SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

ESTABLISHMENT OF A MISSION

The founding of a new mission followed a standardized procedure. First, the custodio and his staff of difinitors made the decision to send a mission to a particular pueblo. They usually selected a missionary for the task during the annual chapter meeting. It was common for a new mission to be assigned to a friar who had just arrived from Mexico. The friar departed for his new pueblo accompanied by a squad of soldiers for his protection on the road and during the first days in his assigned pueblo. A wagon carried his allotment of basic supplies necessary to begin religious instruction and the construction of a church and convento. The equipment had been sent from Mexico City on the same supply train that brought him to New Mexico. [5]

Upon arriving in the pueblo, the friar purchased one or two houses from an Indian family, with the approval of the administrators responsible for such decisions. The houses served as his church, convento, and storerooms during the planning and construction of permanent buildings. [6]

The friar's next step was to secure permission to build a church. The leaders of the pueblo had to give permission to use a particular tract of land for this purpose. Depending on the success of the negotiations, the friar decided whether to build a temporary or a permanent church and convento.

There were several paths that events could follow over the next several years. For example, at Hawikuh Fray Roque de Figueredo and his successor, Fray Francisco Letrado, began construction on the permanent church and convento about 300 feet east of the pueblo, at the bottom of the hill on which the Indian buildings stood. The friars built the mission immediately adjacent to abandoned house block F, reoccupied by the Indians about the same time. Some of the rooms of this house block probably served as the temporary convento. The friars began on the mission in late 1629, but it was destroyed before completion during a revolt about a year and a half later, in February, 1632. The Franciscans did not return to Hawikuh until the late 1640s, when they successfully completed the church and convento. [7]

At Pecos in 1617, the pueblo would not permit the construction of a church near Indian buildings. Fray Pedro Zambrano Ortiz began a small church about a thousand feet northeast of the pueblo and probably lived in a small shack near the site of construction. The small church may have been roofed but was unfinished inside when the Franciscans finally received permission to enter the pueblo about 1620. Fray Pedro de Ortega, who replaced Ortiz, moved into rooms at the south end of the South Pueblo and built several additional rooms to serve as a convento. He constructed a small temporary church, and in late 1620 began construction on the building that was to become the largest church ever built in colonial New Mexico. The small church northeast of the pueblo was dismantled and some of the adobes and wood were probably reused in the new construction. Fray Andres Suárez took over the work of construction in 1622 and completed the new church and its convento by early 1626. [8]

At Las Humanas a third variation on establishment occurred. In mid-1629 Fray Francisco Letrado occupied several rooms at the west end of house block 7 and in 1631 began construction on the church of San Isidro. It was located on the south slope of the hill crowned by the pueblo, and was intended as an interim structure. Letrado was transferred to Hawikuh in late 1631, and Las Humanas was reduced to a visita of Abó. Fray Francisco Acevedo completed construction on San Isidro. Fray Diego de Santandér began construction on a larger church in about 1660. [9]

Supplies and Equipment

Each friar was given a set of basic items when he was sent to New Mexico for the first time. As part of his founding equipment, the friar was furnished with:

10 axes for cutting trees for beams and other wooden items;
 3 adzes for trimming beams, lintels, and other wooden items;
10 hoes for the preparation and maintenance of the convento garden and for digging foundation trenches;
 1 medium-sized saw for cutting boards;
 1 chisel with collar and handle for detailed shaping of beams, lintels, and boards;
 2 augers for drilling holes for pegs, the usual way of fastening the components of doors;
 1 box plane for planing board and beam surfaces flat. [10]

This was a basic set of tools for use in the mission on a day-to-day basis. For major work such as the trimming and carving of the decorated roof beams and corbels for the church and sacristy and the lathe-turning of bannister rails and posts, the friar usually hired skilled carpenters, such as the Indians of Pecos Pueblo. These experts would bring their own, more specialized tools and equipment to the site. [11]

In addition, the friar was supplied with the following materials for construction:

