Governor Jose Figueroa in 1834, and by 1836, the first Mexican land grant, Rancho Guajome, was carved from the area. Ownership of the land passed from owner to owner until Cave Johnson Couts and Ysidora Bandini received it as a wedding present.

Cave Johnson Couts, originally from Springfield, Tennessee, moved to California in 1849 to serve as a dragoon with the U.S. Army, which sent him to California to aid in the establishment of the U.S. and Mexican border. Couts later was elected a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention and for many years served his community in a number of official positions. He met and married Ysidora Bandini in California in 1851.

With this marriage, Couts received the 2,219.4 acre tract of land, Rancho Guajome. Just two years after acquiring the land, the couple began constructing their home on the property. Couts recruited 300 Indians to build the 7,680 square foot house. Two years later Couts, his wife, and their two children moved into their residence. Eventually, Ysidora gave birth to eight more children in the house.

Couts found prosperity as a Southern California rancher, raising cattle and horses. The “cattle boom” began in 1849 because of the Gold Rush and the forty-niners’ massive demand for beef. The market for local cattle declined in 1857 as large imports of New Mexico sheep and Eastern cattle increased and other setbacks ensued. To overcome these setbacks, Couts added sheep to his cattle and horses, and planted orange groves and vineyards at the ranch. Couts was one of the first ranchers to plant orange trees, and eventually developed orchards with a wide variety of fruits and nuts. He established an adequate water supply for his crops by converting a frog pond into a network of basins and streams of running water. The name Guajome comes from the Luiseno word “wakhavumi,” meaning frog pond. Couts is remembered for his early recognition of the natural agricultural and horticultural advantages of the region.

Couts acquired vast acreage for investment and for grazing land for his prized Spanish Merino sheep eventually controlling almost 20,000 acres at the time of his death in 1874 at the age of 53. After his death, Ysidora managed the operations of the ranch and welcomed guests until her death in 1897. Rancho Guajome remained in the Couts family until 1943. In 1973, the County of San Diego, Department of Parks and Recreation acquired 566 acres of the Rancho Guajome restoring the historic adobe in the 1990s and opening the 22 room house and the grounds to the public.

The adobe hacienda has an inner and outer courtyard plan. The thick-walled, red-tile roofed main house is built around the four sides of a rectangle, forming a large inner patio with a fountain in the center. The west wing of the ranch house contains the pantry, bakery, kitchen, and dining room, while the center of the house has the family living room. The east and north wings are both occupied by numerous bedrooms with a veranda extending across the entire exterior façade of the south portion. A gate on the north side of the house leads to the outer courtyard. This double courtyard plan provided a ready means of defense in the event of an Indian attack. Although most of the original adobe remains intact, the house has seen some changes since its construction in 1852-1853. Nearby are a lake and small stream, natural rock outcroppings, gently rolling hills, and a distinctive row of casurina trees.

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The John Muir National Historic Site preserves the house John Muir resided in for the last 24 years of his life, from 1880 to 1914. During this period, Muir was responsible for some of the most influential policies and writings on national conservation ever developed in the United States. In 1892, while living on the site, he also founded the Sierra Club, a renowned environmental organization still in existence today. The historic site preserves two separate houses and Muir’s approximately 9-acre fruit orchard. Although the site’s significance and interpretation generally focus on John Muir and his outstanding contributions, the property is an important reflection of the nation’s Latino heritage. The earliest house on the site, known as the Martínez Adobe, is a simple, two-story building that is one of the earliest examples of adobe construction in Contra Costa County. Built around 1849, the adobe is an intact example of Spanish-influenced Californian architecture from this period. The land on which the John Muir Historic Site sits today was once part of a 17,700-acre Mexican land grant.

Internationally recognized as one of the most important early leaders in the Conservation Movement in the United States, John Muir was instrumental in the creation of national parks and national forests, and the scientific management of Federal forests between 1889 and 1914. During that time, Muir was highly influential in the establishment and expansion of some of the nation’s greatest national parks and sites, including Yosemite, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, and Mt. Rainier National Parks. Named one of the fathers of the entire National Park System, Muir served as a conservation advisor to Presidents Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.

The history of the Muir site dates to the late 1700s when California was under Spanish rule and heavily colonized. The Spanish established many mission churches in order to bring Catholic teachings to the native people, and also built presidios (large military forts) nearby to protect the churches. Don Ygnacio Martínez was a young Spanish officer serving at both the San Diego and Santa Barbara presidios from 1788 to 1819. In 1819, he became the commandante of the important presidio at San Francisco, a position he held until 1831, when he retired.

While he served at San Francisco, Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, and California thus became a part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, large land grants encouraged citizens to move into unpopulated areas and establish ranches. Martínez took advantage of this opportunity in 1824, receiving a land grant for an area known as Rancho El Pinole, which encompassed a 17,700-acre parcel in what is today Contra Costa County. When he retired from the military and moved his family to the ranch, they were among the area’s very first residents. Martínez began serving as the third mayor of San Francisco in 1837, and had the present City of Martínez, California named in his honor.

When Don Ygnacio Martínez died in 1848, he divided his land among his children. His son, Don Vicente Martínez, claimed the land on which the John Muir National Historic Site sits today. Between 1848 and 1849, Don Vicente built what became known as the Martínez Adobe, a two-story ranch house typical of mid-19th century Californian architecture. The main walls of the house are of thick adobe brick, the foundations of rough-cut stone. An internal adobe wall divides each floor into two rooms. The eastern (front) and southern sides of the house have wooden wraparound porches at each level. Sawn wood shingles of either cedar or redwood originally covered the roof. The Martínez Adobe was the first of its kind in the county.

After constructing the adobe, Don Ygnacio Martínez only lived in the house for four years before selling it in 1853. The house then passed through a series of owners before Doctor John Strentzel bought it in 1874. Strentzel became John Muir’s father-in-law in 1880, when Muir married Louie Strentzel.

Dr. Strentzel was a well-regarded horticulturalist and fruit rancher in California during the mid-1800s and transformed what was once the Martínez land into a large orchard. He used the adobe itself as both an agricultural storehouse and a residence for his ranch overseers. Possibly Strentzel lived in the adobe for a brief period while awaiting the completion of his own mansion nearby. Contrary to legend, John Muir and his wife Louie never lived in the Martínez Adobe.

In 1882, Dr. Strentzel moved into his newly constructed house, an Italianate-style Victorian mansion that overlooked the Martínez Adobe. His house was one of the grandest and most expensive in the area at the time, costing $20,000 to build. The 10,000-square-foot house contains 17 rooms, Douglas fir flooring, black walnut railings, Italian marble fireplaces, and, in 1884, was the first house in the area to have phone service installed. When Dr. Strentzel died in 1890, John and Louie Muir moved into the mansion.

During the next two decades, John Muir played a vital role in the establishment of environmental policy in United States while living and often working on the site. The couple resided in the mansion for the remainder of their lives until Louie passed away in 1905 and John in 1914. Their daughter Wanda resided in the Martínez Adobe until 1915.

In the 1960s, concerned citizens organized to save the Strentzel/Muir Mansion, the Martínez Adobe, and the surrounding land from certain destruction and urban redevelopment. In 1964, with the establishment of the John Muir National Historic Site, the National Park Service purchased the property. In 1993, another purchase added an additional 326 contiguous acres of Muir’s original land that is protected, open space.

While slightly altered over time, both the Martínez Adobe and the John Muir House (former Strentzel Mansion) are still very significant historic properties that are open to the public. The mansion interior has period furniture, including John Muir’s original writing desk on which he drafted some of his most important works. Guided tours are available daily and a visitor center helps orient guests to the site. A 20 minute biographical film of Muir’s life, “A Glorious Journey,” is available to watch on site.

In San Juan Bautista, the José Castro House witnessed nearly a decade of cultural and political change between its construction in 1839 and the annexation of California by the United States in 1848. This was a time of demographic and political transition in California, as Mexicans, Americans, and both Latino and Anglo Californians fought for control of the Mexican province. Ownership of the José Castro House, a National Historic Landmark, passed from the Californio Castro family to the Irish American Breen family in 1848. Today, the José Castro House is part of the San Juan Bautista Plaza Historic District where the San Juan Bautista State Historical Park offers visitors a chance to explore life during the eras of Spanish, Mexican, and early American California.

General José Antonio Castro was a politician and military leader during the 1830s and 1840s in Alta California, then a Mexican province. As a young man, Castro was a vocal and active supporter of Californian self-rule and semi-independence from Mexico. At various times over the course of his life, Castro served as governor and general of both Alta and Baja California. His father, José Tibúrcio Castro, was the administrator of the secularized San Juan Bautista Mission and, under his authority, the California government distributed mission land to Castro relatives and friends. The elder Castro gave his son land on the San Juan Bautista Plaza, and General Castro finished building his adobe house there in 1841. Castro used the house as a residence for his secretary and as an administrative base for his military operations. During the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846 and U.S.-Mexican War that followed, Castro was the commanding general of Alta California. This province included the present day American States of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. After the United States annexed Alta California at the close of the war with Mexico, the Mexican government appointed Castro as governor of Baja California in the south.

After the U.S.-Mexican War, José Castro gave his house in San Juan Bautista to an Irish American immigrant, Patrick Breen. Breen and his family were surviving members of the Donner Party. They arrived at San Juan Bautista in February 1848, nearly a year after completing their tragic journey through the Sierra Nevada. The Breens were the first English-speaking Americans to settle in the town, and Castro allowed them to live at his house until they could afford to buy it from him. One of Patrick Breen’s teenage sons made a fortune as a gold miner and the family used the money to purchase the adobe house from Castro in 1854. The Breen family established a working ranch and an inn at the plaza. Guests at the inn included gold rush prospectors and Ramona (1884) author Helen Hunt Jackson, who began writing her famous novel about Spanish California during her stay in San Juan Bautista in the early 1880s. The Breen family owned the house until 1935, when the State of California acquired the property and it became part of the San Juan Bautista State Historical Park.

The José Castro House, also known as the Castro-Breen Adobe, is a two-story Monterey-colonial style adobe, with a wood frame and second story porch. The Monterey style of architecture originated in California and blended Spanish colonial architecture with New England style. Massachusetts native Thomas Larkin built the first known Monterey house in 1835 in Monterey, California. The wood frame allows for more windows than regular adobe would have and can support a second floor. In the Monterey style, the porch and gable roof protect the adobe bricks and outer shell, made of mud, from water damage. The pane glass windows beside the front door of the José Castro House are not typical of Monterey architecture and reflect the influence of Greek Revival architecture, which was also popular during the 19th century. Today, the José Castro House property includes a half-acre orchard and garden.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish established a chain of 21 missions throughout California. The Spanish founded Mission San Juan Bautista as the 15th mission in 1797. They constructed the mission in the San Juan Valley, a location selected because it was only a day’s walk between Mission San Carolos Barromeo de Carmel and Mission Santa Clara. While the Spanish lost control of California and its missions to Mexico in 1821, the settlement of San Juan Bautista continued to grow throughout the 19th century. One of the oldest buildings in San Juan Bautista’s Third Street Historic District and a National Historic Landmark in its own right is the Juan de Anza House or Casa Juan de Anza Adobe that dates from 1834 during the period of Mexican control.

Constructed on the San Andreas earthquake fault line, the newly founded Mission San Juan Bautista converted local Mutsun Indians to Catholicism. For thousands of years, the Mutsun Indians lived in the San Juan Valley as a hunter and gatherer society residing in dome-shaped willow reed and grass huts. Their lives dramatically changed with the establishment of Mission San Juan Bautista. The mission’s padres used Mutson labor and recruited Yokuts and Miwok people to construct the mission’s buildings, raise crops, and care for livestock. Mission San Juan Bautista prospered, however, its role as a Spanish mission would change in the coming years.

In 1821, when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, California and its missions became a part of Mexico, which secularized all of the missions and converted church property to private property. The Mexicans secularized Mission San Juan Bautista and converted the settlement into a town in 1835. Mexico’s civil administrator for the area, Jose Tiburcio Castro, oversaw the seizure, division, and sale of mission property to Mexican residents. By 1840, San Juan Bautista had about 50 Mexican residents and by 1845, the Mexican population had increased to 75. Constructed during this period of Mexican control, Casa Juan de Anza Adobe is one of the oldest buildings in San Juan Bautista’s Third Street Historic District.

The Anza House, Casa Juan de Anza Adobe, is an example of a Spanish Colonial style dwelling built during the Mexican era of California’s history. Practiced throughout what are today the States of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, the Spanish Colonial style was extremely popular because the adobe material used to construct these buildings was readily available and inexpensive. Most commonly built between 1600 and 1840, Spanish Colonial dwellings generally have sun-dried adobe brick exterior walls covered with a whitewashed lime plaster coating that helped protect them from the regional weather extremes. The thick adobe walls helped to insulate the houses -- keeping them cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The typical Spanish Colonial dwellings throughout this region were one-story and had a basic rectangular shape.

Constructed in 1834 as the Anza family residence, the Casa Juan de Anza Adobe (or Anza House) was originally a one-story, rectangular two-room adobe house covered with whitewashed plaster. A farmer or merchant looking to make additional income likely built the house. In the 1850s, the adobe house was “Americanized” and enlarged, and windows with wooden or metal bars were added.

By 1870, San Juan Bautista had nearly 1,500 residents. Around this same time, the new owner of the Anza House, Francisco Bravo, modified the house yet again, turning it into a cantina that would serve some of the town’s residents. This began the Anza House’s use as a commercial building. Other than a brief period when Jake Beutler and subsequently his stepson, Fred Beck, lived in the house, the building remained in commercial use and housed the first antique store in San Juan Bautista’s Third Street Commercial District beginning in 1933. The same family operated the antique shop there for 60 years.

Today, at the Casa Juan de Anza Adobe in San Juan Bautista’s Third Street Historic District and San Juan Bautista’s State Historic Park visitors can step back in time and experience an old-fashioned mission town that retains much of its historic rural character. A series of “bypasses,” first when the railroad bypassed the town in 1870 and then when it was bypassed for the position of county seat by nearby Hollister, CA, led to economic ups and downs for San Juan Bautista. These “bypasses” helped preserve the town’s original character, because the town did not develop outside of its original town limits. This makes San Juan Bautista distinctive among California’s mission towns. Many of the mission communities eventually grew into large cities such as San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. Walking along the streets of San Juan Bautista and viewing the Casa Juan de Anza Adobe, visitors to this old mission town can readily experience the Spanish and Mexican heritage of the area.

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The Spanish established Franciscan Catholic missions throughout California during the 18th and early 19th centuries to assist in colonizing the Pacific coast region and to spread their Christian faith to local American Indian tribes. The Spanish not only introduced a new religion to the native peoples, they brought new livestock, fruit, vegetables, farming techniques, and social practices to the area as well. The missions, which were not just churches, but entire settlements, completely changed life in California. Today, visitors can see and experience many of these historic missions throughout California. The La Purísima Mission, a National Historic Landmark, is considered the most fully restored of these Spanish missions and today is a State park.

Father Presidente Fermin de Lasuén founded Misión La Purísima Concepción De María Santísima (Mission of the Immaculate Conception of Most Holy Mary) on December 8, 1787. The first padres assigned to La Purísima were Father Vincente Fuster and Father Joseph Arroita. The two padres organized the construction of temporary buildings at La Purísima and translated the mass and catechism instruction into the native tongue of the local Chumash Indians. Since the mission was more than just a church, construction began on living quarters, workshops, and storage and water systems. As the Spanish baptized the Chumash Indians, they taught them skills that enabled the Indians to help in the development of the mission.

A contemporary report provides some insights into the daily life of the Chumash Indian neophytes at the mission. In 1800, Father Horra, who was formerly at Mission San Miguel, accused the La Purísima Mission fathers of mistreating the Chumash Indians. Governor Borcia, the Spanish governor at the time, investigated, and the padres at La Purísima reported about the lives of the neophytes. They said the neophytes received three meals a day, had permission to gather their own wild foods, and had clothing that was expected to last one year. They lived in their native tule houses for it was not possible to construct permanent houses for them. The Spanish required their labor for no more than five hours per day, taught the Indians how to deal with the soldiers and other people outside of the mission, and punished them if they left the mission without permission. Ultimately, Spanish officials declared the charges against the missionaries unfounded. This report is only from the padres’ view of Indian life at the mission.

In the developmental years of the mission, the padres received help from the other missions in the form of livestock, vegetables, and cuttings to establish orchards and vineyards. Supplies the missions could not produce, including bells, church furnishings, cloth, tools, and iron, arrived on supply ships from New Spain (Mexico) two times a year. In addition, the padres received a stipend and an allotment from the Pious Fund, a fund wealthy Spaniards supported with donations to help expand Spain’s empire.

The mission grew and prospered, and in a report dated December 31, 1798, La Purísima claimed that the mission’s primitive church did not have enough space for its 920 inhabitants. A new, larger, and permanent adobe church was constructed between 1801 and 1803 to accommodate the mission’s growing population (the doorway of this building still stands at the original mission site, which the City of Lompoc now owns).

La Purísima expanded to include several permanent large and small adobe buildings and had nearly 1,500 neophytes. The mission prospered under Father Mariano Payeras, who arrived in 1804. La Purísima began producing soap, candles, wool, leather, and other leading commodities to trade. The padres also hired out the neophytes to local ranchos as an additional source of income for the mission. At the height of its prosperity, however, La Purísima faced a series of setbacks. Between 1804 and 1807, smallpox and measles struck and nearly 500 Chumash Indians died. Then, on December 21, 1812, life at La Purísima changed suddenly when a severe earthquake, followed by torrential rains, damaged all of the buildings at La Purísima beyond repair. With their unprotected adobe bricks, the damaged buildings melted back into mud.

Father Payeras requested and was granted permission to rebuild the mission four miles northwest in a small canyon closer to the El Camino Real, California’s main travel route. The padres established La Purísima in its new location on April 23, 1813. Using materials salvaged from the buildings destroyed by the earthquake, construction began immediately. The new site departed from the traditional layout of the California missions, which included a settlement arranged around four sides with an open square. The new mission was constructed in a straight line at the base of a long hill. Completed within 10 years, La Purísima’s new buildings included the padres’ residence, storehouses, workshops, quarters for the soldiers, the mission church, the Indian infirmaries and dormitory, the blacksmith’s quarters, a pottery shop, and the padres’ private kitchen. These buildings are part of the reconstructed La Purísima Mission State Park today.

In just a few short years, Father Payeras turned La Purísima into a thriving mission once again. About 1,000 Chumash Indian neophytes lived on mission lands. The mission became a school and training center for its inhabitants and a great ranching enterprise. While thousands of heads of livestock roamed the hills, the padres developed shops for weaving, pottery, leatherwork, and other crafts. In 1815, the Catholic Church recognized Father Payeras for his talents and outstanding achievements and appointed him the presidente of the California missions. Father Payeras decided to remain at La Purísima during his time as presidente instead of moving to the Carmel Mission, which had been the standard practice at the time. In 1819, he received the appointment of commissary prefect, the highest rank among California Franciscans. Father Payeras died on April 28, 1823 and lies buried under the altar of La Purísima Mission.

Even though Father Payeras was a strong leader, La Purísima could not deny the turmoil that was unfolding throughout the region. By 1811, after the Hidalgo Rebellion in New Spain (which was the beginning of Mexico’s War for independence from Spain), supplies and money stopped coming to the missions. Spanish governors still clung to old Spanish policy and would not let the missions trade with foreign merchants. This created supply shortages, which then led to black-market activity. Tensions grew between the soldiers, who were now dependent upon the mission, and the mission people. The soldiers took their frustrations out on the Indian neophytes.

By 1824, the increasing conflict between the soldiers and the Indians reached a breaking point. After hearing news that soldiers at Santa Inez flogged a La Purísima neophyte, the neophytes took control of the mission’s grounds. Father Ordaz and the soldiers and their families went to Mission Santa Inez, while Father Rodriguez was still able to come and go from La Purísima as he pleased. About a month after the rebellion began, 109 soldiers from the presidio at Monterey arrived to regain control of the mission. A violent fight that lasted only two and half hours left 16 Indians dead and one soldier and two others wounded. Seven Indians suffered execution for their involvement in the rebellion and 12 more punishment to hard labor.

La Purísima Mission never fully recovered after the rebellion, and by 1834, the Mexican officials enforced the order to secularize California’s missions. A civil administrator managed the grounds until Juan Temple of Los Angeles purchased La Purísima Mission for $1,000 in 1845. Ownership of La Purísima Mission subsequently changed hands multiple times until 1933, when its new owner, Union Oil Company, recognized the historic value of the site and donated it to the State of California.

According to Kurt Baer’s Architecture of the California Missions, in 1935, “after years of total neglect, vandalism and despoliation, the mission buildings were not much more than heaps of rubbish. Yet, diligent and patient examination of records and photographs, interviews with early settlers, and archeologists and structural study has made possible the almost complete restoration of the compound as it existed before secularization. Where details of the original were lacking, such as wood carving, in colors, and furnishings, extant examples from other missions, were copied. Even the adobes and the burned bricks were made in the original manner." In the 1930s, through the combined efforts of the County of Santa Barbara, the State of California, the National Park Service, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, the buildings and grounds were reconstructed and restored and furnished to their 1820 appearance.

Today, visitors to La Purísima Mission State Historic Park will see 10 of the original buildings fully reconstructed, restored and furnished, including the church, shops, living quarters, and blacksmith shop. The park's buildings, mission gardens, livestock, living history events, and visitor center provides visitors with a glimpse into what life was like on a California mission during the 1820s.

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The Larkin House, a National Historic Landmark, is a two-story mud adobe brick home built during Monterey’s Mexican period by Thomas O. Larkin, a New England Yankee merchant who was highly successful and influential in early California politics. Thomas O. Larkin (1802-1858), financier, confidant of California officials, and United States Consul to Mexican California, not only exerted great influence on the political history of California, he also influenced the development of Californian adobe buildings. In the 1830s, the Larkin House became the prototype of Monterey Colonial architecture. Monterey Colonial buildings mix New England and Southwestern building techniques. They are constructed with wooden frames and mud bricks to make a leaner, sturdier adobe buildings than ones made primarily from mud and straw. The greater stability of Monterey buildings--compared to single-story adobes--allows for a large second-story and long covered porch. The covered second story porch also protected the adobe façade and walls of the house from water damage. By adapting an east coast building form to available California materials, adobe and redwood, and to California architectural preferences, Larkin created a style that synthesized elements of two very different cultures, that of the Spanish and Mexican colonists and of the Americans moving into California.

Born in Massachusetts in 1802, Larkin spent the first decades of his life pursuing various business ventures along the east coast of the United States. After attempting several businesses and having little success, Larkin decided to join his half-brother, John B.R. Cooper, in Yerba Buena (original name of San Francisco), California. Larkin sailed from Boston to Monterey in 1831 aboard the ship Newcastle. On board, he met Rachel Hobson Holmes, also from Massachusetts, who became his wife in 1833. Once in California, Larkin worked as a clerk in his half-brother’s business for about a year until he had enough money to go into business for himself.

Larkin quickly became a leading and affluent citizen in Monterey, developing an important commercial and trading business along the coast. As the most successful merchant in Mexican California, Larkin exported and imported a variety of goods selling items such as cloth, clothing, furniture, china goods, crockery, farming implements, sugar, and rice. He opened his first store in Monterey in 1834, and in the same year began construction on his first house.

The building was to serve as both a home and a store. Larkin followed a traditional Massachusetts model as the basis for the design but had to adapt this model to construction materials that were available. When he could not obtain enough redwood locally to construct a building entirely of wood, Larkin incorporated local adobe building techniques into his design. By blending the architectural styles, Larkin was able to create a building with a lighter shell of adobe bricks. This lighter shell made it easier to construct structural openings (windows, doors, etc.) than had previously been possible in traditional Spanish and Mexican adobe buildings where the adobe material predominated.

As one of the first two-story houses in Monterey and likely the first home in California to have an interior chimney/fireplace, the Larkin House marks a turning point in the development of California adobe buildings. The distinctive broad roof that overhangs the second floor windows and the seond story balcony are stylish as well as practical and became the standard for adobe buildings of the period. Also, Larkin made the first floor rooms in the house interconnecting, which was different from the Spanish-Mexican adobes where rooms generally opened only out onto a patio. On the second floor, Larkin followed the traditional adobe floor plan of providing access to the rooms only from the outside. Widely imitated throughout Monterey and California, the Larkin House represented a cultural middle ground where the blending and adaptation of cultural norms created something entirely new.

Larkin not only influenced the development of early California adobe buildings, he was also a key figure in the early political history of California. Because of his knowledge and prominent position in the Californian community, Larkin in 1844 received an appointment as the first (and what turned out to be the last) U.S. Consul to Alta California under Mexican rule. His house became a gathering place for Americans, as well as the governmental headquarters and the center of the social life of Monterey. Monterey was the Mexican capital of California from 1826 until the American occupation in 1847.

The story of Las Flores Adobe is a common tale in California history. The land on which this National Historic Landmark sits was once part of a Spanish mission, then part of a private Mexican ranch a member of the elite owned, and then incorporated into a smaller American ranch after the U.S.-Mexican War. Built in 1868, Las Flores Adobe today is a restored Monterey Colonial on the grounds of the United States Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.

After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the old Spanish missions became secularized administrative districts run by government officials. The Mexican government split these districts up into large ranches and granted the land to prominent men, marking the beginning of the rancho era in Mexican history. California, which was a Mexican province between 1821 and 1848, secularized its missions during the 1830s. Pío Pico, a member of the Alta California elite and the last Mexican governor of California, obtained Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores by grant of the Mexican government in 1841. This land grant was for 133,441 acres north of the San Luis Rey de Francia Mission and included the future site of Las Flores Adobe.

Pico sold Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores to his brother-in-law, John “Don Juan” Forster in 1864. A native of Liverpool, England, Forster arrived in California as a teenager and worked to become a successful businessman. He adopted California culture, the Spanish language, and Mexican citizenship, and converted to Catholicism. Through his business dealings, Forster formed connections to the Californio ruling class that his marriage in 1837 to Pico’s sister, Ysidora, strengthened. The Forsters had three sons who lived to adulthood. The family resided in the San Juan Capistrano Mission, where they ran as a successful horse and cattle ranch, until President Lincoln returned the mission to the Catholic Church. After Forster bought the large Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores from Pico, he gave the Las Flores ranch to his son, Marco Forster, as a wedding present. Juan Forster was an English immigrant who integrated into Californian society in the 19th century.

Marco Forster built Las Flores Adobe as a home for his own family in 1868, and they lived there for 14 years. After Juan Forster died in 1882, his sons sold Las Flores Adobe as part of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores to Richard O’Neill and James L. Flood. In 1888, the new owners hired the Magee family to manage the ranch. The U.S. government acquired the ranch land in 1841 and established Camp Pendleton there as a training camp for marines. The government allowed the Magees to continue occupying Las Flores Adobe, and the family lived at the ranch house until the last surviving member passed away in 1967. With permission from the government, the Orange County Boy Scouts of America used 46 acres at and around Las Flores Adobe as a campground between 1974 and 2007. The camp closed after Camp Pendleton restored Las Flores Adobe in the early 2000s.

Las Flores Adobe is a u-shaped building with three connected sections that draws from Monterey Colonial and Hacienda architectural styles. The main house is a two-story rectangular adobe with a covered porch that wraps around the front and sides. A long single-story section connects the main house to the carriage house. Together, these three sections hug a central open area once bounded by a fence. The main house is a prime example of Monterey Colonial architecture, which was popular in California between the 1830s and 1860s.

The first Monterey house is attributed to American Thomas O. Larkin, who immigrated to California in 1832 and settled in Monterey, California. Monterey Colonial buildings mix New England and Southwestern building techniques. They are constructed with wooden frames and mud bricks to make a leaner, sturdier adobe buildings than ones made primarily from mud and straw. The greater stability of Monterey buildings--compared to single-story adobes--allows for a large second-story and long covered porch. The covered second story porch also protected the adobe façade and walls of the house from water damage. Las Flores Adobe contains all of these features and is one of a small number of surviving 19th-century Monterey Colonial style residences. Marcos Forster and his family lived in Las Flores Adobe for 14 years.

After the last Magee passed away, Las Flores Adobe, left empty, fell into disrepair. Camp Pendleton launched an historic resources program at the turn of the 21st century to evaluate and fund the needs of Las Flores Adobe and the base’s other cultural sites. A partnership between the National Park Service, the California Office of Historic Preservation, University of Vermont, U.S. Marine Corps, and private firms formed to save Las Flores Adobe and restore or replace many of its significant features. As the result of this partnership, preservationists restored Las Flores Adobe to its former glory and restored much of its Monterey colonial architecture. The roof of the main house was partially replaced and the wooden second-story balcony rebuilt. The wood and adobe façade was repaired, plastered, and painted. The house frame was also fitted with modern features that will help stabilize the building during earthquakes, which are common in the region and damaged the house in the years prior to the stabilization project.

The Camp Pendleton Historical Association manages the base’s cultural resources, including other historic properties near Las Flores Adobe. About 200 yards west of Las Flores Adobe is Las Flores Asistencia. Constructed in 1817, this adobe ruin is where Catholic priests and other travelers rested while traveling between the San Luis Rey de Francia and San Juan Capistrano missions. The historic Santa Margarita Ranch House, which was Pio Pico’s home, was restored at the same time as Las Flores Adobe and can be toured by appointment. Along with these sites, Camp Pendleton uses the stable and restored Las Flores Adobe for heritage events, where visitors can encounter the old California of Dons Pico and Forster.

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Spanish colonists settled in California in the 18th century and ran large ranches on land given to them by the Spanish crown. In southern California, a Spanish soldier received a large land grant in 1774 that stretched across present-day Los Angeles and Orange counties. A large portion of this grant became Los Cerritos Ranch, now the City of Long Beach. In the mid-19th century, an American who became a Mexican citizen acquired the ranch and built the Los Cerritos Ranch House, a National Historic Landmark. Constructed in 1844, the restored Los Cerritos Ranch House is a grand example of mixed Monterey Colonial and hacienda styles of architecture applied to a traditional Spanish-Mexican colonial ranch house.

