VIDEO OF SANTA CRUZ MISSION BACKSTAGE

BEHIND THE SCENES FOOTAGE OF SANTA CRUZ MISSION VIDEO PRESENTATION BY SEAN HEANEY WILL BE POSTED HERE> COMING SOON

Santa Cruz Mission Present day and personal statement

SANTA CRUZ MISSION PROJECT

Presented by Sean Heaney

I have given you a lot of facts about the Santa Cruz Mission in my Blog.  My personal view of mission life is that it was an extremely difficult life.  The missionaries and the native people of the area had to endure a lot of hardships in order for the mission to survive.  I can understand why it was called the "Bad Luck" mission because the mission had to survive floods, earthquakes, uprisings and many other challenges over the years.  I must admit I prefer my home to the adobe brick buildings.  I prefer my bed.  I prefer how easy it is now to get food to eat.  Life today is a lot easier than mission life.  We should count our blessings.  Thank you all for sharing this time with me.

Ahlone People overview

SANTA CRUZ MISSION PROJECT

Presented by Sean Heaney

The Native Americans from this area are called Ohlone.  They had several small towns or villages in this area before the Spanish arrived, had plenty to eat, tule houses to live in and did a lot of trading with nearby tribes.

            The Ohlone were known for their hospitality.  They tried to make visitors feel welcome, and they would give travelers food if they were hungry.   When the first Spanish explorers came here, they were given gifts of food by all the local people they met.  The explorers wrote in their journals that those gifts kept them from starving.  The Ohlone tribes people also gave them valuable shell beads and animal skins, and accepted glass beads and Spanish items in return.

            When the padres arrived in California, they asked the Ohlone people in this area to come live at the new Mission, become Catholics, work hard and be Spanish citizens.  The native people did not realize that the Spanish would not let them pray, work or behave in the ways they knew and if they got tired of this new life, they would not be allowed to leave.  Many of the workers died from the new illnesses brought by the Spanish, and some people ran away from the Mission.  Soldiers were sent  out to find runaways and bring them back.

            When there were not enough workers left at Santa Cruz Mission to do the important jobs, soldiers were sent out to the Central Valley to find more natives, and bring them back even if they didn't want to live at the Mission.  The men and women brought from the Central Valley were Yokut tribes people, and many did not like living there.  Workers who were caught trying to run away were beaten or whipped, even if they were very old or just children.

            Other Mission workers took pride in their difficult new lives, not seeming to mind the new rules and working hard to be good Catholics and good citizens.  Workers who tried to become members of the new culture had a few more rights and were treated with more trust and kindness.  If they worked very hard, or learned a valuable skill, they were moved into a special adobe just for workers and their families.  Each family got a room of their own with a door, a window and a fire pit.  They were allowed to put religious art on the walls, and they could store grain or other food in the loft just under the roof.

Santa Cruz Mission Industry

SANTA CRUZ MISSION PROJECT

Presented by Sean Heaney

The industry of the Mission began successfully.  Crops and orchards soon were thriving in the fertile soil along the San Lorenzo River.  The padres introduced many new fruits, nuts, grains, herbs, flowers and vegetables to the people in California.  Some of the most popular new foods at the Mission were:  olives, oranges, beans, peppers, lemons, wheat, grapes, barley, oats, squash, corn and watermelons.  1796 records show that the Mission produced 1,200 bushels of grain, 600 bushels of corn, and 60 bushels of beans.  This food had to feed almost 500 peopler.  For most of the Missions, if it was a dry year with little rain, the workers had very little to eat.  They would be hungry until the next crop harvest.  When this happened, the padres allowed them to gather food in the traditional ways of their people.

            Cattle, oxen and sheep grazed along the property of the mission, which extended from Ano Nuevo in the north to the Pajaro River to the south.  Missions took an inventory, or counted, the livestock they were raising.  Inventories are very important for understanding what work the people were doing, what they were selling and trading and what they were eating.  In 1806, 15 years after the Mission was started, the Mission livestock inventory included:  2,400 cattle, 5,400 sheep, 120 pigs, 3,200 horses and 92 mules!  Also, since Santa Cruz is on the coast, there was an abundance of seafood at the Mission as well as water for crops.   

            The natives worked at spinning, weaving, blacksmithing, leather tanning, and adobe brick and roof file making.  Extra vegetables and fruits were sometimes sent to help feed the people at Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo to the south.

            Mission Santa Cruz was known as the "Bad Luck Mission" even while it was open because things went wrong so often.  Rain and flood destroyed the first buildings.  Earthquakes damaged the structures.  Frequently, there were not enough workers and local townspeople stole horses and cattle.  Natives who did not like the Mission ran away. 