 600 tinned nails for decorating the church door;
  60 nails about 4 inches long;
  60 nails about 7 inches long;
 100 nails de a quinientos en suma; [12]
 400 nails de a mil en suma;
1800 roofing nails;
1200 nails de medio almud;
 800 tacks;
  10 pounds of steel for making other needed items and tools;
   1 large latch for the church door;
   1 pair of braces for double doors, probably the church doors;
   2 small locks;
  12 hinges for doors and windows;
  12 hook and eye latches. [13]

The carpenters used very few nails in the construction of flat earthen roofs, and they used wooden pegs in much of the other work, such as door construction and window framing. [14] Other than the tinned nails for the church door, the carpenters probably used the smaller nails listed above for furniture construction such as benches, chairs, tables, cabinets, and bed frames. The larger nails were probably for framing and supports for the retablo, or decorative screens, in the church. The roofing nails may have been used in the construction of stables and storerooms adjacent to the convento.

The friar had some tools or equipment made on-site, using the ten pounds of unworked steel in his supplies. A blacksmith must have been present during at least some of the cycle of mission construction and activity to do this work.

Site selection and siting considerations

As his first major task, the friar had to select an appropriate location for the mission compound. Several criteria influenced his decision. The friar wanted the church to have an imposing situation, close to the main plaza of the pueblo, but clearly separate from the mundane lives of the Indians, as dictated by the Laws of the Indies. The site should be fairly level, but the friar would plan on building a level platform for the mission if necessary. The church should face into one of the plazas of the pueblo, but still be oriented towards a cardinal direction if possible.

After he selecting a first choice and several second choices, the friar entered into negotiations with those in authority in the pueblo, in order to secure permission to build on one or another of the sites. If and when permission was granted, the friar could begin planning the actual construction.

Planning the Buildings

The friar worked out the plan of the church and convento buildings, probably in the form of a measured sketch plan on paper or smooth board, in advance of actual layout of the site. He carefully determined the overall measurements, the use, sizes and relative location of the rooms of the convento, the plan of the church, and the design of facade. During planning, the friar's own ideas and experience necessarily influenced the design. Conventos and church plan and elevation, usually similar in their general attributes, tended to be different in detail throughout seventeenth century New Mexico because each was the creative product of only one or two people. [15]

The church could be planned with either a straight nave (the main body of the interior of a church) or with transepts. Transepts were extensions built onto the sides of a nave to give the plan of a church the shape of a cross. At the end of the church opposite the main entrance doors, the friars built the main altar. In the area immediately in front of the altar was the sanctuary, where much of the activity took place during the religious ceremony called Mass. The main altar was almost always raised above the level of the nave on a platform reached by broad stairs. To either side of the main alter, the Franciscans usually built secondary altars called collaterals, or simply side altars. At the front of the church, over the entrance, was usually a choir loft, a large balcony where the choir stood to sing. The choir loft was reached by a stairway built under the loft or in a room against the outside wall of the church. Before 1640, the friars built a baptismal area under the choir loft, but after 1640 the baptistry was a separate room reached by a doorway through the church wall. From the area of the sanctuary, a doorway opened into the sacristy, a room used for storing the vestments worn during the Mass. From the sacristy, the friar could go through another doorway into the main residence area of the mission, called the convento.

The Franciscans laid out the churches as precisely square as they could, with remarkable success. San Buenaventura is the only one of the surviving seventeenth-century churches to have a significant lack of parallelism in the walls of the nave. George Kubler has suggested that many seventeenth-century churches were designed to appear longer by the creation of a false perspective with non-parallel nave walls. [16] However, most of these churches have naves that diverge less than one foot over lengths of sixty to one hundred feet. These include Halona, Hawikuh, Abó, Quarai, Giusewa, Acoma, San Isidro, the "Lost Church" at Pecos, and the first plan of the Chapel of San Miguel in Santa Fe; most of these diverge less than six inches. Only San Diego de Tabirá and San Buenaventura have walls more than one foot out of parallel, with San Buenaventura having a three-foot divergence and San Diego two feet. Apparently the missionary responsible for each church wanted the walls parallel, but were not always able to achieve this.