Corporal Jose Manuel Nieto received a royal grant in 1784 of 300,000 acres between the Santa Ana and San Gabriel rivers. Nieto, a Spaniard of African and European descent, served Spain in the years the empire pushed to colonize California, and Spain rewarded him for his work with the grant. After Nieto passed away in 1804, his wife and children inherited the large Nieto ranch and divided it amongst themselves. The eldest Nieto daughter, Manuela Nieto de Cota, received the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos. She was one of the few women who owned property in California during the Spanish colonial period. Until Manuela’s death, she and her husband, Guillermo Cota, lived in an adobe building on the ranch where they raised cattle.

In 1843, John “Don Juan” Temple acquired Rancho Los Cerritos from the Cota family. Temple was a prominent Los Angeles businessman who moved to California from Massachusetts in 1827, became a Mexican citizen, and married Rafaela Cota, Guillermo Cota’s cousin. A year after he took over the ranch, Temple built the Los Cerritos Ranch House to serve as his family’s summer home and ranch headquarters. During the politically and culturally tumultuous years of the late 1840s, the era of the U.S.-Mexican War and California’s Bear Flag Revolt, the Temple family remained politically neutral. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the close of the U.S.-Mexican War ceded California to the United States, Temple retained his rights to Rancho Los Cerritos and continued to raise cattle on the land.

In the early 1860s, a severe drought devastated California’s cattle population. After losing most of his herd, Temple sold Rancho Los Cerritos to the American firm, Flint, Bixby, & Co., in 1866. Jotham Bixby, who started his life in California as a miner, took over management of the ranch and moved his family into the Los Cerritos Ranch House. The Bixby family purchased the land from the firm in 1869 and used the ranch primarily for raising sheep. In the late 19th century, Americans flooded into the Long Beach area. The Bixbys began to sell off small parcels of Rancho Los Cerritos and rented out the main house.

In 1930, Jotham Bixby’s nephew, Llewellyn Bixby, purchased the 86-year-old Monterey Colonial ranch house from his family. The aged house was in poor condition at the time and Llewellyn took it upon himself to replace the roof, expand rooms, restore the crumbling façade, and install electricity and modern plumbing. In 1956, Llewellyn Bixby’s heirs sold the house and 4.5 surrounding acres to the City of Long Beach, which turned the property into a research library and history museum.

Associated with prominent early Californios and Americans, the Los Cerritos Ranch House is a nationally significant example of the Monterey Colonial and hacienda styles of architecture that were popular during California’s Spanish and Mexican eras. The Monterey Colonial Style originated in Monterey, California, with Thomas Larkin, a Massachusetts native who moved to California in the 1830s. Monterey Colonial houses blend New England and Spanish Colonial adobe building techniques.

In houses like Los Cerritos, a wooden frame supports adobe bricks and allows for a sturdy second story. The strength of the wooden frame also shrinks the width of traditional adobe walls. Placed on red brick foundations, the walls of the Los Cerritos Ranch House are three feet thick in the central section of the house and two feet thick in the wings. The brick came in ships that sailed around the Horn. A long, two-story veranda wraps around the front and both sides of the house, which is a common Monterey Colonial feature. The shingle roof extends over the second-story porch and protects the adobe materials from water damage. Los Cerritos Ranch House also incorporates elements of hacienda architectural design. The house is U-shaped and hugs a large courtyard garden that is enclosed by an adobe wall on the western end.

The Rancho Los Cerritos Historic Site today is a museum dedicated to local history. Managed by the City of Long Beach’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Marine, the historic site hosts public programs and events year-round, including its award-winning Adobe Days Revisited elementary school program. The on-site library and archive houses a public collection of books and artifacts that provide researchers with information about the history of the house and the region. The docent-led tours and the visitor center provide guests with information about California’s Spanish, Mexican, and early American eras and about American Indian history. The house also has gardens that visitors can enjoy.

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The Spanish established 21 Franciscan Catholic missions in a line throughout Alta California during the 18th and early 19th centuries to expand their empire, settle the Pacific Coast region, and convert local American Indian tribes to Catholicism. Many of these historic missions still stand throughout California for visitors to experience. Mission San Miguel Arcàngel was the 16th mission founded in the 21 mission chain, and is today a National Historic Landmark. A unique feature of this mission is that its interior wall murals, originally painted in the 1800s by Salinan Indians who converted to Catholicism, have never been retouched or repainted.

Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuén founded Mission San Miguel Arcàngel on July 25, 1797. The Spanish selected Mission San Miguel’s location along the Salinas River to ease travel between Mission San Antonio and Mission San Luis Obispo. In the mission system, missions were generally placed a day’s walk from one another. The mission’s grounds extended 18 miles to the north and south, 66 miles to the east and 35 miles to the west. Such large land grants were necessary for the mission to grow crops, plant vineyards, raise cattle and sheep, and graze horses and mules for trade and to sustain their community.

Mission San Miguel sat along the El Camino Real, which was the main overland route that connected Spanish missions, presidios, and pueblos in Alta California. The road ran right next to a large Salinan Indian village. The mission’s first padre, Father Buenaventura Sitjar, had a pre-existing relationship with the Salinan people having ministered to them for 25 years at Mission San Antonio. Father Sitjar spoke the Salinan people’s language and was able to baptize 15 Salinan children the day the mission was established. The founding of Mission San Miguel marked the beginning of a friendly relationship between the Salinan people and Spanish padres. Eventually, over 1,000 Salinan Indians would call the mission home.

In 1797, a temporary church and other buildings were built at Mission San Miguel. In 1806, a fire destroyed the church, the other mission buildings, and all the stored farm products. Planning and preparation for a new and larger church began immediately following the fire, while the rebuilding of the other mission buildings began at once. For the next 10 years, Salinan neophytes made nearly 36,000 roof tiles and adobe blocks that they stored in preparation for constructing the new church. The foundation for the new church was laid in 1816 and by 1818, the new church, with its six feet thick adobe walls and a long colonnade with multiple arches of varying shapes and sizes, was finished. Monterey’s Esteban Munras designed and had completed the interior murals with the help of the Salinan Indians by 1821. These never re-touched original murals make Mission San Miguel a special stop along the California Mission chain today.

Life at Mission San Miguel changed after Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. Due to the financial strain of maintaining the missions, the Mexican government began to secularize the mission system and convert church property to private property. In 1834, Mission San Miguel was one of the last missions to be secularized. By this time, only about 30 Salinan Indians remained at the mission and no Spanish padres. A Mexican administrator took control of Mission San Miguel.

In 1846, business partners Petronillio Rios, a retired Mexican military man, and William Reed, an Englishman who had a wife from Monterey, purchased the mission buildings. The Reeds lived in the mission until a brutal attack from three Irish sailors, who had deserted their ship, left 11 of the family members and household staff dead in their house. After the vicious murders of the Reed family and their staff, and because of the mission’s location as a stopping point for gold miners traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the mission’s buildings and grounds were converted for commercial use. At various times, the mission served as retail shops, a hotel, a saloon, and a dancehall.

President Buchanan returned Mission San Miguel to the Catholic Church in 1859. By 1878, the newly assigned resident padre, Father Philip Farrely, ran the mission and established a new parish. Fifty years later, in 1928, the mission was officially returned to the Franciscans. Under the direction of the Franciscans once again, the mission became a novitiate training school and a center for retreats and meetings. The mission is still an active parish and a novitiate training facility.

Today, a visitor to Mission San Miguel can see the beautifully restored and reconstructed mission buildings. The untouched interior murals provide a unique opportunity to view a piece of history and of old Spanish mission life in California.

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Founded in 1804, Mission Santa Inés was the 19th Spanish mission established in Alta California and today is one of the best preserved Spanish mission complexes in the United States. The site preserves an unrivaled combination of landscape setting, original buildings, collections of art and interior furnishings, water-related industrial structures, and archeological remains. The intact archeological remains of the two mission wings, a portion of the convento, and the Native American village are rare survivors that contain information on the critical period of resistance of native people against Spanish colonial power. Still an active parish, Mission Santa Inés plays an important role in understanding the history of Alta California and the cultural heritage of the area once controlled by both Spain and Mexico.

Father Estévan Tapís, president of the California mission chain, founded Mission Santa Inés. The site chosen for the mission was at a midway point between Mission Santa Barbara and Mission La Purísima Concepción. Its purpose was to relieve overcrowding at those two missions and to serve the Indians living east of the Coast Range.

Construction on Mission Santa Inés began in 1804 with one row of buildings. This wing contained the temporary church, a sacristy, the padres' quarters and the granary. The 30-inch thick walls were made of adobe and the roof consisted of poles covered by sticks laid side by side, and then by a layer of adobe soil that hardened, thus sealing out the weather. On September 17, 1804, Father Tápis officially dedicated the mission to Saint Agnes constructing a temporary brushwood shelter at which 200 Indians attended solemn High Mass. By the end of 1804, the baptismal register already contained the names of 112 Chumash converts of all ages.

An 1812 earthquake near Santa Barbara destroyed most of the original church, part of the division wall, and the bell tower. Many of California’s missions suffered damage, destruction, and even abandonment during this disaster. Santa Inés built a temporary church to sustain the mission er during its reconstruction. Despite the natural disaster, Mission Santa Inés reached its peak in 1816 with a population of 786 baptized Native Americans. Dedicated on July 4, 1817, the new church and bell tower still stand today.

The mission is also important as the place where the Chumash Revolt of 1824 started, one of the largest and most successful revolts of American Indian Catholic neophytes in the Spanish West that reflected indigenous resistance to European colonization. After Mexican Independence from Spain in 1821, life at the California missions changed. The Chumash were forced to work for the Mexican army, receiving payment in IOUs, which caused mounting frustration. On February of 1824, the beating of a Chumash by a Santa Inés soldier sparked an armed revolt that rapidly spread. Fires destroyed many Santa Inés buildings and smoke damaged paintings and decorations in the sanctuary. The large insurrection spread outside of Santa Inés to other missions in Alta California. After the restoration of peace and the punishing of the instigators of the rebellion, baptisms resumed, but the heyday of Santa Inés was over.

Another consequence of Mexico’s independence was secularization, which led to the decline of mission life. In 1834, the Mexican Assembly passed the Secularization Laws, which shifted responsibility for mission temporalities from the church to the government. The new laws confiscated the mission lands, produce, and animals and placed them under the administration of local Mexican ranch owners. The mission priests were allowed a small parcel of land for their use and to administer to the spiritual needs of the remaining neophytes. All priests had to take an oath of allegiance to the Mexican government, and those who remained loyal to Spain were deported to Spain. The mission churches became parish churches administering to the spiritual needs of the growing settler population. Ultimately, secularization caused the departure of the Spanish missionaries and most of the Chumash neophytes, and the eventual decline of Mission Santa Inés.

As the population at Mission Santa Inés dwindled, the Bishop of Alta California, Francisco Garcia Diego, established Santa Inés as a learning institution opening the College of Our Lady of Refuge, the first seminary in California, at Santa Inés in 1843. The seminary provided for the education of the young men of the landowners. The school eventually was moved outside of Santa Inés and was renamed College Ranch because it provided education for the sons of local ranchers. The college was abandoned by 1881.

Restoration to Mission Santa Inés began in 1947 and is ongoing. When workmen removed the roof from part of the residence, they discovered the outline of several rooms above the arches that had been used during the mission era. The second story was added, making the mission look as it did before the earthquake of 1812. Extensive repairs were made to the roof of the church and residence, and sections of the south end of the building were completely remodeled. The 1817 bell tower was returned to its original design, as confirmed by artwork and photographs prior to its collapse in 1812. The Chapel of the Madonna was also created during this period and numerous restoration projects were initiated. A radiation heating system was installed in the church under the original restored tile floor to preserve the mission's priceless paintings and other artwork. The entire mission was painted and weatherproofed. Improved irrigation and drainage systems were installed for the various refurbished and landscaped gardens. In 1954, a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes was installed in a shrine next to the cemetery.

In August of 1989, the 18th annual Fiesta celebrated many years of hard work. Particularly important to the Fiesta was the reconstruction of 8 of the 19 arches that form the eastern façade of the building. This restoration recreated the appearance of the convento prior to secularization in 1834. The new portion of the convento building now houses a large parish hall complete with kitchen and two conference rooms. All are used by the parish as well as area groups for meetings. Inside the hall are several large paintings done by local artists depicting the various eras of mission life as well as the present life of the parish. Restoration work begun on the mission paintings in 1992 is ongoing.

Today, the Mission Santa Inés District consists of 15 buildings, structures, and sites that reflect the period between 1804 to 1855, when local Chumash lived in one of Spain's and then Mexico's primary colonizing institutions. Surviving historic buildings include the massive original adobe (mud brick) church and convento (priests' residence) wing. archeological remains of the original padres' (priests) residences, the Chumash village of both traditional and adobe dwellings, the soldiers' residence, the temporary church, and the ecclesiastical college of 1844-1868. The mission also has a largely intact water system with plaza and village lavanderias (washing areas), the site of the mission garden, and a complex of reservoirs and mills.

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Monterey served as the Spanish, then Mexican, capital of California between 1776 and 1848. A National Historic Landmark, the Monterey Old Town Historic District includes within its boundaries the Monterey State Historic Park. The district brings to life the Spanish Colonial, Mexican Colonial, and early American periods of California through its 19th century historic buildings. As a thriving port, Monterey became a bustling city as the social, economic, and political center of California. Self-guided and guided walking tours throughout the Monterey Old Historic District and the Monterey State Historic Park transport visitors back to early California and remind them of the historic Spanish and Mexican heritage that permeates the area.

By the late 1700s and early 1800s, Spain had extended its New World empire by colonizing the west coast of North America. The Spanish created permanent settlements in Alta California by constructing presidios (forts) and establishing missions throughout the region. On June 3, 1770, Captain Gaspar de Portola and Franciscan Father Junipero Serra founded the Presidio of Monterey and the Mission de San Carolos Borromeo de Monterey at Monterey Bay. As the second of the four presidios the Spanish established in California, the Presidio of Monterey provided settlers and the mission with protection, and served as the military and government headquarters. The second in what would become a 21 mission chain in California, Mission de San Carolos Borromeo de Monterey moved to nearby Carmel in 1771, because it offered a better agricultural and political environment for the growing mission. The presidio remained in Monterey and flourished as the seat of government.

Labor activist César Chávez established the headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) at Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz in the Tehachapi Mountains of Kern County, California in 1972. “Our Lady, Queen of Peace” in English, the compound is commonly called La Paz. As the headquarters of the UFW, La Paz is of great historic siignficance for its role in the 20th century labor, civil rights, Chicano, and environmental movements, and for its association with Césario Estrada Chávez (1927–1993), the leader of the United Farmworkers of America, which became the voice of the poor and disenfranchised. The 187-acre property just north of Keene, California, contains 26 historic buildings and structures, as well as the César Chávez Memorial Garden and burial site. La Paz continues to serve the UFW and its related organizations, and its visitor center is open to the public. On October 8, 2012 President Barack Obama issued a proclamation establishing the La Paz property as the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument. The National Park Service will manage the site. On the same day, the Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Early development of the La Paz site began in 1913, when the Kern County Highway Department opened a rock quarry near Keene. The county government built four wood-frame buildings, a road, and water and sewer infrastructure. Two of the quarry buildings are still on the property, though they are moved from their original sites. In 1917, the county shut the quarry down and a year later, the California Bureau of Tuberculosis chose the property for a new sanatorium for TB patients, called Stony Brook Retreat. Over the next fifty years, Stony Brook built dormitories, hospitals, a schoolhouse for young patients, garages, storage sheds, administrative buildings, and new roads. By the time the sanatorium closed in 1967, the compound was prepared to accommodate California’s labor activists, and three years later the United Farm Workers, led by César Chávez, chose the property to establish the Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz Educational Retreat Center.

Born in 1927, César Chávez grew up under some of the worse economic conditions brought on by the Great Depression. Prior to the crash, his family owned and operated a grocery store, auto repair shop, and a pool hall at their homestead near Yuma, Arizona, but lost it all in the 1930s. After losing his land, Librado Chávez – César’s father – became a migrant worker whose family traveled with him, sometimes living out of their car. The Chávez family drew strength from their former status as landowners and their social ties in the face of low wages, racism, and unsafe working conditions. Librado was a member of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, and Chávez once said his family never hesitated to join their fellow workers in a strike. In 1944, Chávez enlisted in the U.S. military and served in the Navy for two years until his honorable discharge at the end of World War II.

The history of colonization on the California Coast spans three nations: Spain, independent Mexico, and eventually the United States. Perhaps nowhere is this seen so clearly as in Monterey, California’s original capital. The Old Custom House is a National Historic Landmark that stands as a reminder of the city’s Mexican heritage and of Mexico's political presence in the city during the mid-1800s. The landmark and its surrounding historic district are a living museum that interprets the rich early story of Monterey and the economic foundations of California.

Before the Spanish began to explore and colonize the region, the Ohlone populated the Monterey area. The coastal lands were flush with natural resources, fertile soil, and a temperate climate – all qualities that would later attract the Spaniards.

In 1542, Spanish explorer Juan Rodríquez Cabrillo was the first non-Native person to see the wide Monterey Bay in southern California, spotting it from a ship. In 1770, Captain Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan Father Junípero Serra established the Royal Presidio of Monterey and the San Carlos de Borromeo Mission – the city’s first permanent buildings. The presidio was soon serving as the seat of the Spanish government in the area. By 1776, Monterey became the capital of both Baja (lower) and Alta (upper) California.

Monterey thrived, mainly within the protective walls of the military presidio, until Argentinean revolutionary privateer, Hipólito Bouchard attacked the city in 1818. The conflict would be the only land and sea battle fought on the West Coast. Bouchard sacked the town leaving severe damage in his wake. Over the next decade Monterey remained the capital and slowly rebuilt. Residences and businesses moved beyond the presidio’s walls and the street pattern that is still visible in Monterey today began to develop.

The Custom House in Monterey emerged out of this new period of prosperity. In April of 1822, the city learned that Mexico had won its independence from Spanish rule the year before. California immediately pledged allegiance to the Mexican government. While Spain had prohibited international trade in its territories, the Mexican government opened up its borders and seaports to foreign trade. The purpose of the Custom House was to collect custom duties on foreign goods at the bay, California’s main point of entry.

Constructed in 1827 and perched on the wide bay at Monterey, the Old Custom House was the first government building in California and the earliest government building on the west coast. The building quickly became a critical part of trade and cargo sale during the Mexican Era. A wide variety of goods began to flow into California arriving on ships from American, British, and South American markets. A single vessel involved in California’s popular hide and tallow trade might owe $5,000 to $25,000 in duty fees on just one load of cargo. The collection of custom fees was California’s most important source of revenue during the 19th century.

The growing trade through Monterey launched the city into a new era of heightened prosperity. What had begun as a small presidio grew into a major cosmopolitan community and an attractive destination for American travelers. This growing American presence in 1842 led to greater interest by the United States government in the territory, and by 1844, the United States established an American consulate in Monterey.

Thomas O. Larkin, a New England merchant who came to California in April 1832, was the first and only United States Consul to Mexican-ruled California. When Larkin first moved to Monterey, he quickly became an affluent citizen and developed a successful trading business. Because of his knowledge and position, Secretary of State Buchanan appointed him as Consul. Larkin is considered to be a key player in the eventual annexation of California by the U.S. Larkin's home served as the consulate from 1844 to 1846 and is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Larkin altered and expanded the single-story Custom House, more than doubling its size. By 1846, the custom house had reached its present form and had two stories, a two story porch veranda, four large contiguous rooms, and a tiled hipped roof. At this same time, Mexico and the United States went to war with each other. Commodore John D. Sloat, commander of the U.S. Pacific squadron, arrived in Monterey during the “Bear Flag Revolt.” He raised the American flag over the Custom House and officially claimed California as U.S. territory.

The Old Custom House served as the American-operated custom house until 1868 and then became a private residence. By the early 1890s, the building was unoccupied and began to deteriorate. In 1900, it became one of California's earliest preservation projects. The Native Sons of the Golden West completed the original restoration efforts by 1917. In 1929, the building became the first California State Landmark. On January 1, 1930, the State Division of Beaches and Parks took it over and opened it to the public as a museum. In 1960, the Custom House was designated a National Historic Landmark and remains in use as a museum and visitor center.

When the population of San Diego de Alcala Mission grew during the late 18th century, so did its demand for water. The Spanish colonists solved the water shortage problem by building what is likely the first major colonial irrigation-engineering project on the Pacific Coast. Known today as Old Mission Dam or Padre Dam, this National Historic Landmark collected water near the head of Mission Gorge on the San Diego River, and its five-mile-long aqueduct provided the mission with water for American Indians and Spanish colonists. Though damaged by floods, earthquakes, and human activity, the dam's stonewall continues to hold water. This impressive colonial ruin is a public site that visitors can enjoy within San Diego’s Mission Trails Regional Park.

The early years of colonization in Spanish California depended on the mission system. As Spanish colonists settled Upper California during the 18th century, they founded a chain of Catholic missions along the coast. This mission chain stretched north from present day San Diego to San Francisco. As in other Spanish colonies, the Californian missionaries’ goals were to convert American Indians to Catholicism, control the culture, and administer Spanish law. The southernmost mission in the California chain was San Diego de Alcala. Founded by Franciscan Father Junípero Serra in 1769, San Diego de Alcala was the first of 21 Spanish missions the Spanish established in Upper California.

Father Serra’s mission system laid the foundation for a European society on the Pacific Coast that opened California to Spanish, Mexican and later Anglo settlement. Before he sailed to Mexico in 1749 to spread Catholicism in the colonies, Father Serra lived a quiet life as a scholar and professor of theology. In Mexico, he established himself as a mission superior and in the 1760s, Spain chose him to set up a large mission field in California. Though Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo claimed California for the Spanish Empire in 1542, Spain did not move to permanently settle the area until Serra’s time. Serra, who traveled with soldiers and priests, arrived in California in 1769 and quickly established the San Diego de Alcala Mission. He went on to set up eight more California missions before he died in Monterey, California in 1784.

At the turn of the 19th century, the mission fathers at San Diego de Alcala designed a dam on the San Diego River to supply their expanding community with water after it suffered a bad drought between 1800 and 1802. The mission’s Native American converts, who were from the Kumeyaay Nation, built the aqueduct and dam structures. The mission community started work on the dam after the drought in 1803 and completed construction of the larger irrigation system by 1817. When the laborers finished, the dam was 220 feet long, 12 feet high, and 13 feet thick.

The laborers used cobblestones, bricks, and cement for the dam wall, and they laid tiles on the bed of the long aqueduct to keep water from seeping into the sandy ground. The aqueduct, which ran from the dam to the mission, was two feet wide and five miles long. The community used the water to support its people, agriculture, and herds of cattle and sheep. After the secularization of the California missions in the 1830s, which followed Mexican independence, the dam fell into disrepair. By 1867, the dam and aqueduct were in ruins. In the 1870s, residents of the mission valley restored the dam. The historic dam still disrupts the flow of water in the San Diego River.

Between 1822 and the early 1850s, Mexico made over 800 land grants in California to Mexican citizens, as the government attempted to explore, populate and control the coastal lands of what is now the western United States. Rancho Petaluma Adobe served as the main headquarters and residential building for one of the largest land grants of this period, the Rancho Petaluma, a vast expanse of rolling hills and fertile grazing land for thousands of cattle. First established in 1834 as a land grant to successful military leader and colonial strategist, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Rancho Petaluma would expand to 66,000 acres over the next decade and become the largest, richest, and most important Mexican estate in Alta California.

Sitting on a knoll overlooking the property and completed in 1846, the Petaluma Adobe served as the heart of the rancho’s daily routines and economic success. A National Historic Landmark, the two-story, Monterey Colonial style building stands today as the largest adobe structure in the country. The adobe sits within the Petaluma State Historic Park and is part of the California Park System’s ongoing effort to highlight and celebrate Spanish and Mexican heritage within the State. Interpretive signage, audio tours, authentic furnishings and educational programs all offer visitors a chance to experience Petaluma Adobe and learn about its inspirational connection to Mexican colonialism in the early 19th century.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

Rancho Petaluma developed during the early 1820s, a time when the vast expanse of the Mexican-owned California Territory was sparsely populated and largely uncharted. Following Mexican independence from Spain, Mexican land grants encouraged citizens to move into California, and previously established Spanish mission holdings were divided up into smaller parcels for farming. In 1834, fearing infiltration from Russian colonists traveling south toward San Francisco, the Mexican Government ordered Lieutenant Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to establish a pueblo at Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay. Vallejo, who had already been instrumental in the founding of several California communities, received a promotion to Commandment General and Director of Colonization for the Northern Frontier. Mexican Governor Jose Figueroa granted Vallejo 44,000 acres, which was later expanded to 66,000, and instructed him to move his military command center in order to increase Mexican presence in the area north of the community.

Vallejo immediately began settling and improving the land that would become his Rancho Petaluma. Various corrals, outbuildings and houses dotted the landscape, and in 1836, construction began on the Petaluma Adobe, the main headquarters for the rancho. The two-story structure was a massive undertaking, however, and even after a decade, work was still being done on the building. Traditional adobe brick construction methods were used and all of the original lumber was locally cut redwood, almost entirely hand-hewn. At some point in the early 1840s, a sturdier, wooden roof for which thousands of shingles also had to be split by hand replaced the original thatched roof. American Indians performed most of the labor, mainly workers from the Coastal Miwok tribes who populated the area before European arrival.

Although it was standard practice to plaster and whitewash adobe bricks for protection from the elements, many of the walls at Petaluma never received this treatment. A deep, roofed veranda encircled the building on both levels and shielded the exterior from the weather. The majority of the adobe bricks have thus survived throughout the decades. Other original elements and hardware still exist within the building showcasing a fascinating mix of both pre- and post-industrial revolution technologies. Machine cut nails and cast iron hinges function side by side with wooden pegs and rawhide straps.

At its peak, Rancho Petaluma’s main income came from both hides and tallow (rendered cow fat). During the mid-1800s, cow hides were not only a valuable material for leather goods such as shoes, bags and saddles, but with the industrial revolution underway, hide belting was a necessary component of many machines. Tallow also had a variety of uses from candles and soaps to leather dressing and lubricants. The immense Petaluma Adobe housed the necessary facilities for the daily production of these products and general functioning of the ranch.

Across from the U-shaped, adobe building that stands today, another structure once existed, creating an interior courtyard surrounded on all four sides. During the heyday of Rancho Petaluma, this rectangular complex would have been alive with the sounds of hooves and hundreds of workers, the smells of hide processing and boiling fat, the whisper of looms weaving necessary blankets for the cold season, and heat pouring from the blacksmith’s anvil as he shaped and sharpened farm equipment. The Petaluma Adobe also housed storage space for grain and vegetable crops, as well as residential units on the second floor for both workers and guests of Vallejo.

Rancho Petaluma was the most prosperous rancho in northern California from 1834 until 1846, selling its wares to merchant ships arriving off the California coast, or trading its raw materials for manufactured goods from overseas. During the tumultuous year surrounding the eventual American takeover of California, Vallejo’s success came to a sudden end. The so-called “Bear Flag Revolt” of 1846 resulted in Vallejo’s arrest and imprisonment for several months. By the time the political dust settled, the ranch had been stripped of its valuables and most of the farm workers had fled. The U.S.government recognized Vallejo’s legal title to the rancho. He decided to lease the property and eventually sold it in 1857. Despite numerous owners and attempts, the ranch never reached the same level of prosperity again.

PETALUMA TODAY

Throughout the remainder of the 19th and into the 20th century, Petaluma Adobe passed through many hands and eventually fell into decline. The State of California purchased the property in 1951 after renewed interest in the site’s cultural heritage spawned an intervention program to save the adobe. Since the 1950s, preservation work, interpretation, research, and archeological investigation have continued to enhance the public’s understanding of the building itself and its tie to California’s Spanish and Mexican past.

Located just north of California’s San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore encompasses over 100 square miles (33,300 acres) of coastal wilderness area. At the beginning of the 17th century, Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino named the impressive cliffs that line the seashore “la Punta de los Reyes” (Point of the Kings). The park preserves the natural ecosystems, native species, and cultural heritage found along the diminishing undeveloped western coastline of the United States. Vast windswept beaches, scrub grasslands, salt and freshwater marshes, coniferous forests and striking granite headlands characterize the peninsula, which is home to over 1,000 species of plants and animals. In addition to the area’s magnificent natural beauty, Point Reyes is home to a unique set of cultural resources, which highlights the many layers of human history present in the region.

The park contains landscapes that are much as they were when the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century. It includes 15 sites that provide evidence of one of the earliest cross-cultural exchanges between the Coast Miwok Indians and Europeans in Northern California and the most complete record of early interactions with the American Indians on the west coast of the United States. Before the Spanish permanently settled Alta California in 1769, five European voyages had made their way to the Pacific coast—the voyages of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and Bartolomé Ferrelo in 1542-1543, Miguel Unamuno in 1587, Sebastião Cermeño (captain of San Agustín) in 1595, Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602-1603 (who named the peninsula “Punta de los Reyes,” the Point of Kings), and the Englishman Francis Drake in 1579. The archeological sites in the district have the potential to yield additional important information about early European contact with the land and the Coast Miwok.

The park also contains twelve historic cultural landscapes and many buildings and structures listed in the National Register of Historic Places, from farmhouses, barns and creameries to a lighthouse and radio station. The park exemplifies centuries of cultural connection to the land and sea along the central California coastline.

