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

STABILIZATION OF QUARAI (continued)

Second Stabilization, 1939 to 1940

After a pause of almost three years, Wesley Hurt arrived at Quarai to continue the excavations and to stabilize the ruins of the church and convento. He had trained under Joseph Toulouse during the first year of excavation and stabilization at Abó. On January 25, 1939, he and a crew of Works Progress Administration workmen began the excavation of the pueblo of Quarai. [15] For the next five months they cleared the plaza west of the church while delineating the exterior walls of the pueblo buildings. In May, 1939, Hurt and the crew turned to the mission buildings.

Figure 61. Quarai during the stabilization by Wesley Hurt, October, 1939. At this date the terrace in front of the church had been restored and the north wall of the west transept stabilized and built up to the height of the adjoining tower. The scaffolding has been moved into the apse. One strut of the scaffold is visible at the left edge of the tower at the south side of the east transept. Courtesy Museum of New Mexico, # 6666.

During the second week of May, the crew stabilized the Spanish ruins west of the baptistry and began work on the convento. During the third week the crew repaired the porteria and the kiva. As part of the stabilization of the kiva, Hurt rebuilt the adobe-lined ventilator shaft in stone.

At the end of May, Hurt and the crew began excavating the remaining rooms extending south from the southeast corner of the east courtyard. They started where Baker had left off, at the south side of rooms 58 and 59, and the midpoint of room 51. Over the next seven months, Hurt carried the excavations to the south end of room 53 and two-thirds of the way across room 54. South of this point an irrigation ditch prevented further work in 1939. As the walls were exposed, the crew began capping and stabilization of the ruins.

In late May, while work continued on the southeastern rooms, Hurt had some of the crew begin work on the east courtyard. The crew built up the retaining walls and hauled dirt to fill behind the raised walls, levelling the terraces. They cleaned out the remaining fill and the crosswall from the round kiva, room 31, and cleaned up and stabilized the rooms along the east side of the courtyard.

By the end of July, most of the eastern area of the mission had been finished. The eastern courtyard and its associated rooms had been cleaned and stabilized, and most of the rooms in the southeastern area had been emptied of fill. In the southeast, the crew was still tracing some of the single walls enclosing what Hurt called "Patio 3," the open area between the east campo santo wall and the west side of the southeastern buildings. Hurt moved most of the workmen up to the church to begin final stabilization of its walls.

In the last week of July, the crew began with landscaping at the front of the church. They removed the irregular earth fill in the area of the front entrance, and capped the stone steps marking the edges of the platforms here. [16] From September, 1939 through the end of March, 1940, the workmen patched and stabilized the western convento and various portions of the church that had deteriorated since 1935, and then began capping all walls in the western convento, the eastern courtyard, and the southeastern rooms. They levelled the wall tops and built a capping of stone on top. The capping tapered to a narrow edge, making a stone crest or ridge along the walls to encourage drainage and keep people from climbing on the structures.

In September, 1939, the workmen built a scaffolding in the church and began capping and stabilizing the upper walls of the building. They began at the northwest corner of the interior. Here they capped the north wall of the west transept, the northwest tower, and the west and north walls of the apse. Hurt believed that the walls in these areas stood to the height of the tops of the towers, and raised the walls on either side of the tower to that height. Apparently the effort in this area indicated that to raise the rest of the transept and apse walls to the same height would take up too much time, so the "reconstruction" of these non-existent wall tops was discontinued and the walls capped at their surviving height around the remainder of the west side of the transept and north side of the apse. The masons then repaired and refaced the areas around the west beam sockets in the apse and the north sockets of the west transept. They filled the socket for the transverse viga above the mouth of the apse, and reinserted a beam into the lowest socket of the beams for supporting the retablo.

Moving the scaffolding, they capped the tower at the south side of the west transept in December, and again repaired and refaced the wall around the south beam sockets of the west transept and the sockets at the northwest corner of the nave. In this area they restored two beam sockets and part of a third at the south face of the tower, and filled most of the sockets of the upper and lower clerestory beams. They reinserted a beam in the lowest clerestory socket, as Toulouse had done at Abó. Above the restored sockets south of the face of the tower, the masons built the wall up to within 1 1/2 feet of the original height.

