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

THE ORGANIZATION OF CONSTRUCTION CREWS

According to Fray Alonso de Benavides, construction crews were made up of women, with children doing much of the lighter fetch-and-carry work. "Sumptuous and beautiful as they are, [the churches and conventos] were built solely by the women and by the boys and girls of the curacy. For among these nations it is the custom for the women to build the walls." [32] The men of the pueblo collected the materials needed. The organization of the work crews was probably hierarchical. The friar would have appointed the more experienced Indians or faster learners as crew leaders. Leaders directed workers in particular tasks according to detailed instructions from the friar. When possible, experienced colonists acted as crew leaders. It is likely that the friar had one man who acted as mayordomo, or foreman, overseeing the entire construction operation. This may have been a lay brother, a colonist or an experienced Indian. Such an arrangement allowed the construction work to continue while the friar attended to all the other myriad details of the daily life of a mission. [33]

Construction Crews and Collection Crews

For a building project as complex as the construction of a mission church and convento, the work had to be divided into several major tasks. Mayordomos directed all of these task groups under the supervision of the friar. One task group quarried stone and hauled it to the construction site, probably using a mule-drawn wagon to facilitate collection. Another mixed adobe mortar used to set the stones and cover the walls. A third group, under the close supervision of the friar, collected limestone or gypsum, built kilns, burned the stone, and slaked the lime for use in the final plaster coating of the walls.

Other groups performed the many other tasks necessary to construct a large building. One cut brush and small trees to cover those buildings that were not to receive roofs of carved beams and corbels, or shingles. [34] Another group wove matting to be used between the stick or board layer of the roof and its final earth covering. Still others worked on the layout crew, shovelled dirt from foundation trenches, or hauled earth, stone, and sand to fill the foundation platform.

The Carpenters

The carpenters formed a separate group whose job included seeking out and cutting the appropriate trees for large roofing beams. They probably had to go only five or six miles away into the Manzano Mountains for Quarai and Abó. At Las Humanas, good forests were almost twenty miles distant in the Gallinas Mountains to the east. Supplying timbers for the construction of the churches of Las Humanas would have been more labor-intensive than for the other two pueblos.

In the Salinas missions, the principal material for the large roofing beams was probably Ponderosa pine. In other areas where it was available, spruce would have been used, because the wood was lighter for a given volume and stronger than Ponderosa. More important, the grain of Ponderosa usually twisted as it cured, while the grain of spruce stayed straight. This meant that Ponderosa had to be well-cured before it could be used, or a large beam could twist somewhat and shift and crack even thick walls. [35]

The woodcutters probably allowed the trees to season for perhaps a year where they were felled, perhaps stacked in ricks to prevent rot. After the seasoning period, before the trees were moved to the mission, carpenters probably trimmed the trees into beams, planks, and other members. To shape the larger beams, they used axes, adzes, and saws of various types including two-man pitsaws. This initial shaping reduced the weight having to be carried by the wagons when the crew hauled the wood back to the mission. An average finished roofing beam for the church was about 35 feet long, 10 1/2 inches across, and 12 inches high. When prepared for transportation, it was probably somewhat thicker, say 12 inches square. Such a beam weighed about 1,750 pounds and must have been a challenge to bring down the rough slopes of the Manzano Mountains or haul the twenty miles from the Gallinas forests to Las Humanas. Rather than having the beams dragged or carried by hand, the friar may have dismantled the wheels and suspension from wagons and attached them directly to each beam. This would have allowed the beams to be hauled by mule-team. Similar adaptations were common in Europe as part of fortification construction and the hauling of military equipment. [36]

The carpenters finished the trimmed beams and other members in a workshop at the mission, probably a ramada-covered area in the second courtyard or near the church. Here they had a wider variety of tools, including draw knives, chisels of many sizes and shapes, augers, planes, and lathes to turn stair and bannister posts and other such pieces. [37]

Judging from the scant information available in the structures of the Salinas missions, the carpenters followed a clear routine for preparing the woodwork of a mission. Large beams for the major door and window lintels, choir loft beams and roofing vigas would be cut and allowed to cure until the carpenters were certain that they had stabilized. Then they would be trimmed to the right length and squared. The surviving ponderosa pine lintel beam at San Buenaventura, Las Humanas, for example, was adzed square after it had cured and twisted.

At this point the carpenters would begin decorative carving. The large beams seem to have been cut and carved when the church was begun, perhaps five years before they would be needed. Smaller logs for the window and door lintels and roofing of the convento, needing less curing time because of their smaller volume, were probably cut just before being needed. This implies that the cutting dates of the smaller, unsquared logs used high in a building are about one year before they were actually placed in a building, while the cutting dates of large, squared beams are approximately the year the building was begun. For example, the logs used as the floor of the bell tower in San Gregorio II at Abó were cut in 1649, and probably placed in the walls in 1650, indicating that the main construction of the building was probably finished in about 1651. The small lintel beam of the second story window of the choir loft entrance room, the antecoro, at Quarai, is probably the beam used to produce the only tree-ring date from the mission. If so, it was cut in 1631, indicating that it was placed in the walls in about the same year, giving a completion date for the building of about 1632 or 1633. Finally, the choir loft and doorway vigas visible in drawings and photographs in the unfinished church of San Buenaventura at Las Humanas were probably cut in 1660, carved in 1661, and kept in storage until they were needed in the later 1660s. The cutting date of squared beams usually cannot be determined, because of the loss of the outer rings of the log. The one surviving beam from San Buenaventura, back in place over the main entrance to the church, is an example. Tree-ring dating indicates only that it was cut sometime after 1583. [38]