Santa Cruz Mission Museum

The only part of the original Santa Cruz Mission that still stands is the seven room museum of Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park.  This building was originally seventeen rooms long.  Construction started in 1822 and was finished in 1824.  It was built out of adobe bricks by Native American workers, and it had a tile roof with redwood beams for support.  Originally, only higher status Mission workers with special skills lived in this building, with one room for each family.  Soon after the mission system was secularized in 1834 (transferred from the Catholic church to civilians), the remaining native people moved out, abandoning their rooms or selling them to Californios (California born Mexican families).  Seven rooms have been restored to show what life

was like at the time the native people lived there.  The original seven rooms have survived because they were continuously lived in and maintained from 1824 to 1983, when the building became a State Historic Park.

 

In room one, there is an earlier foundation, probably built around 1812. 

            Room two depicts a diorama of the Santa Cruz Mission at its height in 1830.  At this time in the Mission's history, there would have been priest's quarters, dormitories for boys and girls, soldiers' quarters, housing for the native Americans, workshops for craftspeople and granaries for storage.

            Room three provides an overview of the Mission System.

            The corridor of the adobe building was as much a living space as the rooms themselves and would have been an active place.  Woven willow branches bound with rawhide and covered with mud and straw make up the underside of the roof.  Iron was hard to come by, so rawhide strips were used for construction instead of nails.  These layers support the only waterproof part of the building:  the clay roof tiles.  The tiles protect the adobe walls from rain.

            Room four shows how archeologists peeled back layers to reveal what life was like for the people who lived in these buildings.

            Room five depicts what all the rooms would have looked like when the mission was active.  High ranking members of the working community were rewarded with a room while most people continued to live in their traditional thatched houses.  This room served as the bedroom, kitchen and living room for a family with a ladder leading up to a loft.  The fire pit in the middle of the room provided light and heat and was used for cooking.  The loft was used to store food where the smoke from the fire pit would drive away mice and rats.  Most people slept on grass mats rolled out on the floor.  Beds were reserved for only the most high ranking people.  Both Spanish and California Indian culture are represented in these rooms.  Ceramic bowls, tortillas and metal tools are Spanish in origin.  The shells, baskets, bows and arrows are items brought by the native people when they joined the Mission.  The people who lived here tried to maintain some of their old culture while adapting to a new life at the mission.  

            Room Six displays some of the everyday work done at the Mission.  The Missions tried to be as self sufficient as possible by growing or making everything they needed.  Extra food, clothing, hides and tallow could be sold to townspeople or soldiers in the presidios, or could be traded with passing ships for supplies like paper, chocolate, sugar and glass.   Woman's jobs included washing, culling and grinding grain, sifting flour, spinning yarn and sewing.  Men worked as tanners, shoemakers, farmers, cowboys, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, brick makers and masons.  Children performed simple chores like weeding the garden, scaring birds from crops, or carrying firewood.  

            Adobe buildings are very easy to modify and this one has been changed many times to suit the needs of the people who lived here.  The doors are so short because during restoration the floors were raised to make the building wheelchair accessible and to protect the archaeological artifacts below. 

Santa Cruz Mission Architecture and buildings

On February 17, 1793, work began on a new church that had a stone foundation and five feet thick adobe brick walls.  It was 112 feet long and 29 feet wide and took a year to build.  This was to be the main church at the mission for about 65 years.  Adobe is made by mixing mud, straw, clay and animal manure and then  packing it tightly into a box shaped brick mold, then leaving it out in the sun to bake and get hard.  The adobe bricks measured about 17 inches long, 8 inches wide and 3 inches high.  It took thousands of bricks to build a single building and Mission Santa Cruz, at its height, had more than 30 buildings, including a gristmill, a weaving room and a two story granary.  

           When the padres first arrived in this area to start a Mission, the local houses were built of branches and tule reeds.  Since the Mission buildings would be made of different materials, the first job at the new Mission was building huts or small rooms for the padres and soldiers to live in, until large, permanent buildings could be planned.  The first permanent building was probably the Mission church, because the padres always thought churches were the most important.  At first, most of the new Native American Mission workers lived in the same kind of reed houses they had always known.  Later, many workers would be able to move into adobe homes while they lived and worked at this Mission.  

 

 Mission Life was different for the Ohlone tribe:

Santa Cruz Mission Location overview

This video was taken in a field next to the Santa Cruz mission museum located a short walk away from Plaza garden. The position shows the San Lorenzo valley behind me where they build the original mission in 1791. The first year the mission was flooded by the San Lorenzo river breaking it banks. In 1792 the mission was moved to higher ground exactly where I'm standing.

Here's a short video about Santa Cruz mission location and why it was selected.