Drakes Bay Historic and Archeological District is a National Historic Landmark located in Point Reyes National Seashore. Famed English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake most likely landed in the bay that now bears his name, on the coast of Northern California, in 1579 to repair his ship while searching for the Northwest Passage, a hypothesized waterway that would open direct trade between Asia and Europe. Though he did not find the passage, this voyage made Drake, who later raided Spanish outposts in the Gulf of Mexico and burned the Spanish fort at St. Augustine, Florida, the first English navigator to circumnavigate the globe. Drake and his crew were also the first Europeans to record their contact with American Indians on the Pacific coast. Drake named the land he encountered in California “Nova Albion,” after the white cliffs at Point Reyes that reminded him of the white cliffs of southern England, and claimed it for Queen Elizabeth I. In the 18th and 19th centuries, England used Drake’s landing to support its claim to the Pacific Northwest when Spain, and later the United States, challenged its rights to the region.

In 1595, sixteen years after Drake landed, Spanish traders and sailors stopped at the Point Reyes Peninsula on their way to Mexico from the Philippines. The ocean trade route between Manila and Acapulco carried silver west from the Spanish colonies to the Asian markets and brought Chinese luxury goods east to Europe via New Spain. That year, the Manila galleon San Agustín, loaded with a cargo of painted ceramics and silk, entered Drakes Bay, which is part of the coastal area of Marin County known as “Tamál-Húye” by the Coast Miwok. Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño, a Portuguese captain who worked for Spain, anchored the ship in the bay while some of the crew went ashore to build a launch. While the ship was at anchor, a Coast Miwok man oared a grass vessel to the San Agustín and the Spaniards gave him several objects from their cargo hold, including a piece of Chinese silk. Soon after this meeting, a storm swept through the bay and the ship wrecked into the shore.

Both the Spanish crew and the local Coast Miwok tried to salvage the ship after it ran aground. When the Spanish tried to stop the Coast Miwok from taking the goods, the peaceful encounter turned into a conflict. The crew ultimately abandoned the ship and took the launch to Mexico. After the Europeans left, the Coast Miwok continued to salvage the ship’s cargo and collected the goods that washed ashore. Today, the historic Coast Miwok village and midden sites at Point Reyes contain not only archeological evidence of the Spanish presence in 1595, but also of how the Coast Miwok chose to use Chinese and European goods.

After Cermeño’s crew left, Spain rarely visited California until the Spanish formally returned to colonize the province in 1769. When Spain returned to California in the 18th century, it established a mission system that forced native groups to live and work under Spanish soldiers and priests. The Coast Miwok did not join the mission at San Francisco until the early 19th century, just before California became a Mexican province after Mexico became independent from Spain. By the 1830s, when Point Reyes became private ranch land, many of the Coast Miwok left the peninsula to search for opportunities elsewhere. California became an American territory after the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the 31st State of the United States in 1850. The Coast Miwok, now part of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, recognize the Point Reyes area as their ancestral lands.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, surveyors from the National Park Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scanned Drakes Bay for magnetic anomalies that might give up the location of the San Agustín. The loation of the submerged wreck is not yet pinpointed, but historical accounts of the San Agustín and the sites of magnetic anomalies found during underwater surveys indicate that it is in the area, and it aligns with the currents that occasionally bring pieces of the ship’s ceramic cargo to shore.

The Coast Miwok archeological sites are in remote, protected locations on Point Reyes Peninsula. Point Reyes National Seashore collection contains over 700 pieces of Chinese ceramics found in the park, washed up on the beach, or at historic Miwok sites during excavations.

Coastal Miwok at Point Reyes

The earliest known human inhabitants of what is now the National Seashore were the Miwok American Indians, indigenous people who thrived within the fertile and biologically dynamic region. The Miwok lived along the central Californian coast for thousands of years before European contact, building small communities and developing rich economies based on gathering, fishing and hunting. They were prolific farmers and craftspeople who used native grasses, gray willow, hazel, lupine and tule to create thatched roofs, mats and baskets. Polished and carved abalone and clam shells were used to craft beaded decorations and make currency.

Sir Francis Drake is believed to have been the first European to make contact with the Miwok, when in 1579, he probably stopped along the craggy coast during his circumnavigation of the globe. After camping along the beach, which today bears his name, he claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth before returning to sea. Meanwhile the Spanish had also been sending ships along the Pacific Coast for many years and conducting overland exploratory missions, heading northwest from Mexico. In 1603, explorer Sebastian Vizcaino first sighted the rocky headlands along the Miwok-inhabited coast. He named the impressive cliffs “la Punta de los Reyes” (Point of the Kings) after the three wise men of the Catholic faith. Contact between the two cultures increased over the next decades, and trade of Spanish metal goods for fine Miwok baskets continued through the next century.

By the mid-1700s, however, the traditional Miwok population along the Pacific coast was waning as the result of disease and displacement brought about by increased Spanish settlement. Several Catholic missions established in the Point Reyes region introduced Christianity to the Miwok people and often forcibly removed them from their land. Spanish settlers and immigrants overtook and transformed what had once been strictly Miwok territory by the early 1800s.

Spanish colonists, Mexican frontiersmen, and American-Californians have all left their mark on the Presidio of San Francisco for over 200 years. Established at the mouth of San Francisco Bay as a Spanish military outpost in 1776, the Presidio stands today as testament to the longest operating Army installation in the American West, and California’s complex past as both a Spanish colony and territory of independent Mexico.

From the Presidio’s original construction in 1776, to its ultimate de-militarization in 1994, the site has accumulated a many layered, multi-era story of significance. The Presidio played a critical role in not only Spanish exploration and frontier expansion, but also in all major North American military conflicts from the Mexican-American War through World War II and Vietnam. As one of California’s most historic sites, the Presidio has witnessed the transferring of the West Coast from nation to nation, the effects of the California Gold Rush, military aviation, World Fairs, the devastation of earthquakes, and a vast evolution of architectural theory and design.

Today visitors flock to the site, a 1,491-acre National Historic Landmark District located within the National Park Service’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The park is flush with opportunities to explore centuries of historic architecture, the San Francisco National Cemetery, hundreds of significant military buildings, and over 25 miles of trails through beautiful forests and beaches. A visit to the Presidio of San Francisco is sure to inspire with its wide breadth of intact historic resources and an intricately woven quilt of heritage sites that link today’s American National Park to the nation’s Spanish and Mexican past.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

Perhaps no other historic site helped inspire the myth and romance of Spanish California like Rancho Camulos. A National Historic Landmark, Rancho Camulos is a Santa Clarita Valley ranch and farm that the prominent Hispanic del Valle family owned and operated between 1839 and 1924. Rancho Camulos is perhaps best known as the “Home of Ramona,” because of its influence on Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a best-selling novel set in post-colonial California. The ranch is privately owned, but the historic museum grounds are open to visitors most weekends and the property hosts tour groups, private parties, and public festivals.

The Rancho Period in California followed the Mexican Revolution. In the 1820s, Spanish priests, along with all other Spanish-born immigrants, were expelled from independent Mexico. The Mexican government claimed land in the southwest previously owned by Spain, including California, and gave large grants of land to individuals who had proven their loyalty to Mexico. Antonio del Valle, an administrator at Mission San Fernando who served in the Mexican army, petitioned for old mission land in California and received 48,612 acres called Rancho San Francisco. He became the legal owner of the land in 1839. After Antonio’s death in 1841, his son Ygnacio del Valle inherited a portion of the original grant, which he called “Rancho Camulos” because it included Kamulus, a Tataviam village.

After inheriting Rancho Camulos, Ygnacio built a cattle corral on the property and a 4-room adobe house for his foreman. Construction at Camulos began in 1853. Ygnacio remained in Los Angeles, where he was an elected member of the City Council and the California Assembly, until 1861. After Ygnacio retired from government, he moved with his second wife, Ysabel, to the ranch. They lived in the adobe house, expanding it to accommodate the growing del Valle family. By 1870, Ysabel had given birth to 12 del Valle children, half of whom lived to adulthood. Ygnacio initially planted a large citrus orchard on the land. By the time of his death in 1880, the ranch also produced wine, almonds, grain, and other produce. In addition to the del Valle family, Camulos supported nearly 200 Mexican and Native American ranch workers.

In the 1880s, the isolated ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley became part of the national culture when Helen Hunt Jackson published her novel, Ramona, about a young Californian woman of mixed Native American and Scottish descent. Jackson was a white advocate for Native American rights and hoped her writing would open Americans’ eyes to the mismanagement of natives by the American government. Though some of Jackson’s writing influenced policy, Ramona’s legacy was its contribution to romanticizing southern California in the American consciousness. Jackson stayed at Rancho Camulos while she toured the region researching rancho culture for her book, and the descriptions of Ramona’s fictional Morena Ranch match the real Camulos. Charles Lummis, a journalist and friend of the del Valle family, published The Home of Ramona: Photographs of Camulos, the fine old Spanish Estate Described by Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson as the Home of "Ramona” in 1888. Tourists flocked to southern California and Rancho Camulos. The del Valles capitalized on Ramona’s popularity and sold their wine with a “Home of Ramona” label. In 1910, D.W. Griffiths directed a silent film adaptation of the novel. The movie, which starred Mary Pickford as the titular character, was filmed at Rancho Camulos.

As the romance of Ramona gripped the imaginations of its readers, the del Valle family’s hold on the property loosened. Ysabel managed the ranch after her husband’s death, but retired to Los Angeles in 1900. After their mother left, the remaining del Valle children took over operations. However, in-fighting and the deaths of several family members forced the del Valles to sell the ranch in 1924. The buyer was August Rübel, a Swiss American immigrant. He and his wife, Mary Colgate McIsaac Rübel, moved to the ranch the following year. August served the United States in the two world wars and was killed in Tunisia in 1943. Mary Rübel remarried in 1946 and her second husband, Edwin Burger, managed the ranch until 1994. Today, the property is administered by a board of directors presided over by August Rübel’s daughter, Shirley Rübel Lorenz. Under the board of directors, the citrus operation continued and a museum opened for visitors to learn about Rancho Camulos’ rich history.

There are four historic buildings on the property and three further contributing historic features. The first of the buildings is the Ygnacio del Valle Adobe, originally built in 1853 and later expanded. Two additions to the adobe were made in 1861, including three rooms adjacent to the western end of the house and a wine cellar underneath them. The second addition at the time was a freestanding kitchen building constructed just north of the adobe main house. In the 1870s, a full western wing was added on perpendicular to the original adobe structure with an open breezeway between this wing and the kitchen, creating a “U” shape around a central garden.

The historic Del Valle Winery building dates back to 1867. This rectangular stone building with a wood-shingled roof was where the ranch aged its Home of Ramona wine and later August Rübel kept a museum for tourists on the second floor. The other two contributing buildings are the Roman Catholic Chapel and the Southern Pacific Railroad Section House. The wooden chapel dates from 1867. The enclosed portion of the chapel is 14’x20’, but a large double door opens up to the chapel’s 30’ long porch to form an open chapel for large congregations. The section house was built in 1887, when the railroad first cut through the Santa Clarita Valley.

The fountain, bell structure, and railroad right-of-way also contribute to the national significance of Rancho Camulos. The date of the fountain’s construction is unknown, but could be as early as 1853 because it appears in Ygnacio’s original plans for the ranch. The bell structure is a simple wooden frame dating back to at least the 1870s. Two of three original large metal bells still hang from the frame: one from the San Fernando Mission and another that was cast in Kodiak, Alaska in 1796. The historic right-of-way is a dirt road that leads north-east to the section house.
Visitors to the Santa Clarita Valley can walk the 40-acre Rancho Camulos Museum grounds with a museum docent and see the “House of Ramona” firsthand. In addition to the nationally significant buildings and features, the museum portion of the 1,800 acre working ranch includes the Rübel family schoolhouse, workers’ bunkhouse, barn, gas and oil house, and the Nachito Valley Adobe. Weekend afternoon tours are available for walk-ins from February until the end of November. By appointment, school and other groups are welcome. Tours are free, but a donation of $5 for adults and $3 is suggested. A gift shop and produce stand are on the grounds. In addition to weekend tours and activities, Rancho Camulos hosts the annual Ramona Days festival. This Ramona-inspired celebration of California’s rancho heritage offers live music, dancing, living history, arts and crafts venders, children’s activities, and presentations of the Ramona Play scenes and D.W. Griffith’s Ramona.

Plan Your Visit

Monterey, home of the Royal Presidio Chapel, is one of California's oldest and most historic cities. Originally founded in 1770 by Spanish Captain Gaspar de Portola and Father Junípero Serra, Monterey served as Spain's northernmost outpost in Alta California. Eventually the city would become California's capital under Spanish, Mexican, and early American rule. The Royal Presidio Chapel of San Carlos de Borroméo de Monterey still stands today as a reminder of Monterey's Spanish and Mexican origins, as well as the city's overall importance to California history. Completed in 1795 to replace earlier buildings first established in 1770, the chapel had close religious and political ties as California's rule shifted amongst three different nations. Royal Presidio Chapel, a National Historic Landmark, is now the only remaining presidio chapel in its original Californian location. It is also the only 18th-century Spanish architecture left in the city of Monterey.

The chapel is still an active church, and is open to the public as part of California's Monterey Historic State Park. It is in excellent condition and one of the city's most significant historic sites. Visitors to Monterey should not miss the Royal Presidio Chapel, where interpretive features help guide visitors through the extraordinary history that the nearly 250 year-old building represents.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

San Francisco Bay is an important harbor on the American West Coast and one of the greatest naturally formed, sheltered anchorages in the world. The San Francisco Bay Discovery Site marks one of the greatest events in the establishment of Spanish Alta California -- the moment the Spanish first glimpsed the bay. On November 4, 1769, Captain Juan Gaspar de Portolá and members of his overland exploration expedition climbed to the top of Sweeney Ridge and looked out upon the great bay. The discovery ultimately led to the establishment of San Francisco, one of the nation’s most vibrant cities.

The top of the ridge is now known as the San Francisco Bay Discovery Site, a National Historic Landmark and part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Visitors have the chance to follow the footsteps of Spanish explorers, soldiers, and early colonists as they climb the ridge and view the magnificent bay for themselves.

The history of the Spanish discovery of the site begins with an accident. Spanish Explorer Captain Juan Gaspar de Portolá set out from San Diego with a party of 60 men on horseback. His goal was to head north and find Monterey Bay, which had been described only from ships at sea. When Portolá’s land-based expedition arrived at the Monterey Bay and stood on its sands – they failed to recognize the bay! Instead Portolá pressed northward on a long, treacherous mission to look for a bay he had already passed by.

Exhausted and lost, the group eventually climbed over San Pedro Mountain and made camp in Pedro Valley, now in the city of Pacifica, just south of San Francisco. On November 1, 1769, one of Portolá’s men, José Francisco Ortega, led a squad of scouts on a three-day reconnoitering tour of the forested area surrounding the camp. Ortega’s notes show he sighted the San Francisco Bay on his first day of scouting, but assumed it was an estuary. When Ortega returned to camp, Portolá called for further exploration of the “estuary” and on November 4, 1769, the men climbed to the top of modern-day Sweeny Ridge hoping for a better view.

Five striking adobe buildings sit at the historic center of San Juan Bautista, California. They face an original Spanish-era plaza and help illuminate the Spanish, Mexican, and early American heritage of central California. The San Juan Bautista Plaza Historic District is a National Historic Landmark that celebrates this history and provides an intact example of traditional Spanish-Mexican colonial architecture that dates from between 1813 and 1870.

The district includes the San Juan Bautista Mission Church (1803-1813), the Castro-Breen House (1840-1841), the Plaza Hotel (1858), the Plaza Stables (1861), and the Zanetta House/Plaza Hall (1868). The restored historic buildings offer visitors interpreted displays and reimagined interior spaces. As both a nationally registered historic place and an official California State Historic Park, the San Juan Bautista Plaza District represents one of the nation’s most spectacular collections of publicly accessible Monterey-Colonial style buildings.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

During the mid to late 1700s, Spanish land holdings in the New World began to shift northward–up from New Spain (today Mexico). A series of military and religious endeavors eventually led to the establishment of a chain of 21 Spanish-Catholic missions along the western coast of California. Padre Fermin Francisco de Lasuen founded the 15th of these, the San Juan Bautista Mission, on June 24, 1797.

The padre chose the area because of its proximity to a large American Indian population, and soon over 1,200 native people were living, working, and worshiping at the San Juan Bautista Mission. The original adobe church was small and soon insufficient for the booming mission, which led to the construction between 1803 and 1813 of the church that is still there today. Even after its initial completion, work continued to expand and beautify it by tiling and painting the interior and adding altar statuary throughout the mid-1800s. The largest of the 21 original Spanish mission churches in California, the building is still in use as a Catholic Church that has been in continuous operation since its opening in 1812.

After Mexico gained its independence from Spain, a new law provided for the secularization of all the California missions. In 1835, José Tiburcio Castro, a former Spanish soldier, became the civil administrator of the San Juan Bautista mission’s land. Castro divided his new, extensive landholdings and auctioned most of his land off to friends, neighbors, and relatives. Built in 1839-1841 for Castro’s son, José Antonio Castro, the José Castro House, which still sits on the plaza today, served as the judicial and administrative-headquarters of a district that included the entire northern half of Alta California. José Antonio Castro would eventually serve as acting governor of Alta California and commandante general of the Mexican army during the Mexican-American war.

In 1848, the Breen family purchased the house. The family arrived in California as survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party – the expedition over the Sierra Nevada Mountains that was stranded in blizzard conditions without supplies for 111 days. Ancestors of the Breens owned and occupied the house from its purchase until 1933 when it became part of the California State Historic Park System. The house known today as the Castro-Breen House has interior accurately furnished in the style of the original Breen tenure.

The 1850s through mid 1870s were a time of great economic prosperity for San Juan Bautista. The California hide and tallow trade was booming as well as the mining industry due to the discovery of gold and silver in the mountains. San Juan Bautista was en route between the major hubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a primary supply center for travelers from Hollister, Watsonville, Monterey and Santa Cruz. The Plaza Hotel (1858), Plaza Stables (1861), and the Zanetta House/Plaza Hall (1868) were all constructed during this period to meet new demands on the small city.

Seven different stage lines ran coaches through San Juan Bautista, bringing traders, business-folk and travelers through the town in great numbers, daily. Angelo Zanetta, a seasoned Mexican businessman, constructed the new buildings on the plaza, the last of which, the Zanetta House, housed his family on the ground floor. The upper story consists of a long, open hall built over 30-foot-long redwood beams. Noted early on for its excellent "spring," this floor became a popular dance venue. The Plaza Hall hosted many grand balls, events, and gatherings over the years.
San Juan Bautista’s boom days were numbered. In 1876, the railroad bypassed the town and its prosperity quickly dwindled. Luckily, each of the five original buildings on the plaza survived. Carefully restored in recent years, they are now open to the public as a California State Historic Park.

SAN JUAN BAUTISTA PLAZA TODAY

The five buildings surrounding San Juan Bautista Plaza are all regularly open to the public for tours offering interpretive programs suitable for all ages. Visitors can explore them on their own or take interpreter-led tours making advanced reservations with the San Juan Bautista State Historic Park by calling 831-623-2753.

The mission church is open daily and offers educational displays about the building itself and the historic artifacts housed within. While inside, note the original tile floor – it contains animal prints captured in the clay when the tiles were first set out in the sun to dry. The church contains a small museum that once was the padre’s living quarters. At one time, the gift shop served as temporary living quarters for the Breen family that bought the José Castro House. The historic church is still in use as a sacred place of worship to be enjoyed in a respectful manner.

Outside, along the northeast wall of the church, is the mission’s original cemetery that contains the graves of more than 4,300 converted American Indians and European colonists. Beyond the cemetery’s lower stone wall is a small section of California’s famed Camino Real, where visitors can still glimpse deep wagon wheel ruts in the compact earth.

Restored to their appearance in the 1870s, the Plaza Hall and stable are across the plaza. The stable houses display an assortment of carriages and wagons along with harnesses and other historic items. Behind the stable is a blacksmith's shop with many of the tools used in the wagonwright trade. Both the Plaza Hall and the stable are open to the public and contain interpretive displays with guided tours available.

The San Luis Rey Mission Church, the 18th of the 21 original missions established by Spain throughout California, is among the finest existing examples of Spanish-Colonial architecture in all of the State. The building is one of only two cruciform (cross-shaped) churches ever built by the Spanish in the region.

Founded in 1798, San Luis Rey de Francia Mission is in the sheltered valley just east of Oceanside. Erected between 1811 and 1815, the present church is the third one constructed at the site. At the time of its completion, the church was the largest building in Northern California. San Luis Rey is known today as the king of all the California missions.

The history of the San Luis Rey de Francia Mission spans the early Spanish colonial period, the Mexican era, and the beginnings of California’s statehood. Today the church stands as a National Historic Landmark recognized for its significant contribution to the Spanish and Mexican heritage of the western United States. It is still in use as a parish church, Franciscan college, retreat space, and conference center.

Visitors are encouraged to explore the beautiful church, which is open to the public daily. The mission site contains other remains of the mission in addition to the church. All are set around and within a historic six-acre central square. Highlights include a sunken garden, elaborate lavanderia (open-air laundry), stabilized ruins of former mission buildings, and California’s first documented pepper tree. A museum, signage, and guided tours help interpret the site for visitors.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

By the late 1700s, the Spanish government in New Spain (modern-day Mexico) had already authorized the establishment of 17 Catholic missions throughout Alta California. The vast northern territory was lush with appealing resources for the Spanish, as well as a long coastline dotted with protected bays. The systematic establishment of missions was an inexpensive and strategic move to help bring religious and political ideologies to the native people who populated the area. One hope for the missions was to mitigate potential native aggression as the Spanish moved north to colonize these areas themselves.

Padre Fermín de Francisco Lasuén de Arasqueta founded the 18th of the Spanish missions, San Luis Rey de Francia, in 1798. He chose the original site, just east of modern-day Oceanside, for its protected nature within a valley, the availability of building resources and water, and the proximity of a large tribe of Luiseno American Indians. Constructed in 1798 at the mission’s first founding, the original church was a small and simple adobe building like the majority of Spanish missions. By 1802, early success and an increase in Catholic conversions necessitated the building of a bigger church with adobe walls and a tiled roof.

The third church, the one that remains on the site today, dates from the peak of the mission’s success. Construction on this church began in 1811, but due to its impressive scale and intricacy, the church was not finished until four years later in 1815. Antonio Ramirez, a master stonemason, oversaw the work of native converts who performed a majority of the labor. The main walls of the new church were impressive: 30 feet high and five feet thick with an adobe interior and baked brick exterior. White lime plaster coated the walls, and the huge church must have gleamed in the bright California sun. The main façade of the church features a mix of Baroque and Classical styles including a 75-foot tall bell tower at its eastern corner. A western, symmetrical tower was originally in the plans but never constructed. The tower rang a chorus of eight different bells in the 1800s, but only four hang within its belfry today.

Both the original floor and roof of the mission church were of terra cotta tile, and by 1829, a wooden dome sat atop the building. The octagonal dome had an eight-windowed lantern that filtered light down into the nave and crossing below. The restored dome remains today and is unique among all of California’s Spanish missions.

By the mid-19th century, the San Luis Rey de Francia Mission was expansive with landholdings covering approximately 950,400 acres. Over 3,000 converted native people lived at the mission and helped tend the land and care for the 50,000 head of livestock. Grapes, oranges, olives, wheat, and corn were just some of the crops produced on the property. The main mission buildings, including the church, ringed a large central plaza, 500-feet square. At the height of its glory, the mission included irrigation channels and an outdoor lavanderia (laundry), a convento for housing the friars, officers barracks, dormitories for residents, workshops of various types, a long decorative colonnade, and an extensive gated cemetery.
Mexico gained its independence in 1821 cutting short the period of prosperity for San Luis Rey Mission. Under a new Mexican law, all of the California missions were secularized within a decade. Many, including San Luis Rey de Francia, went through periods of divided ownership and neglect. As nearby pueblos grew, much of the quality materials of the mission church were stripped to use in new construction.

Between 1847 and 1857, the mission church served as an operational base for the United States military. California became the 31st State in the Union in 1850. The men were not greatly concerned with the upkeep of the church, even housing livestock within its walls. President Lincoln officially returned the mission to the Catholic Church in the 1860s, but the entire property was in such disrepair that the church abandoned it.
Mission San Luis Rey de Francia might have completely vanished from the landscape had it not been for a group of Mexican Franciscans who reoccupied the church in 1892. Under the guidance of Father Joseph Jeremias O’Keefe, a massive rebuilding and restoration began. Despite the deterioration over the years, much of the original mission remained, as did original drawings, plans and designs. After O’Keefe’s death, the restoration of the site continued.

TODAY

Today, San Luis Rey Mission Church is a part of the restored mission complex that sits on 56 acres of its original land. Franciscan friars still study, worship, and live at the mission, and it is highly regarded as both a religious and heritage site. The church is among the most stunning of all of the Spanish mission churches and is a popular tourist attraction in Southern California. Original patterns found in the church’s old documents and on remnant textiles decorate the interior. Outside, the church is believed to look much as it would have when originally constructed.

In addition to the church, visitors can view the other impressive features of the site. One of the most fascinating ruins left at the mission is the old lavanderia. Just to the south of the mission church, this structure consisted of a tiled irrigation system in which water spouted from the mouths of carved gargoyles. The water was diverted from the nearby San Luis Rey River and used for both bathing and the laundering of garments. The water capturing and retention system was advanced, even by modern standards. The lavanderia has been an archeological site since its unearthing in 1955, and today visitors can see its tiled stairs, channels and stone pools. The gargoyles remain intact and are believed to be the only known examples of carved Luiseno sculpture.

Ruins of the original convento arches, colonnade, officers' barracks, and lime kiln are still on the grounds as is the original mission cemetery – the oldest in North San Diego County. As you walk throughout the mission’s grounds, be sure to cross the original large central square and look up at the massive tree at its center. Planted in 1830, it is still alive as the oldest and first pepper tree in California.
The mission’s museum interprets the San Luis Rey Mission Church and its surrounding structures for the public. Housed in the former convento, the museum oversees all of the preservation and conservation efforts for the church and its extensive historic collections. Exhibits feature the entire history of the mission and include objects and artifacts from both the Spanish Colonial and Mexican periods.

Plan Your Visit

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area covers over 153,000 acres and protects a mosaic of natural and historic resources. Established as a unit of the National Park Service in 1978, the park has continued to expand in both size and international recognition. Federal, State and local agencies and organizations work together to preserve its landscape, rare species of flora and fauna, fragile coastal ecosystems, hundreds of miles of recreational trails, and historic resources.

Now an attraction for tourists, the Santa Monica Mountains region has been the home of people of diverse cultures for thousands of years. Before Europeans arrived in what is now coastal California, American Indian tribes populated the region for more than 10,000 years, among them the Chumash and Tongva/Gabrielino cultures. The Chumash were thriving along the coast sustaining themselves with the abundant food, mineral, and aquatic resources present in the temperate environment when the Spanish arrived. The Spanish explorers encountered the Chumash in the late 1700s when they became the first Europeans to explore the region. After them came the rancheros and homesteaders.

In the 1700s, Spain controlled a strong empire in what is now Mexico and Central and South America. The Spanish King Carlos III, fearing that England and Russia would overtake the bordering lands to the north, set out to explore and colonize what the Spanish called “Alta California.” In 1774, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza was one of the first to identify a relatively safe overland route into the vast territory with the assistance of tribal guides. A year later, he convinced 300 colonists to return to the north with him to establish a presidio and mission near San Francisco Bay. The route they traveled became the one Spaniards would use over time as they continued to settle in California, changing the cultural character of the region forever.

Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public institutions unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, Méndez v. Westminster helped end racist policies in California’s school districts. This 1946 class-action lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of separate schools for Mexican American students in Southern California. The lawsuit threatened the “separate but equal” doctrine that supported segregation in the United States and the appeals court’s decision ended public segregation of Mexican Americans in the Ninth Circuit. The site of the trial was the U.S. District Court of Southern California, at the historic U.S. Court House & Post Office building, a National Historic Landmark, in Los Angeles.

For over 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional in 1896, California school districts legally separated Chinese, Japanese, and American Indian children from white children. The doctrine meant that the separation of racial groups was legal as long as the facilities for each group were equal. Though Mexican Americans were “white” under the 1940 U.S. census, more than 80% of Mexican American children in Orange County, California attended segregated non-white schools by World War II. Separating Mexican American children from “whiter” children was widespread in the southwestern United States at the time. Schools segregated Mexican American children because of their Latino surnames and the presumption they had little or no English language skills.

By the 1940s, virtually all agricultural workers in California were Mexicans or Mexican Americans, and they were the largest minority group in the State. School authorities presumed Mexican American children would only need skills for low-wage labor, so the schools only taught Hispanic children vocational skills and did not offer higher-level classes. California’s Mexican American schools had inferior resources compared to white schools and only employed English-speaking teachers. In 1947, a Federal court’s decision in Méndez et al v. Westminster School District of Orange County etc al ended Mexican American primary school segregation in California and supported later civil rights struggles to end all segregation nationally.

When the children of Gonzolo Méndez tried to enroll at an Orange County, California school in 1943, the school denied them entry because of their Mexican heritage. The same day the school administrators rejected his children, they admitted Gonzolo’s niece and nephew, fair-skinned Alice and Edward Vidaurri. Administrators at the school district told the family that Mexican Americans needed their own schools because of cultural and language differences. The Méndez children enrolled at Hoover, the local Mexican American school, but Gonzolo was not satisfied. He knew “separate but equal” did not legally apply to his children and the school district was violating their rights. The Méndez family organized with four other fathers whose children faced similar discrimination. William Guzmán, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada, and Lorenzo Ramirez joined Gonzolo to launch the first class-action case in a Federal court in American civil rights history that would challenge primary school segregation.