Somewhere high on the church, sometimes above the choir loft stairs or the baptistry, the Franciscans built the bell room. Bells in seventeenth century mission churches were not sounded by swinging. Instead, the clapper was pulled against it by a thong, or the bell was struck from the outside. [17] It was necessary for the bell ringer to stand virtually beside the bell. This resulted in the distinctive arrangement of the bell tower seen in the missions of the seventeenth century. In each case, the design carefully allowed direct, easy access to the bell room, usually built high on one side or either end of the church. Each missionary received one standard issue, two-hundred pound bell in the founding supplies for his mission. Most of these were virtually identical bronze bells. The seventeenth century Pecos and Aguatobi bells were cast in the same mold as the bell at Acoma made in 1710; the bells at the Salinas missions probably looked the same. [18] The bells were usually made in Mexico City. For example, in 1612, the Franciscans contracted with the maestro de campañero, the master bell-maker, Hernan Sanchez for a number of brass items, including six large bells, each weighing 200 pounds. Hernan Sanchez was a recognized maestro in Mexico City. Among other things, he made the bell called "Santa Maria de los Angeles" in the Cathedral there. [19]

The Convento

The friar planned the convento to include certain basic elements: 1) the central patio with its encircling covered walk, called the ambulatorio in this report; 2) the portería, or reception room, at the front of the convento near the church facade; 3) a refectorio, or dining room; 4) a cocina, or kitchen; 5) oficinas, or storerooms; 6) the despensa, or pantry; 7) the infirmario, or infirmary; and 8) several celdas, cells or residences. Some of the cells had alcobas (alcoves, also called trasceldas) or rear rooms for sleeping, and usually one cell, the celda principal, had an adjoining office space for the friar. Frequently the mission would have one or several privies inside the convento buildings, in the patio, or in the second courtyard. The missionaries usually used one room, probably an unused cell, for a schoolroom. [20]

The convento centered on the patio. Around it was the ambulatorio, a walkway that gave access to both the secular and sacred areas of the mission. It served to separate the activities which involved the public from the private residence of the Franciscans. However, the Franciscans were not a cloistered order, and lay persons had some access even to the private rooms of the friars. Doors were used, not to preserve the sanctity of the cloister, but as a security measure to prevent pilferage of goods, supplies, and valuable church fittings, and as a deterrent to cold drafts in the winter.

In the private area of the friary were the rooms for the necessities of life and the business of the mission. These included the cells where the friar and any other resident Franciscan or lay brother lived; the storerooms; the dining room; and the kitchen. The cells were usually two rooms each, a larger one for paperwork and study, and a smaller, the alcove, for sleeping. Some of the cells may have been used as residences by Indians on the permanent staff of the mission, such as the sacristan, who kept the sacristy and church clean and neat and cared for the vestments used in the ceremonies of the church. He sometimes assisted the priest in such ceremonies. [21] These and other room uses were highly variable depending on the wishes of the resident minister and the fortunes of the mission.

The friar designed all of the rooms for particular purposes at the time they were built. Some, such as the extra cells, anticipated future needs, while other rooms were put into use immediately. However, because of changes introduced by later friars and alterations by reoccupation after 1800, and lack of sufficient detail in the archeological records, the purposes of some rooms cannot be determined. The friars after the original builder changed the plan of some rooms, indicating that they also probably changed the uses of these rooms.

Adjacent to the main convento complex, the friar laid out a second courtyard resembling a barnyard. The second courtyard contained the animal pens; stables for the mules, horses, and dairy cows; and coops for chickens and turkeys. Here stood the main food-storage buildings, usually a hay barn for the animals and a granary to store beans, wheat, and corn against time of need for the convento and the pueblo. Beyond this, but not far from the convento, would be pens and corrals for keeping sheep for shearing or fattening and tame cattle for milking and breeding. Larger pens in the area held stock waiting to be driven to markets in the San Bartólome-Parral area, several hundred miles to the south. [22]

The rooms and associated wooden buildings of the second courtyard served the secular life of the mission. Elsewhere, either in the second courtyard or in buildings added to the pueblo room blocks, the friar built the mission weaving rooms and other workshops. [23]

The mission maintained its ranching and farming activities in large estancias on the surrounding valley floor, using Indian labor. Some missions in the central Rio Grande Valley had a surprising number of these estancias. In the period from 1663 to 1666, for example, San Ildefonso had six, Sandía had thirty, Isleta had fourteen, and Socorro had two. [24]

The mission, with its residences, offices, storerooms, workshops, sheds, barns, pens, herds and fields, was almost a self-contained community. This was certainly the intent of the design, derived from over 800 years of monastic tradition and 400 years of Franciscan development. It had served well in Medieval Europe, in Renaissance Mexico, and would continue to serve in Colonial New Mexico.

