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

LAS HUMANAS (continued)

John W. Virgin, 1894

In February, 1894, John W. Virgin visited the ruins. He later wrote his own description of San Buenaventura. [58] The church walls stood twenty-five feet high, he said. The choir loft had been supported by a large beam measuring ten inches by sixteen inches, resting on a vertical pillar sixteen inches square. [59] On the large beam rested smaller beams, each with one end set into the front wall of the church. The smaller beams measured 8 1/2 inches by 10 1/2 inches (Morrison earlier had given the measurement of these beams as eleven inches by thirteen inches). All the beams were carved with elaborate decoration. In a letter written thirty-six years later, Virgin added more details to his description of the church, without the picturesque style that confuses what he saw with what he suspected or had heard. "When I was there the only timbers in place [in the church] were the square timbers over the front door, with a little of the wall they had supported still there." He added that the ends of the main beam were in the wall at the time of his visit.

In later correspondence, Virgin described finding a section of one of the carved beams in a large pit about a mile from San Buenaventura, probably during this visit. He gives its measurements as ten inches by twelve inches and perhaps twenty-five to thirty feet long, and said that it was weathered gray and had sever pitting and decay on the upper surface. The other three surfaces were covered with carved decoration. He had to cut it into two sections to lift it out of the pit. He considered it to have been the middle section of the main beam, and thought it had been cut out by a vandal to be used as a ladder to reach the bottom of the pit. Note that the measurements Virgin gave for this beam do not match the measurements stated for any of the beams in his article. [60]

Virgin said that there were three windows on each side of the nave, and the floor of the church was "laid in neatly-jointed limestone flags." Both these statements were incorrect. He could see the lower portions of three openings in the south wall, and presumably interpreted the slight irregularities of the top of the north wall as the last traces of similar window openings. He could probably see the flagging in front of the portería and the entrance to the church (that at the front of the church is covered with a thin layer of soil and grass today), and assumed that the stones continued throughout the interior of the church. Photographs taken before and after his visit all show that the interior ground surface of the church was covered with from several inches to two feet of rubble, so that he could not have seen a floor surface. [61]

San Isidro, said Virgin, presented "such a confusion of fallen walls and dirt-covered debris as to defy any attempt to trace its form or determine its dimensions with much accuracy." This should be taken to mean only that Virgin did not measure the building. Several people before and after his visit had no difficulty measuring the structure and drawing an accurate plan of it, including Willison in 1872, Bandelier in 1882, and Ida Squires and Anna Shepard in 1923.

Virgin illustrated his article with etchings made from two photographs. One of these can be identified as one of the missing Lummis photographs from his 1890 visit. The other, showing the inner face of the front of the church, looks so much like the Lummis photograph showing the outside of the same wall that it, too, is probably a missing Lummis photograph.

Figure 44. The inside face of the lintel over the entrance to the church of San Buenaventura in ca. 1890, looking east. This is the engraving published in 1898, but suspected to be made from a lost Lummis photograph made in 1890.

Figure 45. A beam from San Buenaventura. It was photographed in 1896 in front of a shed of the Dow House next to the post office of Gran Quivira. This beam has decorative carving on the middle section of the face towards the camera. The carving, cracks, and weathering all match the details of the beam in the engraving in the previous illustration, making it very likely that this beam had been removed from the inner face of the facade of San Buenaventura between 1890 and 1896. Courtesy National Park Service, #GQ-448.

Figure 46. The north portion of the convento of San Buenaventura about 1900. The room at the right is room 16, and the north corridor runs diagonally across the center of the picture to the sacristy in the background. This photograph is of great importance, because it records the last surviving traces of the roof of the convento. Six beam sockets can be seen in the top of the wall between the sacristy and room 15. The second socket from the left still has the stub of a beam set in it. The sockets and beam stub survive here because the thickness and height of the sacristy wall kept it from collapsing to a level below the beam sockets of the convento, as happened everywhere else in the convento except along the south side of the church. The sockets in room 15 were about 10 feet above the present floor level, three feet lower than the sockets in the south wall of the church in rooms 1 and 16. Courtesy New Mexico State Monuments, # 40667.

Visitors Between 1894 and 1923

A number of photographs taken between about 1890 and 1923 are available, although undated at present. These show the process of collapse of the buildings, and can be roughly divided into two periods by the presence or absence of the beams over the church entrance, which were removed between 1896 and 1905. [62] The innermost beam with its carved decorations had been pulled out by 1896 and lay next to the Dow house in the village of Gran Quivira at the foot of the hill for several years. [63]

Between 1890 and 1905, the lintel beams over the sacristy window disappeared, probably pulled out by souvenir hunters. The carved beams over the doorway from the church to the sacristy probably disappeared about the same time. The lintels over the window facing west and most of the other walls of room 14 collapsed, leaving a splintered stub of wood from one of the beams in place until about 1905. The doorway opening north into the corridor from room 10, the window facing south from room 7, and the doorway from room 7 to room 8 all fell during the same period.

After 1905, lintel beams remained in room 10 over the window facing south onto the second courtyard and over the doorway to room 11, and in room 15 over the doorway south to room 14 and the small window facing west into the sacristy. In 1919 the United States Government placed the care and protection of Gran Quivira in the hands of the newly created National Park Service. The doorway between rooms 15 and 14 fell soon after National Park Service maintenance of the ruins began about 1920, and then the doorway from room 10 to 11. The last lintels to collapse were those for the window south from room 10 and those for the window west from room 15 into the sacristy, not long before excavation and a full stabilization program began in 1923.