As the lead defendant, Gonzolo Méndez sued four school districts and superintendants on the grounds that his children and the children of other Mexican Americans were legally white, therefore entitled to attend white schools. The Méndez lawyer filed the lawsuit at the U.S. Court for the Southern District of California, where they could argue that the State of California violated the children’s right to the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Constitution states that no State can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The lawyer also used social science expert witnesses to explain that segregating children threatened their self-esteem and segregated school districts invented an inferior class of citizens where one did not exist. As a result, Méndez v. Westminster was the first Federal lawsuit openly to challenge “separate but equal” segregation in K-12 schools. In Courtroom No. 8 of the historic U.S. Court House and Post Office of Los Angeles, Judge Paul J. McCormick decided in favor of Méndez.

In his 1946 decision, McCormick wrote,

“‘The equal protection of the laws’ pertaining to the public school system in California is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, textbooks and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to the other public school children regardless of their ancestry. A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”

The Westminster school district appealed McCormick’s decision and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard the appeal in 1947. By this time, the case had attracted national attention. If an appeal went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it had the potential to overturn public segregation throughout the nation. At the appeals level, the American Civl Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Lawyers Guild, and the Japanese American Citizens League filed a joint brief in support of Méndez. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), American Jewish Congress, and the Attorney General of California also submitted briefs. Together, these briefs challenged the logic of all racial segregation in the United States, as well as the legality of segregating Mexican Americans in California. The Ninth Circuit Court’s decision did not overturn racial segregation in its district, but it did uphold the core of McCormick’s decision and ruled that it is unconstitutional to segregate Americans because of their heritage. Two months after the trial, California Governor Earl Warren, who later presided over Brown v. Board as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, signed a bill that made California the first State to outlaw all public school segregation.

The national significance of Méndez v. Westminster rests on its influence on the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and ‘60s, and its effect on the lives of Mexican Americans in the Ninth Circuit. The brief the NAACP filed for Méndez was the forerunner to the organization’s legal arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1954. After Méndez set the precedent, the landmark case helped strike down policies of segregating Mexican Americans in the Ninth Circuit. Mexican Americans in the Southwest took their school districts to court to challenge the legality of separate schools for their children and won. Using Méndez, district courts in Texas and Arizona ruled to end segregation for Mexican Americans before the U.S. Supreme Court decided that all state-sponsored segregation is unconstitutional in Brown.

The lawsuit that started the movement was a five-day trial held at the U.S. Court House and Post Office in Los Angeles. Built in 1940, this historic building was only five years old during Méndez v. Westminster. The building is a 17-story, Depression-era Moderne style Federal courthouse and post office. It is a steel-frame building, reinforced with concrete, with recessed windows. The exterior has a light-pink, textured ceramic veneer, and gray Minnesota granite with pink veining adorns at its base. Wide concrete steps lead from the sidewalks to the court house entrances on Spring Street and Main Street. U.S. District Courtroom No. 8, the site of the trial, is on the second floor where all District courtrooms were at the time. The high, white-plaster ceiling rises through the third floor. The walls feature five-foot-high American walnut wainscoting, with black walnut detail, with white acoustic tiles above it. Walnut paneling surrounds the double-door entry and lines the recessed area behind the judge’s bench. The bench, gallery bench, jury seating, press seating, and lecterns also feature a walnut veneer. The U.S. General Services Administration made few major alterations to the building after its construction and has made minimal changes to Courtroom No. 8 since 1945, apart from replacing ceiling lights, flooring, and minor aspects of the courtroom furniture.

In 1966, the U.S. Court for the Southern District of California moved to San Diego and the Court for the Central District of California (western division) moved into the Los Angeles U.S. Court House & Post Office Federal building.

The legacy of Méndez v. Westminster is the precedent it set for future cases, its impact on the lives of the people oppressed by segregation, and the inspiration it gave to later civil rights struggles. Overshadowed by Brown v. Board for decades, a resurgence of public recognition of the case in the early 21st century rightly called attention to its significance. PBS aired a documentary, Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Niño', in 2003. The U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in 2007 to commemorate the landmark case. Once turned away from her Orange County school in 1943, Sylvia Méndez, in 2011, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her role in the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice in the United States.

Plan Your Visit

Located near Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island is the largest island in San Francisco Bay. The 740-acre island, which offers expansive views of the San Francisco skyline, the Marin County Headlands, and Mount Tamalpais, is alive with history. American Indians, Spanish explorers, Russian sea otter hunters, British sailors, a Mexican rancher, and United States military and customs officials have all made use of the island. Today, visitors to Angel Island State Park can explore the diverse human history of this island, while enjoying its natural resources.

Beginning nearly 3,000 years ago, the Coastal Miwok Indians used the island for fishing and hunting. The Miwoks reached the island using boats made from tule reeds. Once on the island, the Miwoks established temporary camps at places now known as Ayala Cove, Camp Reynolds, Fort McDowell, and the Immigration Station. They hunted deer, seals, sea lions, and ducks and fished for salmon. They also collected shellfish, acorns, buckeyes, root vegetables, and other plants. The tribe used the plants for medicinal and other purposes such as toothpaste and substances similar to chewing tobacco. By the early 1800s, the Miwok Indians likely no longer utilized the island because the Spanish drew them to Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores in San Francisco), or they were driven from the region.

The island came under Spanish rule in 1775 when Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala, a Spanish naval officer, sailed the San Carlos into the San Francisco Bay and dropped his anchor in what is now Ayala Cove. One of the first Spanish expeditions to sail directly into the San Francisco Bay, this expedition was to develop an accurate chart and description of the area that future Spanish sailors could rely upon. Ayala’s pilot, Don Jose de Canizares, and his crew explored the area for 40 days and produced the first maps made of the San Francisco Bay. They named the island Isla de Los Angeles, which followed the common practice among Catholic explorers of naming a site based on the religious feast days nearest the time of discovery.

Following the Spanish discovery of the island, the Russians and British briefly utilized the island. Russian sea otter hunting expeditions visited the island and established a storehouse there in 1808; while in 1814, the British anchored in Ayala Cove to make repairs to their 26-gun sloop-of-war, the H.M.S. Raccoon. Damaged off the coast of Oregon, the H.M.S. Raccoon managed to make its way into the San Francisco Bay. The British repaired the ship during March and April of that year, and this brief moment in history gave the deep-water channel between Tiburon and Angel Island its name, Raccoon Strait, in honor of this old British sailing ship.

By 1837, during Mexico’s rule of California (1821-1848), a Californio man (California-born Mexican), Antonio Maria Osio, asked the governor of California to grant him Angel Island to use as a ranch. Osio had previously worked in Los Angeles as a town councilman, in San Francisco as a customs official, and in Monterey as a collector of customs and a judge in the Tribunal Superior Court. Governor Alvarado approved Osio’s grant in 1839, with the provision set forth by General Vallejo, the military commander of the frontier north of San Francisco, that part of the island be set aside for use as a fort. Upon receiving the grant, Osio quickly established his ranch.

Osio raised cattle on Angel Island and sold beef in San Francisco. He stocked the island with 54 horned cattle in 1839, and by 1846, he had up to 500 heads. Although Osio himself never lived on Angel Island, he built four houses there for his herders and other attendants to use. He also constructed a dam and a reservoir to provide water for the cattle. Throughout other parts of the island, Osio cultivated corns, beans, potatoes, pumpkins, and other vegetables. The success of his first ranch and the generous land grant policy of Governor Alvarado and his successor Manuel Micheltorena permitted Osio to expand his landholdings from the original land grant of 740 acres for Angel Island to over 50,000 acres in land grants throughout the San Francisco/Monterey area. In five short years, Osio had become one of the largest landholders in Alta California.

Osio’s life changed drastically in 1846, when the Bear Flag revolt erupted, followed by the Mexican-American War. Warned by the U.S. vice-consul that he was in danger of being arrested, Osio fled with his family south and then to Hawaii. During the war, the U.S. Navy occupied Angel Island and decimated Osio’s entire herd of cattle. At the end of the war in 1848, California became part of the United States. Osio returned to California in 1849, only to face major land disputes for the next 11 years.

Beginning in 1849, the United States government challenged Osio’s claim to Angel Island. In 1860, after years of legal battles, the government ultimately decided that Osio’s claim to the land was invalid. The government argued that even though Governor Alvarado had issued him the original land grant, it did not have the approval of the Departmental Assembly, the seven-man body that along with the governor ruled Alta California before 1846, and therefore Osio’s grant was void. Angel Island had a new owner, the United States government. Osio lived the rest of his life in Baja California, where he died at the age of 78 in 1878, outliving at least nine of his seventeen children.

When ownership of Angel Island shifted to the United States government, it became the home to several Federal facilities. In 1850, President Fillmore declared Angel Island a military reserve. During the Civil War, Camp Reynolds, later called West Garrison, on Angel Island was fortified with cannons to defend San Francisco Bay from potential attacks by Confederate ships. After the Civil War, Camp Reynolds became an infantry camp, serving as a training base for U.S. soldiers serving in campaigns against the Apache, Sioux, Modoc, and other American Indian tribes. Also on the island is Fort McDowell, later called East Garrison. Constructed beginning in 1899, Fort McDowell served as a very important military base and point of embarkation – handling the transfer, induction, detainment, and discharge of thousands of men during the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.

In 1905, the War Department transferred 20 acres of land on the island to the Department of Commerce and Labor for the establishment of an immigration station at China Cove, also called Winslow Cove and the North Garrison. As the major west coast immigration center between 1910 and 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station processed a majority of the Asian immigrants seeking new lives in the United States. The Angel Island Immigration Station detained an estimated 175,000 Chinese and 60,000 Japanese immigrants under adverse and oppressive conditions while they awaited permission to enter the United States and to begin their new lives.

The immigration station relocated to San Francisco when a fire destroyed the Angel Island Immigration Station’s administration building in August 1940. The Angel Island Immigration Station reverted to military use in February 1941. During 1942 and 1946, the immigration station’s rehabilitated barracks and hospital held Japanese and German prisoners of war and members of the Italian Service Units. A National Historical Landmark, Angel Island’s U.S. Immigration Station is open for guided and self-guided tours from Wednesday through Sunday.

In July 1946, after serving the military for a variety of purposes, the Army declared Angel Island surplus and eventually transferred ownership to the State of California for park, recreational, and historical purposes. Today, visitors to Angel Island State Park can explore the history of Angel Island by taking various trails and roads. Guided segway and tram tours, as well as interpretive signage, enhance visitors’ experience of this historically diverse island.

When Spain controlled what is now the southwestern United States, the Spanish officially banned international trade of all kinds. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexicans lifted the ban and opened the area to both commercial and cultural exchange. The Santa Fe Trail, which spanned 1,200 miles from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico passing through deserts, mountains and forests along its route, became the main means of transportation to and from the area.

Raton Pass, at the border of present day New Mexico and Colorado, was one of the most important, yet treacherous, segments of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The pass cut through the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, allowing wagons access to the vast western territory. Shorter routes were eventually developed, but Raton Pass, which crossed easier terrain, remained in use. The pass played a critical role in General Stephen Watts Kearny’s conquest of Santa Fe and the eventual American annexation of New Mexico in 1846.

As the first major passage west through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Raton Pass National Historic Landmark celebrates the development of American trade, cultural interaction, and westward expansion.

When Mexico opened its borders to trade with the United States in 1821, a great commercial, military and emigrant trail was born. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, however, loomed huge and daunting between the western edge of the United States in Missouri and the bustling Mexican center of commerce, Santa Fe. Early explorers, trappers, and American Indian peoples had previously discovered various paths through the treacherous mountains, but before 1821, no covered wagons had made the journey.

In June of 1821, William Becknell, a horse and mule trader, traveled west from Franklin, Missouri with a wagon and four companions. He would be the first of many to travel via wagon through the narrow, torturous Raton Pass. The path was narrow, steep, and rocky. Some areas of the pass were so tight that only one wagon could go through at a time. Often their wooden axles shredded and snapped on the brutally rough terrain. Still, Becknell proved that it was possible, and many others followed, risking their equipment and lives along the craggy trail for the promise of trading success in Santa Fe.

Soon, however, a new branch of the Santa Fe Trail developed. The so-called “Cimarron Route” was not only 100 miles shorter, but cut across the relatively flat grasslands and deserts of present-day Kansas and Oklahoma instead of through Colorado’s peaks. Although the openness of the Cimarron Route led to frequent raids from American Indian tribes (and the dry desert presented issues of its own), the dangers of the shorter path were still preferable to travel over the difficult Raton Pass. Between the 1820s and early 1840s, most of the wagon traffic along the Santa Fe Trail opted to take the Cimarron Route.

The Mountain Route and its famously dangerous Raton Pass may very well have been abandoned completely, but in 1846, the pass again played a significant historic role. Tensions were running high between the United States and Mexico over land disputes in Texas, a territory that included what is now the State of New Mexico. Both countries lay claim to the land and Mexico disputed the decision of the United States to annex Texas in 1845. President James Polk declared war on Mexico in 1846 and sent American forces into the territory. General Stephen Watts Kearny set out with his famed 1,600-man “Army of the West” along the Santa Fe Trail.

Although the Mountain Branch and the Raton Pass were known for being dangerous, Kearny specifically chose to head west through the mountains, rather than take the Cimarron Route. The steep, narrow Raton Pass afforded better protection from invading forces and an ample water supply, unlike the dry desert along much of the Cimarron Route. Before Kearny and his men arrived, a team of workers set out along the trail to try to make passage easier including clearing rocks and debris from the notorious Raton Pass. In spite of their efforts, Kearny’s journey was still fraught with difficulty. Many wagons were destroyed and supplies had to be left behind.

Weakened, the men emerged from the Raton Pass and expected to meet resistance from Mexican forces that the provincial governor Manuel Armijo sent. They instead found the valley abandoned. Kearny’s takeover of Santa Fe thus was swift. Without a struggle, the United States laid claim to the territory.

The Mountain Branch was again mostly abandoned after its use by Kearny’s army, because traders and travelers still preferred the shorter, easier route. The Raton Pass saw use once again, however, with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. The vulnerability of the Cimarron Branch was recognized as concerns heightened around Confederate raids. The Santa Fe Trail saw heavy use as a Union Army supply route west, and the narrow, protected Raton Pass was easy to guard. The pass continued to serve Union troops through 1865.

At the war’s end, Raton Pass became part of a toll road for several years that entrepreneur Richens L. Wootton built and managed. Beginning in 1866, the most treacherous part of the Santa Fe Trail was heavily altered by grading, blasting, bridge building, and clearing. The formerly difficult Raton Pass was made passable in all seasons for horses, wagons and stagecoaches alike. While Wootton’s toll road was highly profitable, the advancing western railroad system soon overtook it. By the late 1870s, train traffic replaced Raton Pass and the Santa Fe Trail as a whole, which led to the abandonment of the epic trade route by 1880.

The railroad that once scaled the pass via a series of switchbacks has since been re-routed beneath the mountain by way of a tunnel. Much of the rest of the rail line still follows the old route of the Santa Fe Trail through Raton Pass and along Raton Creek. Though much of the trail has been wiped out by new highway construction, distinct original segments remain.

Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area encompasses more than 3,000 square miles of south-central Colorado spanning Conejos, Costilla and Alamosa counties. The area lies within the San Luis Valley and is a treasure trove of impressive historic, cultural and natural resources. Sangre de Cristo’s heritage resources reflect the convergence of the area’s cultural past; one in which the stories of American Indians, Latinos, Mormons, Amish, Japanese-Americans, Dutch and Anglo are represented. In 1694, Spaniard Don Diego de Vargas became the first European known to have entered the San Luis Valley, though herders and hunters from the Spanish colonies in present-day New Mexico probably entered the valley as early as 1598. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, has noted that “The cultural and historic value of the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area to Colorado and our nation is immeasurable.” This national recognition includes the whole landscape and involves government agencies, private organizations, businesses, and individuals in conserving and interpreting the importance of the region.

Visitors to the heritage area can experience history in San Luis, the oldest town in Colorado (established 1851); impressive natural splendor at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve; and a diverse built environment that includes over 20 historic properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Early American Indian Tribes and the Fertile Desert Valley

Following Spanish discovery of the New World in the late 1400s, competition exploded among European nations to extract the many natural resources and exotic goods this new and mysterious land provided. Transporting these resources, including silver, gold, gems, spices, and other items from the New World back to Europe via the Atlantic Ocean was at times difficult and dangerous. Navigating the Atlantic Ocean was challenging because of nature’s whims, and sailors and merchants also had to be aware of pirates and corsairs.

To combat the threat of raids from rival nations, including France, England, and the Netherlands, Spain developed a formal convoy system as early as 1537 to protect its merchants and goods. Spain used the fleet system for more than 200 years and while it did protect the ships from some enemy attacks, it could not save the ships from disasters caused by natural obstacles such as coral reefs and violent hurricanes. In the warm blue waters of Biscayne National Park, near Miami, Florida, two shipwrecked Spanish fleet vessels rest on the ocean floor where they sank during a hurricane in 1733. The shipwrecks provide a glimpse into the hazards of European exploration and colonization of the New World.

While the Spanish made few attempts to settle South Florida or the Florida Keys, they began utilizing the area quite frequently after Juan Ponce de León discovered the warm, fast moving Gulf Stream that flows through the Straits of Florida (the channel between the coast of Florida and the Bahamas). The swift moving warm waters of the Gulf Stream provided the fastest route from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic Ocean; however, the route was dangerously narrow, with coral reefs, small islands, shifting sandbars, and dangerous currents all acting as natural obstacles. Many ships wrecked due to the limited navigational aids available at the time.

While the route was treacherous, it still provided the best way for ships leaving the Gulf of Mexico to reach the North Atlantic on their return voyages to Europe. Spain’s fleet system used this water route. Each fleet had at least two heavily armed galleons (escorts) - a Capitana or flagship sailing at the front of the fleet and an Almiranta or vice-flagship in the rear- as well as pataches, which were smaller vessels used to communicate between ships, and resfuerzos or supply ships that carried food and regular cargo. Each fleet also had 10 to 90 merchant ships called naos. Naos were unarmed galleons that carried cargo, treasure, and passengers. For larger fleets, additional strategically placed armed galleons provided extra protection for the richly loaded ships.

Each year, two separate fleets, named the New Spain fleet and the Tierra Firme fleet, left Spain loaded with clothing and European luxury and household goods to trade with Spanish colonists in the New World. Often making the trans-Atlantic journey together, the fleets went in different directions once they reached the Caribbean. The fleets brought the European goods to various locations, and in return filled their vessels with New World products including Mexican silver, Chinese porcelain, Peruvian silver, pearls from Margarita Island, chocolate, sassafras, tobacco, leather goods, ceramics, and American Indian-made products. An analysis of these ships and the goods they carried reveals that, much like today, a truly international and worldwide trading network existed. Because of the diversity of products and the immense monetary value of goods on these ships, no one would question why Spain developed a convoy system to protect these vessels from pirates and raids. Once the fleets were fully loaded with New World products, they would meet again in Havana, Cuba for their return journey back to Spain.

During July 1733, on a return journey to Spain, the New Spain fleet faced disaster. On Friday, July 13, 1733, under the command of Lieutenant-General Rodrigo de Torres, the New Spain fleet left Havana harbor on its return journey to Spain. The fleet of four armed galleons and 17 or 18 merchant vessels left the harbor for Spain carrying gold, silver, tanner hides, rare spices, tobacco, porcelain, and precious jewels. The following day, after the fleet sighted the Florida Keys, the wind shifted abruptly and increased in velocity, which indicated to General Torres that a hurricane was approaching. He ordered the fleet to turn back to Havana, however, it was too late – the hurricane was upon them!

By nightfall, most of the ships had been wrecked, sunk, or swamped along 80 miles of the Florida Keys. Two of the ships that sank and were unsalvageable were the Nuestra Senora del Populo and the El Aviso del Consulado, which rest in the waters of Biscayne National Park today. The Nuestra Senora del Populo was a small, armed vessel that carried goods, and the El Aviso del Consulado was another small vessel used as a carrier between ships and as a scouting boat. While four ships made it safely back to Havana and one galleon, the El Africa, managed to sail on to Spain undamaged, the rest of the ships faced destruction in the treacherous Floridian waters. Small groups of survivors established camps wherever they came ashore and began salvaging. Rescue ships soon arrived from Havana loaded with supplies, food, divers, and salvage equipment to help recover as much lost treasure and goods as possible.

Over a couple hundred of years, a complex wrecking industry had developed to assist sailors in salvaging their cargoes throughout the region. The salvage operators were often American Indians, Spaniards, Bahamians, and Euro-Americans. The wreckers recovered goods from dying ships and helped refloat ships that had run aground but remained seaworthy. The salvagers burned to the waterline the vessels that could not be refloated or towed back to Havana, so divers could descend into the cargo holds to recover any possible cargo. Burning the ships to the waterline also hid them from pirates. The location of each wreck was marked on several maps and records were kept of all salvaged materials. Interestingly, more treasure was recovered than had been listed on the original manifests, which was proof that merchants smuggled contraband and extra gold and silver onto ships to avoid paying taxes.

The Cape Canaveral barrier island, perhaps best known today as a National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) base for space exploration, was once the edge of the European frontier in North America. In 1502, Canaveral became one of the first places on the North American continent identified by Europeans when it appeared on a map for the first time and Cape Canaveral is one of the oldest European-named places in the United States. In English, “cañaveral” roughly translates as the “place of reeds or cane.” Though it was not a significant site of permanent Spanish settlement, for approximately 300 years Spanish colonists sailed the waters in and around it as they traded, warred, explored, and settled in Florida. Canaveral National Seashore is located between the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean on the northern slope of Cape Canaveral and on Merritt Island, north of the Kennedy Space Center.

When Ponce de León, Spanish explorer and governor of Puerto Rico, reached the coast of North America to claim all known land north of Mexico for Spain, he may have landed within the bounds of Cape Canaveral National Seashore. Historians disagree on where exactly he landed. Their theories range from Cape Canaveral, to present-day St. Augustine, to the coast of southern Georgia. One theory puts Ponce de Leon at Cape Canaveral in 1513, at a place he called the Cape of Currents. Florida was not resource-rich, but it offered Spain a strategic location to protect the colonies’ valuable exports from pirates and competitors as Spain’s ships sailed through the Florida Current. The Florida peninsula creates a fast-moving current in the Florida Straits that runs east from its southern tip in the Gulf of Mexico and then flows north parallel to Florida’s Atlantic coast, where it becomes the Gulf Stream. The Florida Current was an important shipping route between the Spanish colonies and Europe, and Spain’s enemies waited in the Straits to raid ships carrying silver from Mexico and Peru. To protect its ships, Spain invested resources in colonizing the eastern Florida coast. Ponce de Leon was the first of many Spaniards who tried to establish a Florida colony.

Permanent European settlement did not happen in Florida until Pedro Menéndez de Aviles founded St. Augustine in 1565. The king of Spain gave Menéndez the power to colonize and run Florida, in the hopes that Menéndez could keep the French away from the southeastern coast of North America and the Caribbean. Menéndez’s rival in Florida was Jean Ribault, a French Huguenot, who tried to found his own colony in North America between 1562 and 1565, to escape religious persecution in France. In 1565, Menéndez drove Ribault’s men from their fort. Once they were at sea, a hurricane destroyed four French ships along the Canaveral coast. Several of the ships went down near Ponce Inlet, which is in Cape Canaveral north of the National Seashore area. Ribault survived the storm, because his ship ran aground on the shores south of Canaveral. He and approximately 350 surviving French settlers were able to escape to dry land. Ribault headed north to challenge the Spanish with a small group of men, while the remaining group of French settlers went to Cape Canaveral to build a fort and a new ship. When Ribault met up with the Spanish, Menéndez executed Ribault and his men after they refused to convert to Catholicism, and then he marched his soldiers south to Canaveral to drive out the remaining French settlers who did not surrender.

Canaveral continued to be an important place for Spanish colonists until Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819. As maritime traffic increased in the Florida Current, so did shipwrecks, and Ribault was not the last European to wash ashore at the Cape. Today, wrecked Spanish and French ships from the colonial period lie sunken under waters off the coast of Canaveral and throughout the Florida Current where travelers were vulnerable to hurricanes.

Spain tried to create diplomatic ties with the American Indians along the Canaveral coast to encourage the return of survivors and goods that washed ashore after shipwrecks. However, there is no evidence that Spain ever built a mission on Cape Canaveral, as it did in other places throughout its empire as part of efforts to convert indigenous people to Christianity and extend its authority. Canaveral was also important for Spanish shipping because it juts out into the ocean and travelers in the straits used it as a navigational marker. One important landmark for navigators was Turtle Mound, a massive pile of oyster shells Timucua or Ais Indians created that is visible from the open ocean. Turtle Mound is about 30 feet high at present and covers approximately two acres.

Canaveral National Seashore today is a wildlife refuge and recreation area. Its natural landscape offers visitors spaces to enjoy the barrier island for swimming, fishing, camping, hiking, hunting, and boating. There is some archeological work done there to study the Spanish and precontact periods, especially at the site that is perhaps where the French settled for a short time in 1565 and at known American Indian sites like Turtle Mound. Rangers at the National Seashore offer guided tours of the park and facilitate learning for visiting school groups. Visitors can learn more about Cape Canaveral ecology and history at the Apollo Beach Visitor Information Center in the National Seashore.

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Castillo de San Marcos stands today as a monument to the Spanish empire’s 300-year occupation of Florida and to the interaction and clashes of cultural groups that built the unified nation that is the United States today. Constructed to protect Spain’s settlement in St. Augustine from pirate raids, hostile American Indian tribes, and neighboring imperial powers, the fortification is a symbol of the cultural and imperial struggles that shaped early North America. Never captured in battle, Castillo de San Marcos is both architecturally impressive as the oldest surviving masonry fortress in the United States and culturally significant because its stone walls are a testament to the endurance of this nation’s Latino heritage and to the other cultural groups that have played a role in its story.

Spanish influence in America began in 1513 when Juan Ponce de León, upon discovering the Florida peninsula, claimed North America for Spain. Recognizing the strategic significance of Florida for the defense of their treasure fleets, the Spanish began to settle the southeast coast of North America. Their efforts proved unsuccessful and costly, and in 1561, King Phillip II of Spain halted future expeditions into Florida. When news came three years later of the French settlement of Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River, the Spanish king revoked his order and commissioned Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to remove the French. By 1565, Menéndez and his crew established a settlement on a sheltered harbor they named San Agustín and reclaimed Florida for Spain when they launched a successful and ruthless attack on Fort Caroline.

During the first century of occupation in St. Augustine, the Spanish were victims of numerous enemy attacks that destroyed their original wooden fortifications. The Spanish constructed a series of wooden fortifications until English privateer Sir Francis Drake seized St. Augustine in 1586. An English sailor who accompanied Drake on this expedition against Spain described St. Augustine (San Agustín) as a “city built all of timber…or bodies of trees set upright and close together.” Following Drake’s attack and a later raid in 1668 by pirate John Davis, the Spanish governor of the Florida colony wrote to officials in Spain and Mexico requesting funds to build a more permanent defense system. The Spanish crown approved plans to build a stone fortress, and, in 1672, construction of Castillo de San Marcos began.
The Spanish designed Castillo de San Marcos to withstand the impact of a cannonball, using the bastion system developed by Italians in the 17th century. Resembling the medieval castle, or castillo, the bastion design lowered the castle walls and placed mounds of earth around the exterior to reinforce the walls. At each corner of the castle walls, the Spanish -- aware of their vulnerability to land and water attacks -- placed a circular tower to protect the fortress from every angle. To secure access into the castle, the Spanish constructed drawbridges. The survival of the Castillo today demonstrates the strength and success of the bastion system.

The castle underwent minor changes during different periods of its occupation by the Spanish, English, and Americans. Under the Spanish, Castillo de San Marcos had four bastions, 30 feet high and 14 feet thick walls of coquina blocks -- a soft limestone made of cemented seashells. Although disease and funding shortages slowed construction, the Spanish were ready to test the true strength of the coquina fortress during the War of Spanish Succession. After an attack in 1702, Castillo de San Marcos was the only structure to survive the fire that the English set in St. Augustine. After this, the Spanish sought to defend the city by extending the castle with a system of inner defense lines. By 1763, the Spanish finished construction on the Cubo and Rosario Lines, which are still present today, to form a boundary around St. Augustine for protection from future land attacks.

When tensions increased during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the conflict between Spain and England that lasted between 1739 and 1748, the Spanish governor in St. Augustine wrote to officials in Cuba requesting funds, supplies, laborers, and soldiers to help extend the height of the walls, build an underground powder magazine, and replace the original ravelin. In 1763, after completion of most of the renovations, news came of the Spanish cession of Florida to England in the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War. The Spanish surrendered the Castillo de San Marcos to England and abandoned St. Augustine altogether.

During the first decade of British occupation, the English renamed the fortification Fort St. Mark. Victorious at the end of the French and Indian War, the British did not seek to restore the fortress knowing they had eliminated all other competing imperial powers from North America’s eastern coast. Repairs and changes to the structure did not occur until the outbreak of the American Revolution when British loyalists sought refuge within Fort St. Mark’s walls. The British garrison reconstructed the former entrenchment lines and used the fort to house troops, weapons, and to imprison rebel colonists. Although the Continental Army planned to attack the British in east Florida, Fort St. Mark did not see any action during the American Revolution and remained unharmed throughout the remainder of the British occupation.

In 1784, the brief British control of St. Augustine ended when negotiations at the end of the war returned Florida to Spain. Throughout the second Spanish occupation of St. Augustine, Castillo de San Marcos was the center of a diverse cultural exchange. When the Spanish returned to Florida, they welcomed into St. Augustine American Indians, slaves, free blacks, British colonists, and immigrants from Italy, Greece, Germany, France, and Ireland. The new Spanish St. Augustine was not a peaceful city, however. Castillo de San Marcos found itself vulnerable to attacks from plantation owners from northern Georgia who crossed over to find and capture fugitive slaves. The Spanish, fearing future attacks from the Americans, continued to make improvements to the fortress, but American encroachment into Florida proved difficult to combat, and in 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States.