Moving the scaffolding again, the workmen began capping the top of the west wall of the nave. They built up the stonework above the west window to the height of the surviving wall, and then raised the wall south of the window to about half the height of the beam sockets. At the south end of the nave wall, the masons stabilized the tower and repaired and refaced the surfaces, both exterior and in the nave around the first two beam sockets. North of the tower along the nave wall, they raised the wall to its original height, rebuilding the upper half of the next two beam sockets. The fifth and sixth sockets were stabilized at half their original height. North of the sixth socket, only the lower two or three inches of the sockets survived--these were stabilized out of existence when the walls were capped.

By the first week of February, 1940, the crew had completed the stabilization of all walls of the convento and the entire west side of the church, and were working on the front of the building. They set up the scaffolding at the center of the facade and prepared to rebuild the doorway from the choir loft through the facade. About February 9, a storm blew the scaffolding over, damaging it enough to halt work on the high walls of the church for a few weeks while it was repaired.

While the carpenters repaired the scaffolding, Hurt built the visitor contact station, although he referred to it as the "headquarters building." Hurt had this structure built of the same red sandstone as that used in the church. It was a rectangular building about 24 feet long and perhaps 12 feet wide, with a roof at a height of about 7 1/2 feet supported on vigas extending six inches beyond the exterior faces of the walls. It had two large doorways, one on each of the two long sides. The doorways were approximately four feet wide and seven feet high. The masons built a fireplace with a rectangular chimney in the south end of the building. Finally, they constructed a retaining wall along the east side with two steps down to grade, and filled behind the wall to create an artificial platform around the kiosk, level with the parking area a few feet to the west.

The scaffolding was ready by the end of March, and work began again on stabilizing the church walls. During mid-April the crew rebuilt the facade above the entrance door, recreating an approximation of the original choir loft door opening onto the choir balcony. Then they lifted new lintels for the choir doorway and set them into place in the traces of the surviving sockets. Above the lintel they rebuilt a portion of the facade wall. This wall was left with a shallow V-shaped top profile. At the sides it reached to within 2 feet of the original height of the facade parapet, but in the center, above the choir doorway, it was only about two feet high.

At the end of April Hurt moved the scaffolding to the southeast corner and began work on the east wall. By mid-May the crew had rebuilt the choir loft doorway, replacing wooden lintel beams in the last traces of the beam sockets above the doorway. The masons capped the south wall of the nave and the southeast tower, and repaired the facing around the choir loft door and up the tower.

By the end of June, crewmen began work on the interior of the church. They removed and relaid much of the flagstone in the nave and transepts, probably because the original flagstones had shifted, making the flooring irregular. [17] This relaying of the floor destroyed the arrangement of flagstone outlining the altar platforms in front of the two side altars, and the platform for the stairs to the main altar. At the same time, the workmen removed the decayed traces of the main altar steps and built replacement steps inside the mouth of the apse. These replacement steps were located about 1 1/2 feet north of the originals and were of the wrong riser and tread sizes. With the completion of this construction in late June, Hurt reached the end of the time available for capping and stabilization of the church. He apparently assumed that the east walls of the church and many of the details would be finished in a later season's work.

Meanwhile, the first week of February the crew finished excavating the known rooms of the southeastern area of the ruins. They removed the fill from the last few feet of room 54 and stabilized the walls. At the same time they apparently moved the irrigation ditch a few feet to the south so that it passed just south of the ruins.

In the last week of May, Hurt and the crew began a few final details to clean up the site. This involved the removal of rubble and brush from various parts of the site, and the removal of the residence built into the baptistry a few years before. Hurt removed the roof, doors, and windows, and took down the walls to about half the height of the windows. In mid-June the crew removed the roof, doors, windows and upper wall of the residence built into rooms 17 and 18. He left the outlines of the two windows on top of the east wall, as well as the doorway cut through the wall. Finally, on August 9, Hurt and the crew packed up the equipment and left Quarai.

With Hurt's departure, Quarai entered a period of 32 years during which it received no further stabilization work. Most of the convento walls and the structural remains on the southeast side of the convento had been stabilized well enough to survive this period of neglect reasonably well. The high walls of the church along the east side of the apse, the entire east transept, and the east central tower never received any stabilization during the effort from 1934-1940, and in fact remained unmaintained until 1978. They stayed virtually unchanged during these years, apparently because they had reached a point of equilibrium some time before. In other words, although the building had been acquired by a public agency in 1932, much of it survived until 1978 only because of its sound original construction, rather than through modern preservation techniques.