Surveying

The friar usually laid out the church and convento with some concern for geographic orientation. He located geographic north by a magnetic compass, or by means of any one of several methods using the stars or sun. A compass, however, was not trustworthy in a new territory until its variation, or deviation from geographic north, had been determined. Each area had a different variation, and in some cases the difference could be very large. [25]

The friar could accurately obtain the bearing of geographic north by methods using either observation of the stars during the night or of the sun during the day. He could have determined the variation with an accuracy of less than half a degree by a simple nighttime observation of the direction of the North Star relative to the direction in which the compass needle pointed. Greater accuracy could have been obtained by several observations at different times during one or several nights. [26]

Most "frontiersmen" such as the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and colonists on the northern frontiers of New Spain probably used solar observations to find the cardinal directions. They would have known several techniques for this, and probably carried small, easily used instruments for the job.

The simplest method of determining the cardinal directions using the sun was the gnomon. The friar set a rod (the gnomon) vertically into the ground and drew a circle around it using the base of the rod as the center. He marked the shadow of the top of the rod as it crossed the circle in the morning and again in the evening. He then found the midpoint of the line between the two marks and drew a line from that midpoint through the base of the rod. This line would run within a fraction of a degree of true north and south.

Several other instruments for finding true north using the sun, such as the magnetic sundial, the equinoctial sundial, and the equinoctial ring, were available to the missionaries in the early seventeenth century. All of these instruments were made in small, virtually pocket-sized versions. [27]

The magnetic sundial and equinoctial sundial used compasses as part of their orientation system, and therefore would not serve the purposes of the friar. The equinoctial ring was simpler, but required that the north latitude and the hour of the day be known. The friar could easily find his north latitude and the arrival of the noon hour by observing the altitude of the sun with standard instruments such as the quadrant or astrolabe and comparing this reading with printed tables of latitude. Such tables, called ephemerides, were commonly available. For example, Antonio Espejo used a set during his exploration of New Mexico in 1582, as did Captain Alonso de Leon while crossing Texas in 1689, and Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit, who explored and mapped southern California from 1685 to the early years of the 1700s. [28] The hour of the day could be obtained with some accuracy by using the astrolabe. In fact, a latitude observation required, as a routine procedure, that local noon be determined.

In the Salinas area, the missionaries would have found that the compass pointed almost due north, making it unnecessary for them to correct for variation on every sighting. After this determination, the friar could proceed with the layout of the mission buildings.

Laying Out the Plan of the Buildings

The church and convento buildings were laid out at the same time using stakes, a plumb bob, and a measuring cord, the cordel, probably fifty varas (140 feet) in length. [29] In general, the method consisted of a series of angle and distance determinations, with stakes placed at intended corners. First, the friar selected the location of the center of the complex. The Indians on the layout crew then ran a baseline through the center along the alignment selected by the friar for the building. They used the cordel to measure the length of the main wall along the baseline and drove stakes to mark the first two corners. The friar showed them how to turn a right angle here, using a simple geometric method such as intersecting circles or a 3-4-5 triangle, or an instrument such as the compass. The crew drove a third stake marking the new alignment and measured along that alignment to the next principal corner, perhaps using the plumb bob string as the sighting instrument. This procedure continued until the crew/workers had marked the outline of the entire building complex on the ground. They probably ran string between the stakes. [30]

Within the outline, the crew members delineated room walls, then excavated trenches for the building foundations along these lines. As a rule, the friar had all the foundations completed first to serve as the permanent plan for above-ground construction. [31]