Under the new American occupation, Castillo de San Marcos became the property of the United States War Department. President James Monroe, believing the Florida acquisition would calm relations with Seminole Indians, appointed Andrew Jackson to govern St. Augustine at the newly named Fort Marion. Castillo San Marcos (now Fort Marion) was by that time uninhabitable from disrepair. The fortress became a storage facility for military supplies until the outbreak of the Second Seminole War in 1835. By 1842, Army engineers had modified the fort with a water battery, furnace, and refilled the moat around the castle walls. With the repairs, Castillo de San Marcos served as an active defensive fortification during the Seminole and western Indian wars, serving its purpose a final time during the American Civil War.

At the end of Reconstruction, with the resort and railroad land developments in Florida by tycoon Henry Flagler, St. Augustine and the Castillo de San Marcos became a popular tourist destination. The War Department offered guided tours, and in 1883 -- having recognized the value of the historic fort -- made a request for Congressional support to restore the fort. Now managed by the National Park Service, the Castillo illustrates the resourcefulness of the Spanish and their capable military engineers in the New World and the history and cultural influences of various groups associated with the site. Visitors can explore the fortress, enjoy a ranger program, watch a video, or view a demonstration by re-enactors.

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Hernando de Soto is famous in Latin American history as the Spanish conquistador who joined Francisco Pizarro in the invasion of the Inca Empire, but he is also a critical player in American history as the first European to discover the Mississippi River. Located on Shaw’s Point, which is the general area historians believe was the landing place of De Soto’s 1539 expedition, De Soto National Memorial commemorates de Soto’s landing in Florida and his northwestward expedition into North America. De Soto National Memorial is also an archeological site with artifacts and trails left behind by American Indians who guided de Soto’s expedition through Florida to the Mississippi.

The Spanish provinces of Badajoz and Barcarrota both lay claim to hometown status; while de Soto spent time in both as a child, he willed that he be buried in a Badajoz town named Jerez de los Caballeros, or City of the Knights (Templar). Given de Soto’s eventual career as a conquistador and avid horseman, it would seem fitting that he likely came from a town that both idolized knighthood and was noteworthy for its distinguished equestrian training. Born soon after the expulsion of the last Muslims in 1492, de Soto was raised in an atmosphere influenced by the eight centuries of struggle that followed the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This period, known as La Reconquista (the Reconquest), bred a distinct class of fighters who epitomized the medieval knighthood and fought to unify the Christian kingdoms by reclaiming the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim invaders. Influenced by the military and religious crusades that defeated the Moors, and inspired by the discoveries of Christopher Columbus’ voyage, de Soto -- like many Spaniards of his generation -- became eager at a very young age to become a conquering explorer. By the time Hernando de Soto reached the age of 14 he had become a skilled equestrian, and in 1519 he joined the ranks of the famous conquistadores of the New World.

In 1525, following the successful expedition to Panama with Juan Ponce de León and Pedro Arias de Ávila, de Soto gained control of Nicaragua and acquired a vast fortune from American Indian gold and slave trading. During this period de Soto met Francisco Pizarro, a conquistador who informed de Soto of the wealth he had heard of in the native empire that lay south of Panama. In 1531, after receiving permission from the Spanish Crown to conquer Peru, de Soto and Pizarro successfully landed on the coast of modern day Ecuador. Making their way into Peru, the conquistadores found themselves in the middle of the struggle between the Inca ruler of Quito, Atahuallpa, and his half brother Huascar, the ruler of the Inca capital of Cuzco. Using the distraction of the Inca civil war, Pizarro managed to seize Peru after Atahuallpa’s army defeated and executed Huascar. In 1532, Pizarro and de Soto -- like Cortes in Mexico with Monteczuma -- captured and executed Atahuallpa after he rejected the Spaniards' demand for the Inca emperor to convert to Christianity. After learning of Atahuallpa’s death the Inca army eventually surrendered, and the Spaniards gained control of the Inca territories and ransacked the empire’s fortune.

Following the successful conquest of the Inca Empire, de Soto returned to Spain in 1536 and sought an audience with the emperor to request permission to become governor of Quito. Since the Spanish Crown would take a year to grant his request, de Soto took advantage of his time in Spain to marry Inès de Bobadilla, the daughter of his Panama expedition partner, Pedro Arias de Ávila. In the same year, he became a member of the Spanish Order of Santiago, and by 1537, he reached an agreement with Charles I of Spain to conquer Florida. Although the Spanish Crown did not grant his original petition to become governor of Quito, the emperor agreed to make de Soto the governor of Cuba if he returned victorious from his expedition through Florida. In 1539, two years after their departure from Spain, de Soto and his crew landed on the west coast of Florida in the area historians believe is the location of present day Tampa.

Expecting to find great treasures as he did on his previous expeditions to Central and South America, de Soto approached his conquest of Florida with the same mentality and techniques that Pizarro and de Ávila applied in their conquests of Peru and Panama. When de Soto reached Florida, he found that the natives of the Coosa towns did not possess gold and could only offer the Spaniards the richness of their agricultural harvest. De Soto, convinced that he would find monetary treasure, continued to travel northwest from one village to the next terrorizing native towns that did not cooperate by throwing natives to the dogs, burning them alive, enslaving and raping them, and cutting off their noses and hands. Those who did cooperate became servants who helped feed the Spaniards and guide them on the American Indian trails. Both the tribes and the Spaniards suffered losses caused by disease and battles, but despite losing half of his soldiers, de Soto was determined to find the treasures he sought. The journey ended in 1543, when de Soto died from a fever, having reached the Mississippi River at the time of his death. His men buried him in the river and built boats to return to Mexico by floating down to the Gulf of Mexico on the river.

De Soto never came across fortune throughout his voyage, but historians credit him with the European discovery of the Mississippi River. De Soto’s troops were the first Europeans to explore deep into North America, and the details of their travels helped future explorers of the area by offering them information about the land and the natives. By the time later explorers reached the territory de Soto had explored, however, the Florida they found was not the land that de Soto’s men encountered in 1539. When other explorers reached the area of the Coosa towns 20 years later, they found abandoned villages that demonstrated the negative impact the Spaniards had on the native people who were destroyed by raids and disease. Evidence of native life in the Southeast today from this period comes from the sites and artifacts discovered by archeologists, and the Indian trails throughout De Soto National Memorial.

In 1948, the National Park Service acquired 30 acres of Shaw’s point--the area the United States De Soto Expedition Commission declared in 1939 as de Soto’s landing point--to establish a National Memorial commemorating de Soto’s expedition in Florida and his discovery of the Mississippi River. The year 2009 marked the 470th anniversary of the Spaniard’s expedition into North America.

Visitors to De Soto National Memorial can enjoy both indoor and outdoor activities. The visitor center includes displays of historic armor, weapons, and related period items and provides helmets and armor to try on. An orientation film depicts the de Soto expedition and the native people it encountered.

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Although Key West, Florida may be the southernmost point in the continental United States, the story of America’s rich cultural heritage expands beyond the zero mile marker of US-1. Located almost 70 miles off Key West is a cluster of seven coral reef islands that explorer Ponce de León discovered in 1513. Upon seeing the abundant population of sea turtles he named the islands Las Tortugas (The Turtles), but when explorers and merchants learned that the islands lacked fresh drinking water they soon changed the name to Dry Tortugas. Despite their name, the cluster of islands at Dry Tortugas National Park--which includes Garden, Loggerhead, Bush, Long, East, Hospital, and Middle Keys--is the site of events that have played an important role in American cultural and maritime history and a reminder of the seminal role the Spanish have played that history.

Following Ponce de León’s discovery of the Dry Tortugas, the islands immediately became a strategic location for Spanish explorers traveling along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Since these islands were between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, the Spanish considered the Dry Tortugas an important navigational marker that signaled when their vessels should begin turning into the Gulf Coast. As other empires joined the race to colonize the Americas, the passageway at the Dry Tortugas became heavily trafficked by treasure fleets carrying goods to and from the New World. Unfortunately, the Dry Tortugas were also a “ship trap,” whose shallow and flat terrain claimed several European vessels that are shipwrecked there and lie beneath the sea. The first documented shipwreck occurred in 1622. Known by the Spanish as Nuestra Senora de Rosario, this 600-ton vessel fell victim to a hurricane en route from Cuba to Spain. After acquiring Florida in 1819, the United States built two lighthouses--one on Garden Key in 1825, and the second on Loggerhead Key in 1858, to help vessels navigate into the Gulf Coast. Even so, the shallow waters around the Dry Tortugas continued claiming vessels, including the Norwegian Avanti located at the Windjammer Wreck site on Loggerhead Reef, south of Loggerhead Key. Shipwrecked in 1907 and discovered in 1971, the Norwegian Avanti is a 1,862-ton iron ship the British built in 1875. The vessel lies in approximately 18-21 feet of water. Visitors are welcome to explore the Avanti and enjoy the unique marine life that inhabits the Windjammer Wreck.

Although many today are attracted to the islands’ sunken treasures, the most prominent historic feature of Dry Tortugas is Fort Jefferson at Garden Key. Established to control navigation into the Gulf of Mexico and protect the Mississippi River trade, Fort Jefferson is one of the largest masonry forts built along the coast of the United States during the 19th century. Fort Jefferson is significant for its defense of the U.S Gulf Coast and also for its role throughout the Civil War. Fort Jefferson served in the Union’s campaign to obstruct the Confederacy’s shipping efforts in the South. Throughout the Civil War and subsequent years, Fort Jefferson also served as a military prison that held Union deserters, as well as four men tied to the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Construction of this historic fortification began in 1846, but funding issues, periodic hurricanes, sickness, and lack of materials turned Fort Jefferson into a never completed 30-year endeavor. Many of the structures that African slaves and military prisoners constructed from the time of Fort Jefferson’s founding until its abandonment by the US Army in 1874 are still visible today. Among these are the remains of the Officers’ Quarters and Soldiers’ Barracks completed in 1870, two magazines built sometime between 1863 and 1872, the 1825 Garden Key Lighthouse, the restored hotshot furnace, and the cell of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Mudd was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson because of his role in President Abraham Lincoln's assassination; he mended assassin John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, which was injured while fleeing law enforcement. Although never finished, Fort Jefferson continues to stand as a reminder of the enormous efforts of the United States to protect its coastal regions.
On arrival at Dry Tortugas National Park, tourists are encouraged to see the orientation program at the Fort Jefferson visitor center before beginning their tour of the military post and surrounding islands. Visitors can enjoy the historic sites and the natural scenery of these seven islands by kayaking, camping, snorkeling, bird watching, fishing, and taking ranger-led or self-guided tours.

Not all of the islands are open to the public, and restrictions apply for all outdoor activities. There are several closed areas, including the Shark and Coral Special Protection Zones, and the Bush, Hospital, and Long Keys. Camping is restricted beyond Garden Key, and visitors can only swim and snorkel in designated areas of Loggerhead Key. Visitors wishing to kayak into Garden Key should have a permit, and boaters need to check schedules and regulations for anchoring and docking at Garden Key. Fishing restrictions also apply within Dry Tortugas National Park, and commercial fishing, spear fishing, and taking conch or lobster are illegal.

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El Centro Español de Tampa, a National Historic Landmark, is one of the best surviving Spanish mutual aid society buildings in the Gulf Coast States of the United States. Many Spanish immigrants came to the Gulf Coast States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida during the last decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Located in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida’s “Latin Quarter,” this clubhouse reflects the important roles mutual aid and ethnic societies played in immigrants’ new lives in the United States. The building illustrates the trend-setting influence of the Spanish-born elite who founded Ybor City and long had a dominant influence on its commerce and social and intellectual life. El Centro Español de Tampa provides visitors and the nation with an important place to remember this phase of Spanish immigration to the United States.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Ybor City, Florida quickly developed into one of the cigar manufacturing centers of the world populated by Spanish and Cuban immigrants and others who worked in the cigar factories. As Florida’s first “industrial town,” by 1900 cigar factories in Ybor City out-produced cigar manufacturing in Havana, Cuba, earning Ybor City the title of “Cigar Capital of the World.” The male and female artisans who rolled the perfect handcrafted cigars in Ybor City could make good wages and had some control over their own workday. Paid based on how many cigars they produced, they had a certain amount of control over their own rate of production. At the factories, each worker contributed 25 cents per week for the services of lectors (readers). Lectors sat on the platform above the workers in the large workrooms and in loud, clear voices read the daily newspapers and Spanish poems, novels, and plays to the workers at their jobs.

In 1891, with production and business booming, a small body of the Ybor City’s Spanish businessmen and artisans organized the community’s first social and mutual aid society, El Centro Español. Before the State of Florida issued El Centro Español’s charter on September 7, 1891, Tampa had no existing philanthropic or charitable institutions to serve the new immigrants, and unlike their role in many other communities, religious institutions played a relatively small role here. The Spanish elite established El Centro Español to help the Spanish immigrants adapt to the United States while retaining their ethnic traditions. To join, applicants had to be either Spanish by birth or loyal to Spain. The club, which required members to pay 25 cents per week, provided recreational opportunities, low-cost health care for the many single men and the increasing number of families in the area, social privileges, educational programs, and death and injury benefits. As the first mutual aid society in Ybor City, El Centro Español set the organization model and economic blueprint for other nationalities to establish similar institutions.

By 1892, El Centro Español’s directors organized the Spanish Casino Stock Company with the goal of creating further recreational and theatrical activity for the club. The directors then had each of the original 186 members pledge stock shares of $10. They used the money to finance the building of a clubhouse at 16th Street and 7th Avenue. Costing $16,000, the first El Centro Español clubhouse was a large, ornate, wooden frame building that contained a theater, dance hall, cantina, and classrooms. Construction of the Centro Español’s Sanatorio in 1906 – which was probably the most modern and complete hospital in Florida at the time – further established the important role the club played in Ybor’s community. The clubhouse and Sanatorio provided the necessary facilities for the growing membership and influence of the club.

By 1901, the club had grown from 186 members to 926, expanding to 1,886 members in 1907 and to 2,537 in 1912. Over 20 years, the strength and size of the club steadily grew, and by 1912, the club was able to replace its original two-story wooden building with a massive dark red brick and stone-trimmed clubhouse. Built in a combination of Spanish, Moorish, and French Renaissance architectural styles, the clubhouse provided its members with an impressive space for social, cultural, and educational activities.

Set within the boundaries of Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve, Fort Caroline National Memorial commemorates one of the first attempts by Europeans to found a colony in the New World. Two centuries of Spanish and French colonial rivalry in North America began here in 1564 when Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519 – 1572) envisioned Fort Caroline as a French challenge to established Spanish colonies, a potential commercial venture, and a shelter for Huguenots (French Calvinists). The fort quickly became a source of conflict, because Spain resented French intrusion and objected to the presence of Protestants on land the Catholic Spanish claimed.

Picked by Gaspard de Coligny, Jean Ribault led the first expedition in 1562 to establish the colony and arrived at a location on the present day St. Johns River in South Carolina, but a settlement there failed. René de Goulaine de Laudonnière led a second attempt and in 1564 established Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St. Johns River in Florida. This group of 200 named the area La Caroline after the French King Charles IX and began to construct permanent shelter and defenses and try to grow the colony.

The local Timucua initially helped the newly arrived French and provided assistance in building the fort and other structures. Timucuans had lived in the area and throughout northern Florida for at least 1,000 years before the arrival of the French and Spanish in the 1500s. The Timucua drew a large part of their identity from the water around them, depending on it for shellfish and fishing as main elements of their diet. In addition, they supported themselves through some land-based cultivation of crops. Although the Timucua and colonists had generally peaceful interactions, the Timucua ultimately suffered displacement by the arriving Europeans and decimation by foreign diseases. Today, no known Timucua remain.

Irked at the unwelcome French attempt to divert trade from Spain to France and take the riches of the New World while establishing a Protestant community, the Spanish responded quickly to the French settlement. King Philip II of Spain sent an armada led by Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to force the French out of Spanish-claimed Florida. Menéndez and his troops attacked the fort in the fall of 1565, killing most of the settlers they found; however, a sizeable number of the French left Fort Caroline before the attack intending to set upon Menéndez to defend the French claim to the land. A hurricane forced most of the group to beach just south of the fort. They became Menéndez’s next target. A few escaped the storm and returned to France; Menéndez killed the others at a place later called Matanzas (“killing” or “slaughter”). While both Spain and France hoped to use Florida as a base from which to expand their overseas empires, Menéndez's victory ended efforts by the French to establish a lasting presence in the Southeast.

In 1568, the French sought revenge for the 1565 massacre and sent Dominique de Gourgues to attack the fort. De Gourgues landed at Fort San Mateo (Fort Caroline) with three ships in April of 1568 and attacked, captured, and burned the fort killing the Spanish prisoners they took in retribution for the previous massacre of the French. Spain then rebuilt the fort only to abandon it the next year. France never again strongly challenged Spanish claims in North America.

Although the exact site of the fort is unknown, visitors to Fort Caroline can see a large-scale model based on contemporary drawings. Built in 1924 for the Daughters of the American Revolution, the fort model recreates the original depicted in drawings done by artists brought over to record life in the New World as part of the 1564 expedition. Other sites around the fort further document the story of Spanish and French colonization. These include a reproduction of a marker placed by Ribault in 1562 to claim this area of Florida for France and the supposed site where the Spanish camped before their attack on the settlers.

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In the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 70 miles west of Key West, are the seven saltwater reef islands that make up Dry Tortugas National Park. Juan Ponce de León, a Spanish conquistador and colonial administrator in the Caribbean, discovered and named the Dry Tortugas in 1513 as he sailed around the Florida peninsula. In the centuries that followed his first Florida expedition, the reef islands were an important navigational marker for sailors in the Gulf of Mexico and many ships passed through – and wrecked – in the Dry Tortugas. In the mid-19th century, when the islands were no longer a Spanish possession, the United States built Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas’ Garden Key Island to guard the Florida Straits.

Spanish explorers discovered the Dry Tortugas in 1513 during the first official European expedition to Florida. The leader of the expedition was Ponce de León; after serving as governor of Puerto Rico, he acquired from Spain the right to explore unknown lands north of the island colonies. In the spring and summer months of 1513, Ponce de León sailed along the coast of Florida and throughout the Florida Keys. In June, he and his men stopped at the Dry Tortugas to hunt for sea turtles and seals to restock their food supply. Ponce de León called the islands “Las Tortugas” (The Turtles) after the large turtle population. British sailors later renamed them “Dry Tortugas” because the islands have no natural source of fresh water on them. “Tortugas” is one of the oldest European-named places in the United States.

Juan Ponce de León’s 1513 expedition was also the first to document the Florida Current, which later became an important channel for ships traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe. The Florida Current is a fast-moving ocean current that moves east out of the Gulf waters into the Atlantic Ocean, where it becomes the Gulf Stream. The Dry Tortugas are located on the northwest edge of the Florida Current and sailors looked for these reef islands to navigate through or around the current. Not all of the ships that passed through the Straits made it out. Hurricanes and shallow reef waters made the Florida Keys treacherous, and there are shipwrecks in the waters in and around Dry Tortugas National Park.

The first documented shipwreck in the area was the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a 600-ton Spanish galleon that wrecked in 1622 at Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas. The Nuestra Señora del Rosario was part of a large treasure convoy traveling from Havana, Cuba, to Spain and was one of nine ships in the convoy that went down in the Florida Keys when a hurricane hit. The Nuestra Señora del Rosario alone carried half a million pesos worth of silver, which the Spanish recovered after the wreck. Other ships, including British ships, that are known to have wrecked at the Dry Tortugas before the United States annexed Florida in 1821 are a Spanish relief ship (1691), the Granville Packett (1765), the Santísima Concepción (1775), the Maria (1806), and the Sir John Sherbroke (1816).

Ownership of the islands transferred from Spain to the United States in 1821. After annexing Florida, the United States invested in lighthouses and a large fort on the Dry Tortugas. Americans built the first lighthouse on Garden Key in 1825 and the second on Loggerhead Key in 1858. By the time of the construction of the second lighthouse, the Army Engineers had started building Fort Jefferson to protect one of the most-strategic deepwater anchorages in North America, but never completed the on-going project between 1847 and 1875. Hurricanes, yellow fever, and a lack of funding and interest stalled the project permanently. Even so, Fort Jefferson was one of only three Union forts in the South that did not fall to the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the fort also served the United States as a prison and recoaling station during the 19th century.

The fort’s most infamous prisoner was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of participating in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln and served nearly four years at Fort Jefferson before he was pardoned. In the latter decades of the 19th century, the US Navy used Fort Jefferson to recoal ships. The USS Maine left the harbor at Fort Jefferson in 1898 when it weighed anchor for Havana, Cuba, where its explosion led to the Spanish-American War. Fort Jefferson, its contributing buildings and structures, and the Garden Key Lighthouse are part of the Fort Jefferson site.

In addition to preserving and protecting its cultural resources, Dry Tortugas National Park conserves the natural resources on the islands and in the reef. On the islands where Ponce de León’s men hunted turtles for food, sea turtle habitats are now protected. Endangered loggerhead, hawksbill, and green turtles nest on the Dry Tortugas. Certain parts of the park are restricted to non-invasive activity or closed to the public, but public areas are set aside for snorkeling, swimming, and camping. Visitors interested in the island’s history can visit Garden Key to tour Fort Jefferson, where there is a visitor center, and Loggerhead Key to visit its historic lighthouse.

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Fort Matanzas National Monument is on the east coast of Florida, about 14 miles south of St. Augustine, on a narrow passage of water that connects the Matanzas River to the Atlantic Ocean. Known as the Matanzas Inlet, this channel was strategically important for the Spanish as they battled other European nations for control of the New World. For almost 200 years, the Spanish used the Matanzas Inlet to strengthen their coastal defenses and settlements in Florida. Here they built a watchtower on the barrier island where the Matanzas River and Inlet meet. Today, Fort Matanzas is a unit of the National Park System that stands as a testament to the Spanish empire’s determination to protect its territorial claims for control of the New World against the French and British.

The story of Fort Matanzas and the origin of its name began in 1564, when King Philip II of Spain received news that Frenchman René de Laudonnière had established a settlement on land claimed by Spain. Located at the mouth of Florida’s St. Johns River, the French base at Fort Caroline posed a serious threat for Spanish treasure fleets sailing to and from Europe. French establishment of Fort Caroline amidst the Protestant Reformation fueled the tensions between the Spanish and the French. The news that Huguenots--French Protestants--were settling in Florida further aggravated the devoutly Catholic King Philip. Although the Spanish empire clearly demonstrated its objection to the Huguenots' presence in Florida, the French continued to supply the settlement, and in May of 1565, Jean Ribault sailed to Fort Caroline with 600 soldiers to reinforce the French post.

Soon after Ribault reached Fort Caroline, King Philip ordered Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to remove the French and establish Florida’s first Spanish settlement. By August, Avilés reached the eastern coast of Florida with 800 Spaniards. After a brief skirmish with the French, Avilés and his men retreated south of Fort Caroline and founded Florida’s first Spanish post in the area where St. Augustine is today. Once the Spanish settled in Florida, the French began planning an attack on the newly founded Puerto San Agustin, and on September 10, Jean Ribault and his men moved to attack the Spanish post. Although the French initially sailed toward St. Augustine, a hurricane changed their course, and Ribault and his men landed south of their intended destination.

As the French lay shipwrecked on the coast of Florida between present day Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral, Avilés and his men headed north to Fort Caroline and attacked the French settlement. Because Ribault and his soldiers left the post unprotected, the Spanish easily captured Fort Caroline, killing most of its residents, except for women and children Avilés sent by ship to Havana. With Fort Caroline destroyed, Avilés returned to San Agustin and met with some Timucuan Indians who informed him about Ribault’s shipwreck a few miles south. Avilés immediately jumped at the opportunity to remove the French from Florida marching 14 miles south of the Spanish post with 50 soldiers to an inlet where they massacred nearly 250 of the shipwrecked French Huguenots, including Ribault. From that moment on, the inlet and river became known as Matanzas, which in Spanish means “slaughters”. The park commemorates the killing of the French Huguenots by the Spanish.

After the French massacre, the Spanish town at St. Augustine continued to grow, and by 1695, the Spanish completed Castillo de San Marcos, which became the heart of Florida’s coastal defenses. Although Castillo de San Marcos protected the coast of St. Augustine from pirate and enemy attacks, the Spanish soon realized that the stone fortress could not protect the town from its one and only weakness, the Matanzas Inlet. Since the inlet allowed enemy vessels to attack St. Augustine from the rear, the Spanish began building watchtowers on a barrier island near the inlet that would allow them to control the Matanzas River. Initially, the towers the Spanish constructed were simple structures made out of wood, which often needed replacement since the material could not withstand fires and the wet Florida climate. After numerous pirate attacks and as the British threat intensified, the Spanish recognized the need for a stronger fort.

Completed in 1742, Fort Matanzas is 50 feet wide and 30 feet high, built out of coquina, a local shell stone that the Spanish also used in their construction of Castillo de San Marcos. The Spanish usually stationed two gunners and four infantrymen at Fort Matanzas, but as international tensions increased, so did the numbers of soldiers stationed at the fort. Five guns protected the inlet; some weighing six pounds and one up to 18 pounds, they could easily reach a target less than a half a mile away. To maintain the fort, the Spanish rotated soldiers monthly between St. Augustine and Fort Matanzas, keeping soldiers on high alert to ward off British fleets. After defeating the British who attempted to gain control of the inlet in 1742, Fort Matanzas never again fired its guns.

When the Treaty of Paris of 1763 transferred Florida to Britain at the end of the French and Indian War, the British gained control of Fort Matanzas. In the initial years of the British occupation, the fort saw little change to its infrastructure, but as the American Revolution gained momentum, the British began to add more cannons. Although the struggle during the war of independence took place in the north, British forces faced a possible threat from the Spanish, who under General Bernardo de Galvez had already captured Pensacola. Before the Spanish could launch an attack, the British lost. The second Treaty of Paris returned Florida to Spain in 1784. The Spanish made little effort to maintain Fort Matanzas after that, so by the time the United States acquired Florida in 1819, the fort was in poor condition.

After its abandonment, erosion and rainwater took a heavy toll on the historic structure. In the late 19th century, Henry Flagler’s resorts began attracting wealthy visitors to Florida, especially St. Augustine. Many traveled to the Matanzas Inlet to see the ruins. They petitioned the United States Congress to save Fort Matanzas, and in 1916, after recognizing the fort’s historic significance, the Federal Government began to restore the site.

At Fort Matanzas National Monument, visitors can enjoy a ferry ride, explore the fort and nature trails, and learn about the history of the site. To reach Fort Matanzas, visitors must take a ferry from the visitor center.

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Competition between Spain and Britain made Florida a haven for colonial South Carolina’s fugitive slaves in the 18th century. To destabilize British colonization in the north, Spain encouraged British slaves to escape to Florida, where they could convert to Catholicism and become Spanish citizens. In the 1730s, a black Spanish community formed in St. Augustine, the capital of Spanish Florida, and founded a town called Fort Mose. In the 18th century, two Fort Mose sites existed, one that the Spanish occupied between 1737 and 1740, and another occupied between 1752 and 1763. Fort Mose is the only known free black town in the present-day southern United States that a European colonial government sponsored. The Fort Mose Site, today a National Historic Landmark, is the location of the second Fort Mose.

Slavery in Spain predated its colonization of the Americas. Spain established its slave laws in the 13th century. Catholic doctrine, Roman law, and Spanish policy influenced these laws. According to Spanish law, slavery was not a natural state for any race. It was a product of war by which the victors enslaved rather than killed their enemy. Slavery existed in Spain, but slaves had legal rights within the Spanish slave system, including the right to own property, sue in courts, keep their families together, and purchase their freedom. Black African slaves arrived in the Spanish colonies in the early 16th century, where they replaced the forced labor of the indigenous population. Enslaved Africans first set foot in St. Augustine at its founding in 1565 as members of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’s colonizing expedition. Despite slave rebellions in the Spanish American colonies, by the 18th century, Spanish Florida had a growing population of both free and enslaved black colonists.

Spain’s flexible attitude toward slaves and black freedmen encouraged British slaves in South Carolina to escape to Florida. In 1693, King Charles II of Spain ordered his Florida colonists to give runaway slaves from British colonies freedom and protection if they converted to Catholicism and agreed to serve Spain. The fugitive slaves from South Carolina who made it to Spanish Florida could expect to gain more control over their own lives, even as Spanish slaves. Between the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries, an unknown number of slaves from South Carolina successfully escaped to Florida. Spanish records note at least six separate groups of slaves who escaped from South Carolina to St. Augustine between 1688 and 1725. This policy of refuge encouraged fugitive slaves to flee to Spanish Florida with the hope of a better life if they made it to a Spanish outpost, and it gave the Spanish a weapon to use against the British. Spain’s policy toward runaways took laborers from the British colony and boosted its own colonial population to oppose the British.

In 1726, Florida governor Antonio de Benavides created a black slave militia to help the white Spanish regiments defend St. Augustine from British attacks. He appointed Francisco Menéndez to lead the militia. Captain Menéndez was a black slave and a veteran of the Yamasee War of 1715. He escaped to St. Augustine from South Carolina with nine other slaves in 1724. Despite Spain’s promise of freedom, Governor Benavides ignored the broad view of King Charles II’s 1693 order to free fugitive slaves. He believed it only applied to slaves who arrived in Florida during wartime. Benavides, perhaps afraid of British retribution, sold several runaway slaves in 1729 to reimburse their British owners and did not free the militiamen, including Menéndez, despite their loyalty. In 1733, the government in Spain outlawed the sale of runaway slaves to private citizens and offered the soldiers freedom after four additional years of service. Menéndez and several others petitioned the government for freedom that year and in 1737 they received unconditional freedom from the new Florida governor, Manuel de Montiano.

After Montiano granted freedom to Menéndez, he established the village of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé for black citizens of St. Augustine. The appellation “Gracia Real” indicated that the king established the town. Saint Teresa de Avilés was the town’s patron saint, and Mose was the name of the site prior to settlement. Fort Mose was its unofficial name. There were nearly 40 free men and women at Fort Mose, including Menéndez and his wife María, who pledged to serve Spain and convert to Catholicism. According to British accounts, the first fort built was of stone and the community lived in dwellings outside of it. Although a white Catholic priest and a white Spanish officer were at the village, the governor considered Menéndez the head of the Fort Mose community and respected his military leadership.

The Spanish government emphasized its religious and humanitarian reasons for founding Fort Mose, but the village was also strategically placed to defend St. Augustine against British attacks. In 1739, African slaves in South Carolina killed over 20 British colonists and then tried but failed to escape to St. Augustine in a revolt called the Stono Rebellion. After the rebellion, an international war in Europe intensified competition between the colonies and their uneasy peace broke down.

In 1740, colonial governor James Oglethorpe of Georgia invaded Florida and burned Spanish outposts along the St. Johns River, as he led his force of British colonists and American Indian allies south to St. Augustine. They attacked the Florida capital and quickly captured Fort Mose. Because they lacked the fortifications to hold off Oglethorpe’s army, the Fort Mose community evacuated the town before the British arrived and escaped to St. Augustine. Soon afterward, the Fort Mose militia returned to take back their village from the British and won a conflict called the Battle of Bloody Mose. Beaten and unable to take the city, Oglethorpe retreated. The governor praised the bravery of Menéndez and his militia in a report of the battle to the king. After Oglethorpe’s attack, the Spanish abandoned the first Fort Mose and the black community returned to St. Augustine, where they integrated into mainstream Spanish colonial life.

Despite their successes in the capital, in 1752 Governor Fulgencio García de Solís ordered the black St. Augustine citizens to rebuild Fort Mose at a new site north of the city. The second Fort Mose, which Captain Menéndez again led, lasted until Spain gave Florida to Britain in 1763. In 1759, 67 people lived at Fort Mose. Most households were married couples and children. After the North American Seven Years War, known by the British as the French and Indian War, Spain abandoned Florida. The Spanish, including the Fort Mose community, left the continent and resettled in Matanzas, Cuba, on the Spanish frontier. Although the Spanish government outfitted them and gave them land, the Fort Mose refuges found life in Matanzas was rough. Refugees, including Francisco Menéndez, eventually moved to Havana, Cuba. The black Spanish community never returned to Fort Mose, but there is evidence of Spanish activity at Fort Mose after the American Revolution when Spain resettled Florida.

Beginning in the 1970s, ongoing archeological excavations at the site of the second Fort Mose uncovered a moat, log stockade, and earthwork fort walls. Evidence within the earthwork walls dates structures back to the first Spanish occupation. In 1759, according to a Spanish census, Fort Mose had 22 dwellings. Archeologists believe they were located in and around the main fort. The second Fort Mose also had a large wooden parish church with a thatched roof. At the site, archeologists discovered beads, nails, glass, buttons, American Indian ceramics, Mexican majolica, English wares, and food remains. During the Spanish colonial period, the Fort Mose site was dry farmland. It evolved into a marsh during the late 19th century. The site today is Florida’s Fort Mose Historic State Park, where reenactors and rangers interpret the lives of Spanish Florida’s freed men and women. The visitor center provides information about the history of the site and its museum exhibit highlights artifacts from the Spanish colonial period. Beyond the museum, visitors can walk across a wooden boardwalk that extends from the public parking lot into the open marshland to see the site of the second Fort Mose.

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At the junction of the Wakulla and St. Marks Rivers, Fort San Marcos de Apalache in western Florida was the site of three Spanish forts between 1679 and 1821. In three episodes during this period, Spain occupied this river junction at present-day St. Marks to protect its trade routes and its claim to Florida. Fort San Marcos de Apalache today is a National Historic Landmark and public State park, where visitors can see the remains of the Spanish forts as well as Civil War-era Confederate earthworks.

Spain first arrived at the future site of San Marcos when Pánfilo de Narváez, a Florida governor and explorer, and his 300 men stopped to build ships at the peninsula in 1526. Florida did not have the gold or silver mines of other Spanish colonies, however, so Spain did not invest resources in the colony until France and England threatened Spanish dominance in the Caribbean. To keep their claim to Florida, the Spanish built forts and Catholic mission towns throughout the region where they allied with American Indian nations, whose populations had been ravaged already by warfare and disease after initial contact with Europeans.

More than a century after the Narváez expedition, Spanish colonists returned to settle and occupy the fertile province of the Apalachee Indians. In Apalachee territory, small Spanish outposts produced wheat to supply Spain’s larger missions in the Caribbean region. Supply ships were targets for British and French pirates along the Florida coast, so the Spanish government ordered soldiers to garrison the strategic peninsula where the Wakulla and St. Marks rivers flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The first Spanish structure at Fort San Marcos de Apalache was a wooden fort. Spanish colonizers built this fort in 1679, and it held 45 Spanish soldiers and 400 Apalachee Indians. Spain lost the fort after an attack by English, French, and Indian raiders in 1682, but quickly recovered the site. However, the British threat and pirate attacks forced Spain to consolidate its presence in Florida. British forces from South Carolina and their Creek allies invaded Spanish Florida in the early 18th century. The British destroyed several Spanish missions, enslaved thousands of Apalachee, and crippled the Spanish colony. During this war, the Spanish burned down their wooden fort and abandoned San Marcos.

Spain returned to San Marcos in 1718. Led by Captain José Primo de Rivera, Spanish soldiers built a sturdier wooden fort there to establish a stronger defense against attackers, and in 1739, they began constructing a large stone fort. This stone fort was still under construction when Spain agreed to give Florida to Britain in 1763. This deal was part of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the global conflict commonly known in the U.S. as the French and Indian War. Twenty years later, as part of a series of treaties forged in France in 1783 between the newly independent United States, France, Spain, and Great Britain, Britain returned Florida to Spain.

With Britain finally removed from the region, Spain occupied Fort San Marcos de Apalache a third time between 1787 and 1818. San Marcos was a small garrison, but continued to be an important and thriving center for Indian trade. It was also a target for small-scale regional struggles between the Spanish, French, British, and American Indian groups. Spain lost the fort briefly to British renegade William Augustus Bowles, an adventurer who led a small army of Europeans, Africans, and American Indians against British and Spanish colonists in the 1790s. Ultimately, Spain lost the fort to the United States in 1818 when Andrew Jackson invaded Florida during the First Seminole War. Soon after the fort fell, political unrest in Mexico and increasingly assertive Americans led Spain to cede Florida to the United States in the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819.

After Spain left Florida in 1821, the United States government sent troops to occupy San Marcos for three years while the government took control of its new territory. In 1839, the U.S. government returned to the fort. In 1859, 14 years after Florida became a State, United States Marines established a Federal hospital at San Marcos to serve victims of yellow fever. The Americans used limestone and flint rock from the Spanish stone fort to build the hospital, finishing it in 1858. Soon after the yellow fever epidemic, the Civil War broke out between the United States and the southern Confederacy. In 1861, Confederate soldiers occupied San Marcos, which they renamed Fort Ward. The Confederates built earthwork fortifications at Fort Ward to defend Florida from a squadron of Union soldiers, who blockaded the St. Marks River throughout the war.

For 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the San Marcos de Apalache fort site was in private ownership, accessible only by boat, and overgrown by vegetation. In the 1960s, the historic site became a National Historic Landmark, and Florida bought the land to turn it into the San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park. The State filled in part of the marsh that separated it from the mainland and built a road, Canal Street, as well as a parking lot, museum, and public amenities for park visitors. Beyond the museum, the park has walking paths, a picnic area, and a spot for fishing. The park museum sits on top of the Marine hospital and the original stone foundation is still visible. In honor of the peninsula’s many occupiers throughout the centuries since Spanish colonization, six different flags greet visitors to San Marcos. Beyond the park infrastructure, only the stone ruins of the third Spanish fort and remnants of the Confederate earthworks are visible on the natural landscape of San Marcos.

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Freedom Tower in Miami, Florida is considered the "Ellis Island of the South” for its role from 1962 through 1974 as the Cuban Assistance Center, offering nationally sanctioned relief to the Cuban refugees who sought political asylum from the regime of Fidel Castro. A National Historic Landmark, Freedom Tower illustrates the important story of the Cuban exodus to the United States and resettlement during the Cold War. Because of the political climate of the era, Cubans seeking political asylum received a warm welcome into the United States. Many Cubans fled to Miami, Florida because of its close proximity to Cuba.

Enacted during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 authorized assistance to the large number of Cubans fleeing to the United States for political asylum. The U.S. government transformed the building at 600 Biscayne Boulevard in Miami into the Freedom Tower, opening the Cuban Assistance Center there to help Cubans with everything from health care to housing, finances, and education. While assistance centers opened in Miami and other cities, the Freedom Tower is the single most important physical manifestation of this period of Cold War era politics and the Cuban exodus experience. More than anything else, Freedom Tower stands tall as a symbol of hope and freedom, and the firm belief that democracy should be available to all who fight against tyranny and demagoguery.

Construction of the building that would become the Freedom Tower began on June 11, 1924. Former Ohio governor James M. Cox purchased the Miami Daily News and Metropolis (Miami News) in 1923 during a thriving economic period in Florida and commissioned the construction of the building for use as the newspaper’s headquarters and printing facility. The building opened on July 26, 1925.

Freedom Tower reaches 17 stories, a significant achievement at the time, and contains over 82,000 square feet of space. The tower, based on the design of the Giralda tower of the Cathedral of Seville, is 11 stories high and three bays deep. Details such as the oak main doors, a cast iron decorative transom, wrought iron balconies, Corinthian capitals on the columns, groined ceilings, and cast concrete cherubs, add to the allure of this Spanish Renaissance-style building. Using a blend of Spanish and Italian architectural techniques with Moorish ornamental embellishments, Freedom Tower rose as a permanent and distinctive feature on the Miami skyline. The Miami News utilized the building until its 1957 move to a new facility. It sat virtually unused for the next five years until the U.S. government leased it, starting in 1962, to assist the Cuban refugees.

When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959 he initially was very popular, even receiving support from the Catholic Church. He rose to leadership as a champion of the working class, raising wages and redistributing the assets of the wealthy. He made many businesses property of the Cuban government and nationalized large tracts of agricultural land. His popularity was short-lived, however, because he soon made significant policy changes after aligning himself with the Soviet version of Communism, resulting in a mass exodus of the Cuban people. Fearing imprisonment, violence, or worse, many upper and middle class Cubans fled the country, leaving all of their possessions behind. They left their belongings because they believed that they would be returning to Cuba after Castro’s surely imminent removal from power; they thought of themselves as exiles, not immigrants. Meanwhile, Castro began a campaign of ridding the island of anyone who did not support his ideologies. By the end of 1960, approximately 40,000 Cubans had fled to the United States.

Between 1965 and 1973, thousands more Cubans fled to the United States. Many arrived via Pan American World Airways’ “Freedom Flights.” Pan American World Airways flew two flights per day, five days a week from Varadero Airport, east of Havana, to Miami. Between December 1, 1965 and December 31, 1969, over 175,000 Cubans fled to the United States on what became known as Freedom Flights. The Freedom Flights continued until 1973, with a brief hiatus from August 1971 to December 1972 when Castro stopped the flights.

Because of the large wave of refugees in such a short period of time, the U.S. government needed to provide assistance to ensure that the Cubans could successfully resettle and start new lives in the United States. On July 1, 1962, the General Services Administration began its lease on the first four floors of the Miami News Tower for the Cuban Assistance Center. Simple gold lettering identified the building as “The Freedom Tower.” Utilizing the basement, lobby, mezzanine, third, and fourth floors of the building from 1962 until 1974, the Cuban Assistance Center provided thousands of Cuban refugees with resources for adjusting to their new lives in the United States.

Known to the Cuban refugees as "El Refugio," the Freedom Tower provided in-processing services, basic medical and dental services, records on relatives already in the U.S., and relief aid for those starting a new life with nothing. Refugees were furnished with identification cards and were interviewed to identify both their needs and strengths. They received medical examinations and surplus foods like cheese and canned meat. Federal funds were also distributed for financial assistance. Due to the mass influx of workers in the Miami area, job opportunities became scarce, and some refugees, through the Cuban Assistance Center, resettled in other areas of the country where economic opportunities did exist. Many refugees remember that they could find all the assistance they needed at the Freedom Tower. Many of the people working at the Cuban Assistance Center were Cuban so they could understand the needs and fears of those they were helping.

The Freedom Tower represented, for many Cuban refugees, a turning point in their lives. Here they began the slow process of rebuilding their lives by equipping themselves with the tools and resources necessary for successful resettlement. By utilizing the food program, medical clinics, and financial relief programs, refugees were able to start their new lives in the United States. The Cuban exile community utilized the Cuban Assistance Center and went on to make significant contributions to their new communities in the United States. With an estimated 650,000 Cuban refugees entering the United States from 1959 until 1974, the Federal Government spent $957 million dollars on the Cuban Refugee Program. By 1974, the U.S. government began phasing out the program and closed the Cuban Assistance Center in the same year.

Bought and sold many times in the coming years, and with vagrants destroying much of the architectural embellishments, the building languished until its purchase in 1997 by Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder and leader of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation. While Jorge Mas Canosa passed away only two months after purchasing the building, his family continued with his plans for its restoration and later sold it to another Cuban American family in 2004. The Pedro Martin family that purchased the building in 2005 donated it to Miami Dade College, the largest Hispanic-serving institution of higher education.

Today, the Freedom Tower serves the college as its premier exhibition space and gallery. Admission to the exhibition space on the 2nd floor of the building is free and open to the public. There are plans to use the Freedom Tower as the Cuban American Historical Museum in the future. As a beacon of hope and freedom, the Freedom Tower remains a national symbol of the liberty sought and found by Cuban refugees who came to the United States of America at the height of the Cold War conflict.

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A National Historic Landmark, the González-Alvarez House is the oldest surviving Spanish colonial dwelling in St. Augustine, Florida. While evidence exists that the González-Alvarez House site had been occupied since the 1600s, the present house dates to the early 1700s. Construction began on the house around 1723 and it reached its final form in 1790. The house exhibits both Spanish and British colonial architectural details and styles. A visit to the house reveals a record of life in St. Augustine over 400 years – through the Spanish, British, and American occupations of St. Augustine.

Spaniard Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established St. Augustine in 1565. Although St. Augustine had an early history plagued by violence and destruction at the hands of rival European nations, the settlement persevered and survived to be the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. Spanish settlers not only had to fight rival European nations, they had to adapt to Florida’s intense weather. Adjusting their architectural techniques to the climate needs of Florida, the Spanish developed a plan for the typical St. Augustine colonial dwelling from 1703 until 1763. When the British briefly controlled St. Augustine from 1763 until 1784, they adopted and improved upon this plan. The González-Alvarez House represents both of these phases of colonial architectural development.

A typical Spanish colonial St. Augustine residence was a one-story rectangular shaped building with two to four rooms. The homes had either a loggia (an open-sided room) or a porch, and often a street balcony. The main entrance to the home was through either the loggia or the porch, which opened to a walled garden in the rear. The thick coquina (a natural shell-stone) walls provided protection from heat in the summer and cold in the winter. Braziers heated the houses, which did not have chimneys. An essential element of the plan was to orient the home’s open areas to face south or east for ventilation purposes. In the summer, winds from the southeast moved through the homes, ventilating the large rooms and cooling the loggias or porches.

During the British occupation of St. Augustine, British settlers expanded porches and moved entrances from the walled gardens to the fronts of the houses facing the street. They also added chimneys for cooking and heating, entire rooms, and sometimes second stories to make the homes more spacious.

Construction began on the González-Alvarez house around 1723. Evidence suggests that by 1727, Tomás González y Hernández, an artilleryman stationed at the Castillo de San Marcos, lived in the house. The original home was a one-story rectangular-shaped stone dwelling with thick coquina walls that were plastered with lime and whitewashed. Covered by a hipped roof shingled with wood, the home’s two large rooms had tabby floors (a mixture of shells, lime, and sand) and large windows without glass. Closely laid parallel pieces of wood, called rejas, covered these large windows and double-leaf solid shutters protected them on the inside. González and his family lived in the house for nearly 40 years. When Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, many of St. Augustine’s Spanish settlers left, including González and his family, who moved to Cuba.

The house sat vacant until 1775 when a wealthy British soldier, Sergeant-Major Peavett, purchased the home. Between 1775 and 1786, Sergeant-Major Peavett doubled the size of the house by adding a wooden framed second story covered in clapboard siding. Sergeant-Major Peavett replaced the rejas and the interior double-leaf solid shutters with glazed glass windows. Sergeant-Major Peavett died in 1786, and shortly thereafter, his wife married John Hudson, an Irishman in financial crisis. To pay off Hudson’s debts, the house went up for auction. Newly arrived

Spaniard Geronimo Alvarez purchased the home and began the alterations that would bring it to its final 18th century form.
Constructing it entirely of coquina, Alvarez added a two-story tier containing six rooms to the rear side of the house. On the east end of the house, Alvarez added a framed porch that sat on top of a one-story room coquina addition. The new rooms included a chapel, three bedrooms, a loggia, and a pantry. Alvarez, his family, and his descendents lived in the home for almost 100 years.

Beginning in 1882, ownership of the house changed hands many times, and by 1892 it was being presented to visitors as the “Oldest House” in America, a title now contested. The St. Augustine Historical Society acquired the home in 1918 and conducted research, archeological studies, and restoration and renovations on the site. Today, the González-Alvarez House is part of the St. Augustine Historical Society’s Oldest House Museum Complex, which also includes two museums, a changing exhibition gallery, an ornamental garden, and a museum store. Guided tours of the complex are available every half hour.

Plan Your Visit

Stretching for miles along the southern coasts of Mississippi, Alabama, and the northwestern corner of Florida, Gulf Islands National Seashore helps tell the story of the development of the United States as an independent nation. The area included within the National Seashore was important in the creation and protection of the southern United States after a series of occupations by the Spanish and British. Visitors will find an array of impressive military heritage sites within the park that reflect the pivotal role of fortresses in seizing control of the region. Gulf Islands National Seashore also offers a wide variety of exciting recreational possibilities including swimming, boating, fishing, and camping.

Between the 1500s and the 1800s, the area where Gulf Islands National Seashore is located came under the Spanish, then the British, the Spanish again, and finally the United States. The sites to see in the park further evolved during the American Civil War and many remained in military service through World War II. Exhibits and tours feature and interpret not only military history but also the area's heritage as linked to the Apache, Latino culture, slavery, shipbuilding, and the coastal environment. There is much to see and do at the many units of the park to learn about the history of the region and the nation.

Around Pensacola, links to Latino heritage are especially strong. The Spanish first came to the area in the 1500s as one of the colonizing powers that ruled Florida. Because the Spanish originally regarded Pensacola as a simple military outpost, Spain only sent basic necessities to support its troops, including slaves and workmen, to build a military presence on the west coast of Florida to protect the strategic Pensacola Bay. In 1698, the Spanish constructed the first fort in this area, Fort San Carlos de Austria; however, the French completely destroyed it in 1719. The rivalry between European powers in this area led to the repeated destruction and rebuilding of fortresses.

From 1763 to 1781, the British controlled Pensacola and built the Royal Navy Redoubt, a five-faced battery made from earth and logs. In 1781, the Spanish regained control of Pensacola, which marked the beginning of the last period of Spanish rule in the area. In 1797, the Spanish constructed the Bateria de San Antonio, a masonry water battery, and Fort San Carlos de Barrancas, which was a replacement for the fort the Spanish built during their first occupation.

Andrew Jackson moved into Pensacola in 1814, in response to Spanish-British collaboration during the War of 1812. The British immediately burned down the fort and retreated from the area. The Spanish attempted to rebuild their fort, but eventually surrendered. Thus, Jackson seized control of West Florida and the fort for the United States in 1821.

Today, visitors can see this legacy in Fort Barrancas and its associated structures. The original Spanish-built fort has been highly altered over time, but the colonial-era Bateria de San Antonio, also known as the Water Battery, that dates from 1797 is still partially visible. US troops overtook it in 1834 and then used it during the Civil War. American engineers remodeled the Water Battery in 1840 and built the current brickwork Fort Barrancas on the bluff between 1839 and 1844, connecting it to the Water Battery by a tunnel. The United States deactivated Fort Barrancas on April 15, 1947. AFter being restored, the fort opened to the public in 1980..

Spain was the first European nation to gain a foothold in this region of the New World but other powers followed. The conflicts that marked the settlement at Pensacola were mostly between colonizing forces, but American Indian groups living in the area were also severely affected. Beyond the struggles of imperialism, successive waves of colonizers encountered American Indian tribes such as the Apache and, later, the Seminole. Relations between the colonists and Indians were not always peaceful, and by the time of the Spanish surrendered Florida to the British in 1763, foreign disease (like the notorious yellow fever) had devastated many of the Indians. Those who survived fled to Cuba with the Spanish. The Seminoles, who began moving into the area in the mid-1700s, clashed with the new American settlers, and few tribe members remained by the turn of the next century.

Meanwhile, the area around the original Spanish Fort Barrancas continued to be important in the nation’s coastal defense and the protection of Pensacola. Completed nearby in 1834, Fort Pickens played a defensive role as a Union stronghold against nearby Confederate forces at Fort McRee and Fort Barrancas during the Civil War. Fort Pickens is the largest of the four forts built in the area to protect Pensacola. The Advanced Redoubt to the north was constructed between 1845 and 1870 to defend against an enemy attack from the land, unlike the other fortifications whose defensive artillery faced the sea. A trench line connected Advanced Redoubt and Fort Barrancas, protecting the navy yard to the east from infantry attacks.

Just west of Fort Pickens in Florida is Fort McRee. Constructed between 1834 and 1839, this fort now lies in ruins after heavy damage during the Civil War and natural erosion of the shoreline on which it sits. Despite this, the US military continued to build artillery batteries here for the defense of Perdido Key and the coastline, through World War II. In addition to the site of the former fort, ruins of these batteries are still visible both here and near Fort Pickens.

Fort Massachusetts on West Ship Island in Mississippi was also intended for national defense. Beginning in 1859, Americans rebuilt what had once been a French base in the early 1700s to protect the strategic deepwater harbor on the north side of the island. Storms, disease, climate, isolation and the Civil War made construction on the remote barrier island such a challenge that it halted entirely in 1866 before completion of the fort.

Visitors to the park can explore Fort Barrancas and its Advanced Redoubt, Fort Pickens, Fort McRee, and Fort Massachusetts through a variety of ranger-led tours, youth programming, and special events. Although few tangible remains at Gulf Island National Seashore mark their presence, it was the Spanish who first realized the strategic importance of western Florida and began the series of outposts that evolved over time to protect the coast of the United States.

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The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor extends from Wilmington, North Carolina in the north to Jacksonville, Florida, in the south. The National Heritage Area includes roughly 80 barrier islands and continues inland to adjacent coastal counties, defining a region 30 miles inland throughout the United States Low Country. The Gullah/Geechee Heritage Corridor is home to the Gullah people in the Carolinas, and the Geechee in Georgia and Florida – cultural groups descended from enslaved peoples from West and Central Africa. The Gullah and Geechee share similar linguistic, artistic and societal traits that have remained relatively intact for several centuries due to the geographic isolation of the region. The cultures represent the many ways that Africans in the Americas maintained their homeland roots while simultaneously assimilating aspects of new cultures they encountered during and after enslavement. The Spanish came into what is now the heritage area in the 16th century.

The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor is managed by a federal commission made up of local representatives who collaborate with the National Park Service, Community Partners, Grass Root organizations and the State historic preservation offices of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Through research, education and interpretation, the corridor aims to preserve and raise awareness regarding the Gullah/Geechee, among America’s least-known and most unique cultures. Visitors to the southeastern coast of the country have the chance to experience Gullah/Geechee heritage through historic sites, local tours, traditional foods, cultural events, and art galleries.

Gullah/Geechee in the Southeastern United States

There are multiple theories as to where the Gullah/Geechee people received their name. It is possible that the name “Gullah” is derived from the country of Angola, where many of the Gullah/Geechee people may have originated. Another possibility is that the name came from Gola, an ethnic group that lives in West Africa. The term “Geechee” may come from another West African ethnic group known as the Kissi. It has also been suggested that the “Gullah/Geechee” name may have Native American roots. When the Spanish arrived to the South Carolina and Georgia region, they decided to call it Guale after a Native American tribe they encountered. Guale became one of four primary Spanish mission provinces along with Timucua, Mocama, and Apalachee.

When the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution banned slavery in 1865, most of the African and American-born slaves along the southeastern coast remained in the region that had come to be their homes. Life on the barrier islands was quite isolated from that of the mainland, and few outside visitors ever made contact with the newly freed communities. Because of this geographic isolation and a strong sense of cultural connection amongst the people, the African Americans who today self-identify as Gullah/Geechee retained their African heritage to a strong degree.

Most of the Gullah/Geechee still live in rural communities of low-level, vernacular buildings along the Low Country mainland coast and on the barrier islands. Towns once were often dotted with dirt roads and traversed by oxen, mules, and horses. The Gullah/Geechee are the speakers of the only African-American Creole language that developed in the United States – one that combines elements of English and over 30 African dialects. Oral traditions, folklore, and storytelling are cultural traditions that have gone largely unchanged for generations. Religious ceremonies such as ring shouts, artisan crafts like sweet grass basket weaving, and culinary traditions such as “hoppin’ john” and sweet potato pone are all preserved as part of the culture of the Gullah/Geechee.

Recently life has changed for the Gullah/Geechee. The barrier islands were accessible only by boat until the building of the first bridges starting in the early 1950s. Since that time, many traditional Gullah/Geechee communities on the islands have been altered by cultural infiltration from mainlanders, or been lost entirely to real estate development. The advent of air-conditioning transformed the hot, humid islands into desirable, ocean-side property bringing outsiders into what was once solely Gullah or Geechee territory. Despite recent losses, the Gullah/Geechee people remain a testament to the power of human adaptability and cultural survival, even in the face of outside pressures from the modern world.

Because of the nature of the Gullah/Geechee culture and its associated corridor, many aspects of the area’s heritage are intangible and cannot be experienced through a solitary site. Local institutions and organizations thus offer regional tours and assistance. Both The Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society in Georgia, and Gullah Tours out of Charleston, South Carolina provide boat tours that focus on Gullah/Geechee culture, language, music and storytelling. Carolina Food Pros also offers an extensive culinary tour of coastal South Carolina featuring traditional Lowland and Gullah cooking. Please call 843-723-3366 for scheduling.

The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor protects, bolsters, and showcases the traditional Gullah/Geechee culture that remains in the region, and its relation to the overall history of slavery, plantations, abolition and emancipation in the South. Several cultural and educational institutions interpret this heritage for visitors. Geechee Kunda is a museum and community education center in Riceboro, Georgia, which features exhibits, galleries, classes and events about Geechee culture, a gift shop, and a family research center. For more information, call 912-884-4440. The Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture in Charleston, South Carolina focuses on Gullah heritage in the Low Country as well as the wider theme of the African Diaspora in America. The center offers exhibits, public programming, tours, and an extensive archival collection. Call 843-953-7609 for upcoming events and information.

In addition to museums, visitors to the heritage corridor can experience the area through many federally recognized historic places. The National Park Service administers Cumberland Island National Seashore. Cumberland Island is Georgia’s largest, southernmost barrier island, with four major historic districts and 87 structures listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The island is still home to Geechee descendants of slaves who worked the plantations there through the mid 1800s. Park interpretive services include guided ranger tours and a museum with exhibits on the history and culture of the area that is open on Sundays from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.

Visitors interested in plantation history may also enjoy another unit of the National Park System, the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The site interprets one of the authors and signers of the United States Constitution. In addition to the c. 1828 Farmhouse, the site focuses on plantation life and agricultural history on the 28 preserved acres of the original 715 acre property. This includes regularly scheduled Gullah heritage celebrations and a Gullah film festival.

One of the most notable historic places to visit within the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor is the Penn School Historic District on St. Helena Island in South Carolina. The site is a National Historic Landmark listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The 47-acre area contains 18 historic buildings dating from the mid 1800s. Brick Church, the oldest building still standing, was constructed in 1855 by slaves for early Baptist planters in St. Helena. It was later used as a church, community center and school for both black and white abolitionists during the Reconstruction Era and is one of the earliest schools for the newly freed slaves. Missionaries constructed the other buildings on the island when they came there to assist former Gullah slaves with their newfound freedom after their owners abandoned the island during the Civil War. In addition to the early school and missionary buildings, the district also includes Gantt Cottage where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference often met during the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Locals showcase the Penn School Historic District, or “Penn Center” with pride, and visitors are welcome to attend annual Gullah festivals and community events. The York W. Bailey Museum interprets the history and culture of the island and is open Monday through Saturday, from 11am to 4pm. More information is available on the Penn Center website.

Florida’s connection to the Gullah/Geechee culture and heritage corridor is rooted in the longest standing tradition of black and Native American freedom. Spanish Florida was established within the Guale chiefdom in the late 16th century. Disease and warfare greatly reduced the size of the Guale. Those who survived migrated to the Spanish missions; many of these members became known as the Yamasee.

Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose or Fort Mose in Saint Augustine is not only located in the nation’s oldest city but also is recognized as the oldest sanctioned free black community in the United States. In the 17th century, Spanish control in the southern region was threatened with the establishment of English colonies in South Carolina. In 1687, Spanish officials reported the first runaways from the nearby English settlements. The Spanish crown, interested in maintaining control in the southeast, began to encourage runaways to abscond from English settlements and colonies. In 1693, an edict was issued granting freedom to all runaway slaves from English settlements. Then, in 1702, the English forces from South Carolina invaded Spanish Florida and destroyed refugee missions located in the Guale region. In 1738, Spanish authority issued a charter to create Fort Mose and as early as 1739, fugitive slaves inhabited Fort Mose.

Blacks agreed to help defend St. Augustine from outside European invasion in exchange for certain liberties. The protection served three primary functions: to maintain a social and strategic relationship with the Spanish, to maintain the Spanish foothold in St. Augustine, and to advance Blacks within Spanish society. The Spanish provided food until the first crops were harvested, a priest for religious instruction, and established a military unit. In time, Fort Mose was considered the first line of defense for Saint Augustine.

Today, Fort Mose historic state park is a national historic landmark. Visitors enjoy both the ecological treasures and historical past of Fort Mose. The museum and interpretive center is open on Thursday to Monday from 9:00a.m. – 5:00p.m. On the last Saturday of each month, living history re-enactors provide visitors with a glimpse of the past. For more information, please contact the Fort Mose Park Office at 904-823-2232 or visit the park website.

Self-taught and visionary artist Minnie Evans was born and raised in Pender and New Hanover Counties, the northernmost points of the Gullah/Geechee corridor. The Cameron Art Museum of Wilmington, N.C. houses the Minnie Evans Study Center, a central repository for archival material regarding the life of Minnie Evans. In addition, the lands around the Cameron Art Museum once witnessed the Civil War "Battle of Forks Road," in which U.S. Colored Troops played a critical role.

Plaza Ferdinand VII, a National Historic Landmark, is the site of the formal transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States in July of 1821. The basis for the transfer was the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, whereby Spain agreed to cede East and West Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States agreeing to pay its citizens’ claims against Spain up to $5 million dollars. While it took Spanish foreign minister Louis de Onís two years to sign the treaty with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, he ultimately realized that he had to negotiate with the United States or risk losing Florida without any compensation. Spain finally signed the treaty February 22, 1821. On July 17, 1821, in Plaza Ferdinand VII in Pensacola, Florida, Spain formally transferred Florida to the United States.

Well before the Adams-Onís Treaty, many European powers sought control over the land that would one day become the State of Florida. During the 1500s, early Spanish explorers such as Juan Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto, and Tristán de Luna y Arellano, helped to identify Florida as a desirable place for explorers, missionaries, and treasure seekers. In 1513 when Ponce de León arrived on the sandy shores of Florida for the first time, he named the area la Florida, in honor of Pascua Florida (“feast of the flower”), Spain’s Easter time celebration. After the early explorers’ failed settlement attempts in Florida, Spaniard Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established a permanent settlement, named San Agustín (St. Augustine) in 1565. St. Augustine was the first permanent European settlement in what is now the continental United States.

For the next couple of hundred years Spain continued its colonization efforts, constructing forts and Catholic missions throughout Florida. During this time both the French and British attempted to take gain control of Florida from Spain. Like the Spanish, these nations sought to exploit the rich resources of the area. For the most part, Spain was able to ward off these attempts; however, continued attacks by both France and England throughout the 1700s revealed the growing weakness of Spain’s hold on Florida. During a brief period, from 1763 until 1784, the British gained control of Florida. The British split Florida into two parts: East Florida, with its capital at St. Augustine; and West Florida, with its seat at Pensacola. The Spanish regained control of Florida in 1784 as part of the peace treaty that ended the American Revolution.

During the second period of Spain’s control of the area, Spanish colonists, settlers from the newly formed United States, and escaped slaves all fled to Florida. Favorable Spanish terms for acquiring property drew settlers. Escaped slaves came to the area because here their U.S. masters had no authority over them. During the early 1800s, while Spanish Florida was actually becoming more “American,” Spanish resources increasingly dwindled due to war. Spain was losing its hold on its American empire. While Spain had long rejected repeated American efforts to purchase Florida, by 1819 the idea of ceding it began to make sense.

Florida had become a bit of a burden to Spain, which could not afford to send supplies, settlers, or soldiers to protect Spanish settlers in this faraway land. While it took some time for Spanish foreign minister Louis de Onís to get the treaty ratified that would transfer rule of Florida to the United States, he ultimately realized that Spain had to negotiate with the United States or risk losing Florida without any compensation. Spain formally ceded Florida to the United States under the terms of the Adams–Onís Treaty with the signing of the treaty on February 21, 1821.

By March 1821, General Andrew Jackson received the appointment of temporary governor of both East and West Florida, which were to be combined into one territory. In July of that year, Jackson sent Colonel Robert Butler to serve as his representative in accepting the official transfer of East Florida at St. Augustine, and he proceeded to Pensacola to accept the official transfer of West Florida.

On July 17, 1821, in the third and most important transfer ceremony, the official transfer of West Florida to the United States occurred in Plaza Ferdinand VII at Pensacola. This ceremony was especially significant because it was the only one in which the Spanish territorial governor participated and because immediately after the ceremony an official proclamation announced the transfer to the United States and the establishment of its territorial government in Florida.

The transfer ceremony began around 10:00 am when Jackson rode to the steps of the Government House, which was on the site of the present City Hall, and met Spanish governor and colonel Don José María Callava. Together the men descended the steps and entered the plaza where they walked between lines of United States and Spanish troops. While the Fourth Infantry band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Spanish flag was lowered to half-staff and the United States flag was raised to a level with it. Soldiers lowered the Spanish flag and raised the United States flag to full staff while the U.S.S. Hornet in Pensacola Bay fired a 21-gun salute. After the ceremony, Jackson officially proclaimed the establishment of the Florida territory, and a few days later, he set up a new territorial government on behalf of the United States.

Today, visitors and residents of Pensacola can stroll through the plaza where this historic event occurred. The Pensacola Historical Society erected a commemorative monument in the plaza in 1935, and old cannons are mounted at the four corners of the plaza. The plaza is bounded by Government Street, Jefferson Street, Zarragossa Street, and Palofax Street. Historic Pensacola Village, a collection of 22 historic buildings and museums where visitors can take self-guided walking tours or guided house tours, surrounds the plaza.

Plan Your Visit

Spanish colonists established their western Florida capital and local Catholic mission in 1656 at an Apalachee Indian village in the Tallahassee Red Hills. Called San Luis de Talimali, this Spanish colonial town was the social, administrative, religious, and military center for the region’s colonists and equal in size to St. Augustine at the time. The Spanish and their Apalachee allies lived at San Luis, present-day Tallahassee, until a British invasion from the north forced them to abandon their village. Today, the site of the San Luis’ political and religious center is a National Historic Landmark and an important archeological resource. The State of Florida bought the land in 1983 and two decades later established a historical park, where visitors can learn about the history and explore recreations of Spanish and Apalachee buildings as they looked during the 17th century.

The Spanish settled permanently in Florida in the 1560s when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, governor of Florida, founded the city of St. Augustine. The Spanish were slow to colonize the peninsula because Florida lacked the mineral wealth of the other colonies, like silver-rich Peru and Mexico. However, colonial outposts in inland Florida and along the eastern coastline gave the Spanish a strategic position to protect their ships from pirates and to preserve American Indian alliances against French and English competition. Like other Spanish colonies, Florida also gave Spain an opportunity to convert American Indians to Christianity. To preserve Spain’s claim to the colony and to perform their religious duty, the Spaniards founded missions throughout Spanish Florida from the eastern coast of present-day Georgia to Pensacola. San Luis de Talimali was part of this chain.

San Luis was Florida’s second most important colonial town, after St. Augustine. The large Spanish population there included a deputy governor, soldiers, Franciscan friars, and civilians. Spanish families in San Luis farmed and raised domesticated animals, like pigs and cattle. Residents of San Luis maintained strong trade ties to Cuba, where they sent wheat and other agricultural goods, and they imported goods from around the world. San Luis was also the home of the Apalachee chiefs, and the Apalachee council house there was the largest Native American building at the time in what is now the Southeastern United States.

According to one Spanish traveler who passed through San Luis in 1690, though on the edge of the frontier, San Luis looked like a Spanish city. The community had a large central plaza, Apalachee council house, chiefs house, a Spanish village, a Franciscan religious complex (with a church, friary and detached kitchen), and a Spanish fort. The Apalachee resided in the countryside around the town center to be near their fields.

Between 1656 and 1704, Spanish colonists and Apalachee Indians lived together at San Luis de Talimali. The community had an impressive population for a colonial outpost -- as many as 1,500 people lived there at one time. In 1702, a war between Spain, England, and their European and American Indian allies spread to Florida. Governor James Moore, a South Carolinian British officer, led British and Creek soldiers into Spanish territory to assault Florida’s missions and forts. Even though his siege of St. Augustine failed, Moore’s invasion destroyed five Apalachee missions and crippled the Spanish colony. Moore’s men imprisoned thousands of Apalachee and took them back to South Carolina as slaves. In 1704, the remaining Spanish colonists, who believed a British attack on San Luis was inevitable, destroyed the town before the British had a chance to sack it. The Apalachee leaders took 800 American Indian residents of San Luis west to Pensacola, and the remaining Spanish population moved to St. Augustine.

Archeological evidence suggests that, unlike other American Indians living in Spanish missions in the Americas, the Apalachee at San Luis kept their political organizations and some of their culture during the Spanish occupation. European culture did not replace Apalachee culture but existed alongside it and sometimes mixed with it. Research at the site and studies of documents reveal that Apalachee leaders requested that Spanish friars move to their village, perhaps for strategic as well as religious reasons. By the 17th century, disease and violent clashes with the Spanish devastated Florida’s native population leaving those who remained politically, economically, and militarily weakened. For the Apalachee, who had both Native and European enemies, an alliance with Spain became a practical choice. Though the Apalachee at San Luis kept their own cultural traditions at the Council House, the Spanish described them as “thoroughly Christianized.” The descendents of the 16th and 17th century Apalachee, who migrated west after the mission fell, are still practicing Catholics and are able to trace their ancestry back to San Luis through parish records.

Abandoned but not forgotten, San Luis is the only Apalachee mission whose name and location are definitively known, and surface evidence of the mission was visible into the early 19th century. Under the topsoil at San Luis are remnants of San Luis undisrupted by human occupation over the centuries since the Spanish left. This makes San Luis a valuable archeological research site. Prior to Florida purchasing the land, archeologists had studied the site intensively. John W. Griffin, Hale G. Smith, and Charles H. Fairbanks – all leading Floridian archeologists – investigated the site of San Luis in the 1940s and ‘50s. Today, a full-time research staff of archeologists and historians works at Mission San Luis.

When archeologists began digging at San Luis, there was no evidence of the original buildings and structures on the surface. Their work revealed what the center of San Luis looked like when the Spanish occupied it. Since the 1980s, excavations have uncovered the locations of the mission church, Apalachee council house, mission convent, Spanish and Apalachee dwellings, Spanish military complex, and the San Luis cemetery. The belief is that many of the buildings at San Luis were of wood or wattle and daub. Wattle and daub was a simple form of architecture imported by Spain, in which walls made of woven wood panels are insulated by mud, clay, or animal dung. Excavations also revealed that San Luis was an exceptional place of cultural mixing in the Spanish colonies. San Luis is the only known site in any Spanish-occupied area that contains sacred and secular artifacts from both Native and European societies, including Native and Spanish pottery, crucifixes, remnants of beans and corn, imported glass beads, and Apalachee quartz crystal beads and pendants.

After 50 years of research at San Luis de Talimali, the State of Florida took advantage of the growing wealth of information about the mission and reconstructed the Apalachee mission town near its historic site. In Tallahassee today, Mission San Luis is a living history park where visitors can learn about Spanish colonial and Apalachee history at the permanent museum exhibits, enter reconstructed Spanish and Apalachee buildings and structures, and talk to costumed interpreters about the lives of the people who lived there. For its exceptional work in heritage education and historical recreation, Mission San Luis received Preserve America’s Presidential Award for heritage tourism in 2006. Among the many reconstructed buildings are the large Apalachee council house, mission church, Apalachee ball court, and Fort San Luis. The Spanish colonists and Apalachee destroyed their houses and public buildings at San Luis de Talimali in 1704, but thanks to the work of archeologists, visitor can explore the village reconstructed to look as it did at the height of the mission’s influence.

Plan Your Visit

On a September day in 1565, Spanish Explorer Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sailed into Matanzas Bay and established the colony of St. Augustine. Though Ponce de León had already claimed the lands of Florida for Spain during a 1513 expedition, Menéndez’s mission was the first to create a successful permanent settlement. Forty-two years before the English colonized Jamestown, and 55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Spain’s St. Augustine became the very first European colony in what is now the continental United States. The Spanish constructed a military base guarded by a large fortress, the Castillo de San Marcos, and the settlement developed and evolved into a sophisticated town with gridded streets and a central plaza. Burgeoning St. Augustine would remain the seat of Spanish power in Florida throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

The city is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. The St. Augustine Town Plan National Historic Landmark District is the earliest extant example of a European planned community with a distinctive layout of a 16th century Spanish colonial town. The Spanish emphasized town planning and developed specifications for laying out new colonial towns in their 1573 Laws of the Indies. The 16th century Plaza de la Constitución still sits at St. Augustine’s center – the metaphoric heart of the strong Spanish heritage thoughtfully preserved throughout the city.

Set among the network of narrow, sometimes winding streets, the district’s existing architectural heritage spans nearly 300 years, but the district and the city are most renowned for the early Spanish colonial buildings. The district also boasts impressive buildings from the Territorial Period (1821-1845), the Flagler Era (1880s-1890s) and the Florida Boom (1920s). St. Augustine showcases this mosaic of architectural styles, materials and typologies alongside traditions and practices inspired by over 400 years of Spanish-Floridian culture.

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

After Spanish Explorer Ponce de León discovered the Florida Peninsula in 1513, Spain immediately recognized the land as an instrumental point of defense for the Gulf of Mexico and the powerful Gulf Stream--both of which Spain heavily used for trade and transport between the motherland and her South American Colonies. After repeated attempts by the Spanish to colonize Florida, Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine in 1565 under orders from King Philip II and the town began to be laid out in 1603. The coastal colony originally served as a military outpost and a base for Catholic missionary efforts. As the town began to grow, a distinct pattern of streets emerged based on Spanish colonial city planning law that called for the laying out of towns in a gridiron with a symmetrical network of streets running both parallel and perpendicular to a central town plaza. Important civic and religious buildings were to front the plaza and provide a strong moral and governmental core to new cities.

St. Augustine’s layout reflected this early Spanish planning. The grid of streets expanded out from the main plaza, which faced the sea, and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, plots around the plaza housed the city’s main church, the Bishop’s house, the town hall, customs house, treasury building, arsenal, the hospital, guardhouses and various monuments.

After Ponce de León named and claimed Florida for Spain in 1513, Spanish Franciscan missionaries established missions in the area to convert the Timucua, translating religious texts from Spanish into Timucua and leaving us much of what we know today about the Timucua language.
Long before the arrival of ships from Europe, America’s first peoples lived in present-day Florida, some of them in what is today the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. Although the European colonists called them by one name, the Timucua, several groups of loosely related bands who shared a common language inhabited the region. The Timucua generally lived in large, fortified villages where they grew crops such as maize, squash, and beans. They also hunted and fished. A chief led groups of villages related by family ties. The Timucua had a highly stratified caste society, where heredity determined a person’s role in the larger group.

Visitors to Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve can learn about the Timucua at Fort Caroline and the Ribault Club. A good place to begin is at the visitor center at Fort Caroline, which features artifacts and exhibits about Timucuan culture. Near Fort Caroline, a modern reconstruction of a Timucuan hut and shell mound interpret how the people lived. The reconstructed hut would have been one of many huts that made up a village. Tall wooden poles would have surrounded a group of huts. The center of the village often held a ceremonial space. The shell mounds are piles of discarded oyster shells and clamshells. A complex society, the Timucua encountered all of the early colonial powers in Florida.

At the turn of the 20th century, nowhere in the United States was as famous for its cigars as Tampa’s Ybor City, which was once known as the “Cigar Capital of the World.” The Ybor City Historic District is a National Historic Landmark located northeast of Tampa’s downtown. The district contains more than 950 historic buildings and structures built during its peak industrial years. Ybor City’s vibrant character, preserved best in the 7th Avenue Commercial Strip, is defined by the community’s blend of cultures from European, Asian, and Cuban immigrants who settled there to support the region’s once-booming cigar industry brought to Tampa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was new American tariffs on imported cigars and political trouble in Cuba that compelled Cuban cigar manufacturers to build factories in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. One of these manufacturing titans was Vicente Martínez e Ybor, who was born in Valencia, Spain, and lived in Spanish Cuba for 15 years before immigrating to the United States. While in Cuba, he founded the “Prince of Wales” brand of cigars and achieved some success there, but Ybor supported Cuban independence and was therefore unable to stay in Spanish Cuba. He moved his factories to the United States in the late 1860s, first to Key West and New York City. Though his cigar factories were in the U.S., Ybor imported his tobacco from Cuba and hired fellow Cuban exiles to work in his factories. In 1885, Martínez e Ybor and Ignacio Haya, a friend and manufacturing peer, formed a partnership to develop a cigar-manufacturing town near Tampa, Florida.

Tampa was an ideal location for Martínez e Ybor’s factories because of its warm, humid climate and its close proximity to Cuba, which was Martínez e Ybor’s preferred source of labor and tobacco. When Martínez e Ybor and Haya purchased undeveloped land to build their planned community, Tampa’s population was around 700. Tampa eventually annexed Ybor City in 1887, but the Hispanic factory town kept a separate identity. In 1886, Martínez e Ybor and his manufacturing colleagues oversaw the construction of the first 176 worker houses in Ybor City, which became home to some of the 3,000 people already handcrafting cigars in their new factories. Of the first wave of Cuban immigrants, 15% were Afro-Cuban. By 1890, Ybor City’s population had doubled from the first year and was around 6,000. Though many of the residents were Hispanic, immigrating from Spain or Spanish Cuba, there were also Italian, German, Rumanian Jewish, and Chinese immigrants in Ybor City.

Spain settled Georgia’s Sea Islands in the second half of the 16th century and quickly established Catholic missionary provinces among the indigenous tribes. Cumberland Island, the largest of Georgia’s isles, was the site of a large Spanish fort and several Catholic missions where members of the island’s large Timucua tribe learned the Spanish language and converted to Catholicism. The Spanish occupation of the island lasted almost a century, ending only when pressure from other European and American Indian competitors, as well as raids by pirates, forced them to abandon the Georgia Sea Islands and move south to St. Augustine, Florida. In the 18th century, Britain and then the United States owned the island, and it passed into private ownership. Today, its natural beauty and historic features are preserved by the National Park Service Cumberland Island National Seashore.

During the early decades of Spanish Florida, the colonial territory stretched from South Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1565, Florida governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led the first successful colonizing expedition of civilians, priests, and soldiers to the colony. Upon arrival, Menéndez forced a small party of French settlers from the region and then established missions, towns, and forts along the eastern coast, including St. Augustine, the oldest surviving European city in the United States. The Spanish colonized the Georgia coast at that time and settled on its defensible barrier islands. In 1569, colonial soldiers built a large fort and garrison on Cumberland Island, which they called San Pedro Island, in present-day southeast Georgia. The island was already known by European and Native American traders for its profitable sassafras tree production, and the Timucua Indians called the island “Wissoo,” which means sassafras. In 1587, Franciscan priest Baltazar Lopéz arrived on the island and established the San Pedro de Tacatacuru mission.

At the island, and throughout inland Georgia and northern Florida, the Spanish made contact with the Timucua, an American Indian group that lived in present day Georgia and Florida at the time of Spanish colonization. The Timucua included many tribes that spoke different dialects of the Timucua language, including the Tacatacuru tribe that lived on Cumberland Island and spoke the Mocama dialect. The San Pedro missionaries’ goal was to convert the Tacatacuru tribe to Catholicism and persuade the Indians to adopt Spanish culture. In exchange for the benefits of living at the mission, the Tacatacuru labored to support the Spanish there.

The mission system dramatically altered the lives of the Tacatacuru at Cumberland Island. Before the Spanish arrived, the Tacatacuru moved seasonally between the island and the mainland. Afterward, the tribe lived permanently on the island and adopted a sedentary lifestyle based on European animal husbandry and agriculture that kept them close to the mission year-round. Spanish missionaries taught the Tacatacuru Christians to speak the Spanish language, and some to read and write it. The missionaries also learned to speak the Timucuan dialects and created a written form of Timucuan, which some of the indigenous people learned and used to communicate with each other. In the early 17th century, Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja wrote several Catholic primers in Timucuan.

The missionaries oversaw the construction of the first San Pedro de Tacatacuru church in 1587. Though there are no records left describing what the first mission looked like, it is possible to speculate. Other similar Spanish mission churches in the region were built from wattle and daub, which is woven wooden branches or strips plastered with a simple mixture of mud, clay, or animal dung, and they had roofs of thatched palmetto leaves.

When England officially settled Carolina in 1670, its English and Scottish colonists put pressure on Spanish Florida’s northern border to force the Spanish to move south. At Cumberland Island, Spanish and Timucua Catholics lived in fear of raids and enslavement by the British and the unconverted American Indian tribes. In 1684, the colonists were planning to abandon their settlements when two separate attacks by English and French pirates destroyed the remaining Cumberland Island missions and drove out the island’s Spanish inhabitants. The French attacked first and raided two of the island’s mission churches. The second attack came after an English pirate, Captain Thomas Jingle, led a failed attempt to take the colonial capital at St. Augustine and brought his six remaining ships to harbor at Cumberland Island. The Spanish and Timucua fled from their homes, and those who escaped the raids eventually resettled at St. Augustine.

Though the Spanish did abandon Cumberland Island, Spain did not formally give up its claim to the island after the missions closed. Native Americans and independent mestizos occupied the island until James Oglethorpe, the founder of the British colony of Georgia, arrived at the island in 1736. Oglethorpe renamed the island after the Duke of Cumberland and his colonists built two forts there: Fort St. Andrew and Fort Prince William. The Spanish attacked the forts and attempted to recapture Cumberland Island in 1742, but failed. Spain and England fought over ownership of the coastal region until the Treaty of Paris in 1763, when Spain ceded Spanish Florida to England. Georgia became a U.S. State in 1787 and the United States annexed the rest of Florida after the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.

In the 19th century, Cumberland Island was home to plantations that produced timber and Sea Island cotton. General Nathanael Greene, who led the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was one of the first Americans to own property on the island, and several of his 19th century heirs were among those who owned plantations on Cumberland. By the Civil War, there were about ten plantations on the island. Chattel slavery supported these plantations, and in 1850, there were 455 black slaves producing cotton on Cumberland Island. Northern industrialist Thomas Carnegie bought an estate of 1,891 acres on the island after the post-Civil War collapse of Cumberland’s plantation system. Other elite American families purchased land on the island in the late 19th and 20th century, and kept private estates there. The National Park Service acquired the island in 1972 and created the Cumberland Island National Seashore to protect the island’s resources.

Cumberland Island National Seashore today is a park of over 9,000 acres made up of the marshes, forests, waters, and shores of the historic island. Only 300 members of the general public can visit the island each day, and the park recommends visitors make reservations ahead of their trip. Visitors can access the island by a ferry, which picks up at the park headquarters in St. Marys, Georgia. On the island, park visitors can board park trams or rent bicycles to tour the historic properties and access the island’s public areas for camping, hiking, fishing, swimming, and wildlife watching.

Though no surface evidence of the 16th and 17th century Spanish and Timucua presence is visible today for visitors to see, their history is part of the island’s rich American heritage. Archeological investigation did reveal late 16th and early 17th century Hispanic earthenware at one site traditionally thought to be that of the a Spanish mission, San Pedro de Mocamo, but additional work did not find anything beneath the ground. Further archeological and historical investigation may reveal more remains of the earliest American Indian, Spanish, and other early settlement on the island.

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James Oglethorpe built Fort Frederica for the British during the Anglo-Spanish conflict for control of what is now Georgia. Named for Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), the town housed both a civilian community and British troops between 1736 and 1763. Though a 1758 fire destroyed most of the town, it had been a lively commercial center and military post at the edge of British claims to land adjacent to Spanish territory. Fort Frederica did more than advance British military interests, however. Under founder James Oglethorpe (1696-1785), the settlement furthered a social agenda that advocated for penal reform and the abolition of slavery. Today, the artifacts and ruins at Fort Frederica National Monument are reminders of both the idealism of this community and the Anglo-Spanish struggle for control in the New World.

The settlement at Fort Frederica was one of several in the colony of Georgia headed by James Oglethorpe. At Fort Frederica, Oglethorpe envisioned a place of employment for people then trapped in British debtors’ prisons. Fort Frederica was to be a community of the “worthy poor” who would tend their own land, using what they produced to support themselves. The emphasis on enabling the poor to support themselves was in response to the mass of landless poor who were ill served by the British system of marginalization or imprisonment. Oglethorpe also welcomed religious reformers, accepting Protestants fleeing Germany and the Methodists John and Charles Wesley. Oglethorpe was also careful to ensure that the town had people of diverse occupations. For a small community in the British colonies, the town at Fort Frederica had a number of artisans practicing specialized crafts to meet the needs of colonists. In addition to being the home of skilled laborers and farmers, the fort was a defensive structure and active garrison posted with regiments of British troops.

The location of Fort Frederica, in what is today southeastern Georgia, was important to both the British and the Spanish. Great Britain had established 12 other colonies further north and had made definite claims on land as far north as Maine. To the south, the Spanish sought control over the territory between St. Augustine, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina. Georgia lay in disputed territory, often called the Debatable Land by the Europeans.

From 1739 until 1742, the British and the Spanish fought many battles with each other in what became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Expecting invasions by the Spanish, Oglethorpe built a defensive wall that surrounded the entire town and helped to give it a fort-like appearance. The actual fort itself was a smaller building set partially within this wall. The fort was made of tabby, a kind of concrete composed of oyster shells that was used throughout the southeastern United States. Many of the other buildings in the town were constructed at least partially of tabby, because it was less expensive and more readily available than bricks. Barracks on the northern edge of town served as quarters for approximately 200 troops and as a hospital and prison for captured Spanish soldiers.

Fort Frederica National Monument was the site of frequent battles between the British and Spanish. Just five miles from the fort town, visitors can see the site that commemorates the Battle of Bloody Marsh, which was fought in July of 1742. Under the command of Manual de Montiano, the governor of Florida, the Spanish launched an attempt to seize British land from Georgia up to South Carolina and sent two thousand troops to Fort Frederica. Led by Oglethorpe, the British ambushed the Spanish troops marching single file through the marsh and routed them from the island, preventing them from taking Fort Frederica. The origin of the name came from the marsh supposedly "running red with the blood of Spaniard." However, official Spanish records indicate that only seven grenadiers died during this battle. The Battle of Bloody marsh forced the Spanish to abandon efforts to take land in the colony of Georgia and marked the end of the Spanish efforts to invade Georgia during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.  With the threat from Spain gone, the British had little need to maintain a military presence in Georgia. Oglethorpe returned to England in 1743, and the regiment he commanded disbanded. The removal of British troops from the community in 1749 took away one of the most important sources of income for the village merchants, and the fort and town fell into decline.  A disastrous fire in 1758 left Frederica in ruins.

After more than 275 years, the fort community is now an archeological site with some exposed building foundations and other remains such as portions of the King's Magazine and the entrance to the barracks. The buildings used by residents of the city included the Calwell House, home of the town’s chandler and soap maker, and the Hawkins-Davison duplex. The Hawkins-Davison houses belonged to Dr. Thomas Hawkins, a surgeon and apothecary, and Samuel Davison, owner of a tavern. The town burial ground has also been partially preserved. During their time at Fort Frederica, John and Charles Wesley preached at services held at the burial ground. Visitors can explore the archeological site on their own or with a digital tour, view the artifacts in the museum, and see a film at the visitor center on how this history was uncovered. These give a sense of how the people of the fort lived, fought, and worked during an important moment in both British and Spanish history.

As a social experiment, the community at the fort demonstrated the need for British penal reform as well as the alternative reform systems contemporary religious and social groups proposed. As a military installation, the Anglo-Spanish clash and ultimate British victory shaped the geography and composition of North America. The artifacts and other objects at the fort tell this unique story.

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Mission Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherines Island was the northernmost outpost in Spanish Florida between 1587 and 1680, and one of the most important Spanish missions in what is now the southeastern United States until 1684. For over a century, Catholic friars and Spanish soldiers lived with Guale Indians on the wooded sand dune and salt marsh island that is part of Georgia’s Sea Islands. After the Spanish abandoned the island, Mary Musgrove, a Muskogee leader, claimed the island and then Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, called it home. Today, the St. Catherines Island Foundation, Inc. owns and manages the island, which is a National Historic Landmark, as an historic site, archeological resource, and wildlife preserve.

During the colonial period, Spanish Florida was a territory in southeastern North America that Spain claimed in 1513 and permanently settled in the 1560s. Permanent settlement began in 1565 after the king of Spain granted Pedro Menéndez de Aviles the privilege to govern Spanish Florida. During Menéndez’s governorship, Spanish Florida stretched from present-day South Carolina to the Florida peninsula. When Menéndez arrived in North America, he drove French Huguenots from the coast and then began to establish mission outposts along the coast where he was able to make alliances with the indigenous towns. Santa Catalina was the first Spanish outpost in Georgia and the largest mission in the Guale province.
After he founded St. Augustine in 1565, Menéndez led an expedition to St. Catherines Island in 1566. The Spaniards initially called the island “Guale,” after the people who lived there. Menéndez stationed 30 soldiers on the island after he made contact and two years later Jesuits established Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. In 1587, English privateer Sir Francis Drake attacked Florida after he raided Spain’s Caribbean colonies. In response to these attacks, Spain consolidated its colonial presence in Florida by reducing the number of missions and the size of the colony. The Spanish abandoned outposts north of Santa Catalina and the island mission became the northernmost base of Spanish colonial power on the east coast for nearly a century afterward. During that period, Spanish authorities often recommended moving the Florida capital at St. Augustine to Santa Catalina.

By the time of Drake’s attacks on the Spanish colonies, Franciscan Catholic missionaries had replaced Jesuits in the Florida missions and at Santa Catalina. The Franciscans arrived at Santa Catalina in 1573 and ran the mission afterward. A Guale revolt against the mission system drove the Spanish out of Santa Catalina for a brief time in 1597, but St. Augustine sent reinforcements to suppress the rebellion and reinstated the mission. After the rebellion, Spanish soldiers, Franciscans, and Christian Guale Indians rebuilt the mission and ran Santa Catalina as the military, political, religious, and economic center of Spain’s influence in the Guale province. In the 1680s, attacks by the British and by Westo Indians forced Spain and its Guale allies to abandon Georgia. The Spanish left Santa Catalina in 1680, and by 1684, Spain abandoned all six of its Guale province missions.

After Spain deserted Mission Santa Catalina, American Indians reclaimed the island and its final indigenous owner was Mary Musgrove, a Muskogee (Creek) leader. After Musgrove died, her husband sold the island in 1765 to a delegate to the Continental Congress and future signer of the Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnett. By the time Gwinnett occupied the island it had the Anglicized name, St. Catherines Island. The private island changed ownership throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, the St. Catherines Island Foundation funded by the Edward J. Noble Foundation owns the island. Edward J. Noble, a businessman, was the island’s final individual owner.

A partnership between the Edward J. Noble Foundation and American Museum of Natural History in New York City initiated archeological research at the island in the 1970s that carried into the mid-1990s. Archeologists conducted the most significant studies of the island’s Spanish history in the 1980s after they discovered the site of Mission Santa Catalina in 1981. No evidence of Santa Catalina mission is visible on the surface, but surveys revealed buried evidence of a fortified village.

Archeologists determined what they found were the remains of two churches, a cemetery, kitchen area, two wells, and dwellings. The older church is the first Christian church built in Georgia. A palisade with bastions once surrounded the mission plaza and inner buildings. The buildings and structures were of wattle and daub. This building technique uses woven branches, or wattle, to create a frame that then gets a plaster of daub, made from mixtures of mud, clay, or animal dung. Researchers at the Santa Catalina site also discovered numerous artifacts, including tens of thousands of valuable beads, food remains, jewelry, rosaries, crosses, and bronze pieces of a bell.

St. Catherines Island today is a private nature preserve and research site that educators and scholars use to study Georgia’s coastal ecology, geology, fauna, flora, and 6,000 years of human history. The beach is accessible by private boat, but the interior of the island is not accessible to the public in order to conserve its natural and historic resources. Over a million artifacts found on the island are part of the St. Catherines Island Foundation and Edward John Noble Foundation Collection, which is stored and exhibited at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, Georgia.

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In 1947, architect Eero Saarinen entered his name in the competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Chosen from 172 entries, his world-renowned stainless-steel masterpiece memorializes America’s historic expansion across the West. Although popularly known as the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial commemorates not only the history of western migration, but also the role President Thomas Jefferson played in opening the West with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French. In addition, the park interprets the history and culture of St. Louis and the city’s role as the Gateway to the West.

The Spanish conquest of North America, which began in 1521, resulted in Spain obtaining a large amount of territory. This included most of the present-day United States west of the Mississippi River and Florida. By 1800, Spain secretly agreed to transfer power of its Louisiana Territory back to France, through the Treaty of San Ildefonso; however, France delayed taking possession of the area until 1803 because Napoleon wanted more time to build up a military to protect the territory.

In 1802, during the time that Spain was still in control of the territory, Spanish officials withdrew the previously granted “Right of Deposit,” which allowed Americans to use New Orleans’ port facilities. This shocking decision prompted President Thomas Jefferson to move forward and purchase the city of New Orleans. The offer proposed by France ended up including the entire territory of Louisiana, which the United States gladly accepted. France controlled the territory for only about three weeks, from November 30 to December 20, 1803. On December 20, 1803, France signed documents formally transferring the Louisiana Territory to the United States. The ratification of the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States and opened up the continent to the continued westward expansion of the nation.

Following the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of westward expansion, commissioned Captain Meriwether Lewis and his partner William Clark to lead the Corps of Discovery in an expedition through the nation’s newly acquired territory. Their mission, according to Jefferson’s instructions, was to explore the Missouri River and find the elusive Northwest Passage for the purpose of commerce. Although Lewis and Clark never found a direct water route to the Pacific Ocean, their expedition advanced the nation’s geographical knowledge of the once uncharted West. With the help of their Shoshone interpreter Sacagawea, the Corps of Discovery managed to locate 50 American Indian tribes, many of which Lewis and Clark befriended by offering peace medals to the most important chiefs. As a result, the Corps of Discovery expedition helped open the West for America’s fur trade.

The publication of Lewis' and Clark's detailed accounts of their journey of discovery generated a great American interest in the Indian fur trade. By 1810, with Clark’s map of the West at hand, traders marked the beginning of the historic Missouri River trade as they moved into the Indian Territory to exchange goods with the Plains tribes. The Plains Indians traded their buffalo robes, horses, and mules for the Americans' tobacco, axes, firearms, and other technological goods. Although the buffalo hides were highly sought, beaver pelts were also of great interest. As a result, traders began sending trappers further west to set beaver traps. Among these was St. Louis fur trader William H. Ashley, who in 1822 employed 100 trappers to work in the Rocky Mountains. Known as the legendary mountain men, these trappers helped America expand further west.

Although the decline in beavers eventually slowed the fur trade, America’s rapid westward expansion continued as the notion of Manifest Destiny swept across the nation. Popularized in the 1840s, the term justified the United States' expansion into the West with the claim that America had a divine right to expand from sea to shining sea. As a result, for two decades large numbers of white wagons painted the American landscape as settlers traveled across the western trails, one of which was the Santa Fe Trail blazed by Missouri trader William Becknell in 1821. The trail, which ran between Independence, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico, became the principal avenue for manufactured goods and emigrants bound for Santa Fe and the American Southwest.

Expansion did not come without conflict. Along with the displacement of American Indian tribes and clashes with other peoples, American soldiers provoked an attack by the Mexican army in the disputed Texas Territory in 1846. This attack led the United States to declare war on Mexico. After several months of campaigning, however, General Winfield Scott entered Mexico City in 1847 bringing the war with Mexico to an end.

By 1869, western settlement increased since the completed transcontinental railway facilitated travel all the way to California. The United States had fulfilled its destiny. The American frontier was gone in less than 90 years.

In the end, displacing a number of American Indian tribes from their homelands, over 300,000 settlers traveled across the West in search of land, gold, and religious freedom. Although the journey proved difficult at times, especially as American Indians fought to keep their lands, the United States' expansion into the West played a significant role in the development of the nation's unique culture. Involved in this mass-migration were peoples of many backgrounds. Spanish explorers, French traders, African Americans, American Indians, Asian railway workers, and the Homestead Act immigrants from around the world all helped shape the American West. Today, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial pays tribute to the diverse people of America, whose stories, whether of triumph or defeat, highlight the historic movement into the West.

At Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, visitors may begin their tour at the Gateway Arch, where they can ride the tram to the top and enjoy the majestic view of St. Louis from the observation deck, which faces both east and west. After riding the tram, tourists can proceed to the Museum of Westward Expansion. Located beneath the Arch, the museum features two films: The Monument to the Dream documenting the construction of the Gateway Arch, and Lewis and Clark, Great Journey West shown in the Odyssey Theatre. The museum also features several exhibits that chart the history of the American West, where visitors can see a full size tipi, lifelike animal displays, a stagecoach, a covered wagon, a bullboat, and other mounted exhibits that demonstrate how the American Indians and pioneers lived.

Beyond the Gateway Arch and Museum of Westward Expansion, the park also tells the story of the Old St. Louis Courthouse. From 1812 until 1865, over 300 African American slaves living in the St. Louis area sued their masters for their freedom at this courthouse. Many times, these cases were thrown out because the United States Constitution did not consider African Americans as citizens at the time. The controversial case of Dred Scott and his wife Harriet moved the nation to the brink of Civil War, which led to the emancipation of all slaves in the United States.

Across from the historic Old Courthouse, visitors are also welcome to tour the Old St. Louis Cathedral, which remains an active Catholic parish. Visitors can stop by the Old Cathedral Museum where the cathedral’s 1776 bell, a gift of Spanish Lt. Governor Don Piernos enriched with 200 Spanish silver dollars in its casting, is on display. The Old Cathedral, the only building spared for the construction of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, serves as an additional reminder of the westward expansion of the United States.

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Julien Dubuque’s Mines, Mines of Spain, is a historic district that contains a nationally significant concentration of more than 100 archeological sites associated with the mining of lead from 1788 to 1865. The district lies along the narrow creeks and in the limestone bluffs and rolling countryside west of the Mississippi River in Dubuque, Iowa. The district is best known for its connection with Julien Dubuque and the extensive lead mining enterprise he developed with the Mesquakie Indians, who inhabited the area when he arrived.

The district has the potential to provide information on the contact between the American Indians and Europeans and the role of lead mining in the development of the United States from the 1780’s to the 1910’s. The yields from these mines provided most of the lead for the nation from the 1820’s to the 1850s, and mining revived again during the Civil War. Dubuque negotiated an agreement with the Mesquakie that gave him exclusive permission to work the mines with them in 1788, but he also had to secure his right to mine the land from the Spanish because the area was part of Spanish Louisiana at the time.

Spain itself was the second largest producer of lead in the world during the 18th century, and its ore mining and smelting technologies were influential in the New World. Dubuque’s Mines, which the Mesquakie worked with him, were highly successful and initiated the first major North American mineral rush – a precursor to the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. The district contains the archeological remains of Dubuque’s Trading Post (1788-1810) and the Mesquakie village of Kettle Chief (ca. 1788-1810); Amerindian and Euro-American lead mining shifts, shafts, adits, and smelters; and the remains of the later mining communities of Catfish and Mosalem. The district is now the Mines of Spain State Recreation Area whose visitor and interpretive center is a popular destination for learning about the important cultural amalgamation and technological evolution and the role of lead mining in the development of the United States.

The earliest known human inhabitants of the district were the Mesquakie tribe. Mounds, rock shelters, campsites and other archeological evidence reflect their presence for thousands of years prior to European contact. A large village of Mesquakie sat at the mouth of Catfish Creek when the French first entered the region in the mid-1600s, and the Mesquakie traded amicably with the newcomers to their region. By around 1690, the tribe revealed a rich lead deposit near present-day Dubuque to French explorer Nicolas Perrot. Perrot briefly set up a trading post in the area, bartering furs and other goods for ore with the native population. By 1710, however, he abandoned the region in search of less isolated territory.

Julien Dubuque, a young Quebec-born French Canadian, heard of the lead-rich area in 1785 and by 1788 was in negotiations with the local Mesquakie leaders to begin a mining venture on their land. By the end of the year, he had secured permission to be the sole mine-operator on the site. Considered the first person of European descent to settle permanently in present-day Iowa, he built a trading post, residence, and small smelter at the mouth of Catfish Creek with the help of the Mesquakie and French laborers.

During the late 1700s, the vast Louisiana Territory that Dubuque set out to mine belonged to the Spanish Crown. During Europe’s Seven Year War (1756 to 1763), the territory was under French control, but following its conclusion and the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish acquired Louisiana. Julien Dubuque had obtained express permission to mine the land from the Mesquakie, but he also sought recognition from Spain to secure his claim. In 1796, the Spanish Governor of New Spain, Francisco Luis Hector, barón de Carondelet, officially granted a 189 square-mile area to Dubuque for his mining operation. In recognition of the grant, Dubuque named his mines in Spain’s honor.

From the beginning, Dubuque combined fur and lead trading with manufacturing, residential, agricultural and export functions at his post. The first mines were worked on a small scale in a somewhat primitive fashion. After digging the ore out of the ground, miners would wash it in wooden sluices where the water would carry away any latent dirt and light impurities such as limestone. The ore was then brought to the smelter, a furnace designed to reduce the ore to its fairly pure lead form.

The earliest smelters at the mines were rudimentary due to the costs and limitations on materials. These furnaces involved stacking ore and logs together in a large inferno and collecting the molten lead as it flowed from the base of the pile. This system, though relatively easy, was inefficient in the amount of fuel it used and percentage of lead that could be captured, and little could be done about the plumes of deathly smoke that were a byproduct of the process. By the 1820s, the mines began using reverberatory furnaces.

Instead of mixing the fuel and ore together in one stack, reverberatory furnaces are configured so that the mineral and the burning fuel never come in contact with one another. Instead, the firebox is separated from the ore by a partition and covered with a domed roof. The angle of the roof reflects the hot air into the reaction chamber where the ore liquefies and easily flows out one end of the furnace. Chimneys divert smoke upward to reduce the risk of inhalation by the workers. Dubuque’s Mines used these more efficient furnaces until converting to more practical methods, such as the Scotch Hearth furnace introduced in the area in 1835.

The reverberatory furnace was by no means a new technology. At the time, England and Spain were the world’s top lead producers, and European nations had been mining and smelting various metals for hundreds of years. Technologies were constantly evolving to be more efficient: inventions that would eventually find their way from their mother-nations to the colonies. In 1640, the famous Spanish metallurgist, Alvaro Alonso Barba, published a comprehensive guide on metals, including the use of reverberatory furnaces. The Spanish are believed to have been the first to introduce the technology to the Americas.

The Mesquakie Indians worked Julian Dubuque's Mines and used the lead ore in trade for goods at his trading post. The Mesquakie continued to work the mines after Dubuque’s death in 1810, but American miners finally took over the mines as part of the settlement of the Black Hawk War of 1832. By the early 1830s, most of the Mesquakie tribe had left the area. What began as a small mining operation was now a big industry accompanied by towns, filled with newcomers flocking to the mineral-rich area from Missouri and the Ohio Valley. An assembly of these miners in 1830 drafted regulations for land use and conduct, laws that formed the basis for the development of future mining activities in the American West during the subsequent California Gold Rush.

Dubuque was the largest and most prosperous community in the entire lead district through the Civil War. Between 1845 and 1847, mining activity in the area peaked with the production of 54 million pounds of lead a year, at the time the most of any mining district in the entire world. Many miners had left in pursuit of gold out west beginning in 1849 and the easily worked minerals became depleted. Iowa’s fertile farmlands also lured miners away from the dangerous and struggling industry, and by 1870, agriculture had replaced lead mining as the region’s most valuable asset. The archeological remains of the 19th century mining communities of Catfish and Mosalem and a camp are located within the district.

The Santa Fe Trail, stretching 1,200 miles from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was one of America’s great trading routes. The trail followed several different routes depending on weather conditions and terrain. From 1821 until 1880, the Santa Fe Trail served as a vital commercial and military trail, and sometimes as an emigrant trail. Americans, American Indians, Latinos, Anglos, and African Americans encountered one another along the Santa Fe Trail creating an avenue of commercial and cultural exchange.

Designated a National Historic Trail in 1987, the National Park Service’s Santa Fe National Historic Trail traces the route thousands of people traveled in order to participate in trade, commerce, and western expansion. Today, visitors can travel between western Missouri and Santa Fe on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail and drive the Santa Fe Trail Scenic & Historic Byway, a road route that captures the historic experience of the Santa Fe Trail. Many of the sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places near and along the Trail played a critical role in the history of the Santa Fe Trail. Visiting these historic places provides visitors with a glimpse into the commercial aspects, daily activities, traveling obstacles, scenic views, cultural relations, and military presence, which were part of life along the historic Santa Fe Trail. Some of the historic places for visitors to see along the Trail are highlighted below. The Trail crosses five States- Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.

In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain’s 200 years of control and unlocked a great gateway to the West- the Santa Fe Trail. From 1821 until 1880, trade between Mexico and the United States flourished along the Trail. By 1880, the railroad had reached Santa Fe. It replaced the Santa Fe Trail as the most the viable trading and traveling method in the area. However, between 1821 and 1880, the Trail became a major component of an international web of business, social ties, tariffs, and laws. The Trail made possible the transporting and trading of goods such as woolens, cottons, silks, linens, china cups, whiskey, champagne, combs, forks, spoons, watches, dry goods, hardware, razors, and jewelry.

Established in 2006, the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area spans 14 parishes in south central Louisiana. Encompassing the nation’s largest river swamp, this 10,400 square mile heritage area is historically and culturally rich and ecologically varied. The heritage area begins at the junction of the Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya is an American Indian word that means long river and that is pronounced ah-CHA-fa-LIE-ah) and the Mississippi River and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico. For hundreds of years, people of American Indian, African, Caribbean, French, Latino, European, and American descent have lived in and interacted with one another throughout this region. Around each bend of the long Atchafalaya River, visitors to the heritage area will hear, smell, and see evidence of this diverse cultural heritage and history.

Visitors are invited to explore the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area’s diverse cultural heritage in its historic sites, museums, and natural parks.

The Cabildo, a National Historic Landmark on Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana, originally housed the administrative and legislative council that ruled Spanish Louisiana. The building took its name from the Spanish governing body that met there, the “Illustrious Cabildo” or city council. The Cabildo was also the site of the Louisiana Purchase Transfer ceremonies and the home of the Louisiana Supreme Court, which handed down the controversial and highly significant “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Cabildo itself is a reflection of the strong influence of Spanish architecture in the Louisiana Territory and one of the most important buildings remaining from the period when Spain held the Louisiana Territory. The Cabildo is now the home of the Louisiana State Museum, providing visitors to New Orleans with a tangible reminder of the city’s Spanish heritage.

Beginning in 1721, the site where the Cabildo now sits was set aside for government use. French engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the plan for the newly established town of New Orleans, singling out specific lots for use by the French colonial government. In 1769, Don Alejandro O’Reilly took formal possession of the Louisiana Territory for Spain and quickly established a Spanish Cabildo (a municipal governing body) to replace the Superior Council that had governed Louisiana during the French regime.

Soon after taking possession of Louisiana for the Spanish, O’Reilly ordered the construction of a new town hall on the site of the prison of the corps de garde (police station). The new town hall, or Cabildo, was built on the foundations of the old prison (parts of these walls are incorporated in the present Cabildo). After the destruction of this building by a fire in 1788, the Spanish constructed new government buildings over the next few years, only to lose them to another fire that tore through New Orleans in 1794.

Between the two fires, the Cabildo held meetings first in the Government House, which escaped the fire, and then in a rented house. By 1795, after these great fires destroyed much of New Orleans, the Cabildo decided to build a new substantial building suitable for its use. The governing body selected Don Gilberto Guillemard to design the new Cabildo building. After the fire of 1788, Don Gilberto Guillemard had been responsible for drawing the plans for the Cathedral of St. Louis and the Presbytere, two other historic buildings on Jackson Square. The Cabildo sits on one side of the cathedral and the Presbytere on the other.

As he did with the Presbytere, Guillemard made as much use as possible of the old brickwork that remained on the Cabildo site after the fires of 1788 and 1794, and incorporated the remains of the brick walls of the old French corps de garde of the 1750s and of the old town hall building into the new Cabildo building. Once completed, the new Cabildo building would have nearly the same frontage to the public square as the new Presbytere.

The original Cabildo building had two stories and was made of stuccoed brick. The new Cabildo had two stories with open arcades. On both of these stories, elliptical arches sprang from square piers. A pediment crowned the three central bays on the second story of the building and once held the arms of the Spanish Crown. After the Louisiana Purchase, the arms of the Spanish crown were removed. By 1822, the pediment contained an eagle amidst trophies, arms, and flags, which Pietro Cardelli, who had worked on the United States Capitol, designed.

The Cabildo’s original flat tiled roof, which proved to be problematic and always in need of repair, was replaced in 1847 with a steep mansard roof in the French style with scrolled dormers. A third floor and cupola were also added to the building. About the same time, Baroness Pontalba, a strong willed designer and businesswoman in New Orleans, planned French inspired renovations to her own private buildings in the Jackson Square area. Because of Baroness Pontalba’s proposed renovations and influence throughout New Orleans, the city council decided to make similar improvements to its buildings on Jackson Square, and thus added the French style mansard roof to the Cabildo and to the Presbytere.

Guillemard designed the second story specifically to house the new council chamber or Sala Capitular. The Spanish utilized the Sala Capitular as a courtroom from 1799 tol 1803, until they formally ceded the Louisiana Territory to France in the November of 1803. Spain had already secretly agreed to transfer power of Louisiana back to France in 1800, through the Treaty of San Ildefonso, however, Napolean had delayed taking possession for he wanted more time to build up a military to protect the territory. France controlled the territory for only about three weeks, from November 30 to December 20, 1803, during which time they called the Cabildo, Maison de Ville, or Town Hall. On December 20, 1803, in the Sala Capitular of the Cabildo, France signed the transfer documents formally transferring the Louisiana Territory to the United States. The ratification of the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States and opened up the continent to the continued westward expansion of the nation.

After the Louisiana Purchase, the Cabildo continued to be used for government purposes and public offices. From 1803 until 1812, the Louisiana territorial superior court sat there, and after the Civil War, from 1868 until 1910, the Louisiana Supreme Court. Since 1803, the mayor, the city council, the superior court and its clerk, the county judge, and the city notary have used the Cabildo. The Cabildo has also served as an emergency hospital, a banquet hall, and as a home for various libraries, including the New Orleans Library Association in 1819 and the Law Association Library from 1847 until 1910. In 1911, the Louisiana State Museum moved in and remains there today.

The Louisiana State Museum’s exhibits in the Cabildo emphasize the diverse ethnic heritage of Louisiana. The museum operates four other properties in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter that reflect Louisiana’s historic events and cultural diversity including the Presbytere, the 1850 House, the Old U.S. Mint, and Madame John's Legacy.

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After founding Fort St. Jean Baptiste in 1714, the French ceded Natchitoches to Spain under the 1762 Treaty of Fountainebleau at the end of the Seven Years’ War. The formal transfer of the colony from France to Spain did not occur until January 1767. During this period, resentment grew among the French settlers concerning Spanish administration of Louisiana. This displeasure resulted in a revolt against Spanish rule and the expulsion of the Spanish governor on November 1, 1768. For the next 10 months, the colony pursued independence from any European control. The period of rebellious self-rule abruptly ended in July 1769, with the arrival at the mouth of the Mississippi of a Spanish fleet carrying General Alejandro O'Reilly with an army of more than 2,000 soldiers. The rebellion quickly crumbled. This time Spanish authorities imposed Spanish law and government on the former French colony. However, French fears of Spanish domination proved unwarranted as the new regime caused little visible change in daily life. At Natchitoches, the Spanish adopted the French method of trade, thus attracting Native American commerce and maintaining relative stability throughout the period of Spanish domination.

Spain ceded the area back to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800, but the actual transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France took place in November 1803. In the light of these developments, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson instructed his minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, to negotiate with French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte for the purchase of Louisiana, resulting in the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent turning over the Louisiana territory to the United States in December 1803.

In 1789, Jean Pierre Emmanuel Prudhomme established Oakland Plantation on a land grant from the Spanish government. By the early 1800s, Prudhomme began using his plantation, originally named Bermuda, to grow cotton, a major cash crop. Through cotton production, Prudhomme amassed great wealth. To ensure success, Prudhomme used enslaved laborers year round to grow, harvest, and bail cotton, which is a labor intensive crop.

In 1859, for instance, 145 slaves, who lived in 30 dwellings at Oakland Plantation, produced 698 bales of cotton and 7,000 bushels of corn. While most of the slaves toiled in the cotton fields, others worked as midwives, nurses, cooks, weavers, shoemakers, brick masons, painters, and ginners. The success of Oakland Plantation allowed Prudhomme and his descendants to expand the land holdings of the estate and to construct multiple outbuildings on the property. The Prudhomme family resided on the plantation until late in the 20th century.

A self-guided tour winds its way through the grounds and many of the original buildings and structures of this once bustling plantation. Visitors can see the main house, the carriage house, the doctor’s cottage, slave/tenant quarters, the overseer’s house, the cotton gin ruins, the store and post office, and many sheds, shops, and storehouses. Most likely built by enslaved African Americans in 1821, the Oakland Plantation main house is an example of a raised Creole plantation house constructed of bousillage. Bousillage is an infill material of mud, Spanish moss, and deer hair.

Magnolia Plantation still has 21 standing historic buildings and structures. Visitors can see a slave hospital, a pigeonnier, eight brick slave houses, a gin house, and a plantation store. While Jean Baptiste LeComte I acquired the Magnolia Plantation land in 1753, it was not until about 1840 that Ambrose LeComte II built the first main plantation house on the grounds. By the 1860s, the LeComtes expanded the landholdings of the plantation and shifted to growing cotton. Magnolia Plantation soon became the largest cotton-producing plantation in Natchitoches Parish, with the LeComtes owning the most slaves in the area.

Enslaved African Americans lived in a double row of eight brick slave houses at Magnolia. On both Oakland and Magnolia plantations, the slave quarters were places where enslaved workers created their own institutions, community, internal governance, recreation, and religious practices. Out of sight of their masters within these slave communities, they married, started families, and produced domestic goods such as clothing, furniture, tools, and toys. They also had their own gardens where they raised crops of sweet potatoes, watermelons, turnips, and other vegetables.

The 1860s brought great changes to both plantations and to the southern plantation system way of life. During the Civil War, Union troops swept through the area burning a steam cotton gin and 400 bales of cotton at Oakland Plantation. Union soldiers burned the original main house at Magnolia Plantation in 1864. Following the fire, the LeComtes lived in the former slave hospital and did not rebuild the main house until 1899. The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation had lasting effects on southern plantations. After the war, many freed slaves became sharecroppers on plantations under conditions that were not very different from slavery. Under the sharecropping system, freed workers became forever indebted to the plantation store for what they needed and were never able to secure the land, money, education, or skills necessary to move beyond plantation life.

Visit Cane River Creole National Historical Park to better understand this diverse and controversial period of American history in a park that brings alive the world of the Creole in this part of the South where the French, Spanish, African, American Indian, and other cultures converged in the nation's story.

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El Camino Real de los Tejas stretches 2,500 miles from colonial Mexico City through Texas and ends in Natchitoches, Louisiana. This trail provided the only primary overland route from Mexico across the Río Grande to the Red River Valley. Other trails such as the Lower Road, Old San Antonio Road, and Laredo Road were also created along this route to accommodate varying weather conditions, terrain, and relations with American Indians.

The Spanish began using the trail in 1690, when Alonso de León, a Spanish explorer, crossed the Rio Grande heading to eastern Texas to establish missions. He followed routes previously used as Indian trails and trade routes. The following year, Domingo Terán de los Ríos traveled the same route with additional missionaries.

Along with missions, the Spanish built presidios to protect Spanish territory from French intrusion, as well as trading posts and ranches. Throughout the 17th century, Spain, France, and England engaged in a major power struggle to control North America. This fight over control served as a catalyst for exploration, settlement, and trade.

El Camino Real de los Tejas was used extensively during the period when Texas was Spanish, then Mexican, land. When Texas became independent, trade between Texas and Mexico declined while trade between Mexico and the United States increased. The trail was briefly a way to get supplies to the Confederacy and to send cotton to Mexico, but this soon waned with the arrival of the railroad. By the mid-19th century, El Camino Real de los Tejas was no longer in use. During its heyday, the trail had a permanent impact on the people of Texas and Louisiana.

Growing interest in the history of El Camino Real de los Tejas caused the Texas Legislature to research the route in 1915. V. N. Zively, a professional surveyor, surveyed the trail and placed wooden markers along it. In 1918, the Texas Daughters of the American Revolution installed inscribed pink granite markers every five miles along the route to mark it. Today, visitors can see nine of these granite markers in their original locations. A number of towns along the route have their own monuments and historical markers to commemorate the trail, including Natchitoches, Louisiana and Cotulla, Texas. In 2004, El Camino Real de los Tejas became a National Historic Trail.

During the mid 1700s, Spanish and French interests in North America often overlapped and collided as the two nations discovered and explored new territories. Los Adaes is the site of a presidio and mission the Spanish built in 1721 to protect their landholdings from potential French encroachment on the northeastern frontier of New Spain. The Spanish named the presidio – Nuestra Senora del Pilar de los Adaes, and the mission – San Miguel de Cuellar de los Adaes, after the Adaes Tribe, a group of Caddo American Indians who inhabited the area at the time of its construction.

The entire complex, known simply as Los Adaes, quickly became the administrative capital of the Spanish province of Texas (Tejas) in 1729 and served as the first capital of Texas until 1770. Los Adaes would also become an important cultural and social melting pot at the international border between Spanish and French controlled lands. Although abandoned in 1773, Los Adaes set the stage for the blend of Spanish and French traditions that is still celebrated in Louisiana’s Creole heritage today.

During the early 1700s, France controlled the large Louisiana Territory, a region that directly bordered Spanish-owned land in Texas. Potential conflicts along this international boundary spurred the creation of the presidio at Los Adaes. In 1714, the French founded a new mission in Natchitoches, near the Spanish border, and soon constructed Fort St. Jean Baptiste to protect it.

In response to the ominous French presence, the Spanish established Los Adaes in 1716 directly across the border to protect its holdings in Texas and check French expansion into the territory. By 1721, the Spanish had erected a large fort on the site and a mission church in order to convert the local American Indians to Catholicism and a more “civilized” way of life. The fort (presidio) included a thick hexagonal stockade with three defensive bulwarks that surrounded the presidial town and its mission. After Los Adaes became the capital of the province of Texas in 1729, the Spanish built a house for the governor within its walls.

Even though it was the capital, Los Adaes remained relatively isolated because the nearest Spanish supply post was over 800 miles away. Life at the presidio was harsh during its early years. The land was difficult to farm, and heavy rainy seasons often spoiled supplies and rotted structures. The Spanish government strictly forbade trade with the French at the time, but a cooperative relationship soon formed between the neighboring forts due to the difficult conditions. Although Spain and France supposedly were enemies, the communities grew close, extensively trading goods illegally across the border, exchanging cultural ideas, language, and often even intermarrying. This early Spanish-French cooperation laid the foundations of the Creole culture that still thrives in Louisiana today.

In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France ceded all of its territory west of the Mississippi to Spain, including New Orleans and a portion of the modern-day state of Louisiana. This erased the former border between the two powers that Los Adaes was to protect. The presidio continued to serve as the capital of Texas until 1770, but it was decommissioned and abandoned in 1773, less than 60 years after its construction.