TO BUILD THE MISSION AND HOW DID THEY DO IT?
WHAT
DID THEY USE
TO BUILD THE
MISSION AND HOW DID THEY DO IT?
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You know what it's like when you build something with your Mom or Dad. You go down to the hardware store and you buy some boards and nails, or maybe some bricks. Then you drive home and put them all together.
Suppose, though, that there were no hardware stores and no bricks and no boards. What would you do? Well, that's what the Padres had to decide and they were pretty smart about it.
First of all, they'd need bricks, wouldn't they? How do you make a brick, if you don't have any? Well, the Spanish had been making a kind of a brick for a very long time that's called adobe. Here's how they made them:
You know that there's a type of a soil that's called clay and that it very sticky when it's wet. They would take clay and add some quartz and a few other minerals to it and then they'd put it in water to make it wet. Then, they'd add some straw to help it all stick together. Then, they'd mold it into the shapes of bricks.Finally, they'd set it out in the sun and let it bake for a couple of weeks. When it dried out, it was as hard as could be, and that's how they made their bricks.
Still, you can't make a house or a church out of only bricks. It wouldn't be very comfortable, would it, to not have any windows or doors. What else did they need? They needed wood, of course, and there was plenty of that to be found right around them. In fact, there's a very special kind of tree that grows in Santa Cruz, that you can't find in most of the world; it's called a "redwood," because the wood is red. If you want to see what they look like, just click on the picture to make it bigger.
They look kind of like giant Christmas trees, don't they? Did you know that redwood trees are the oldest living things in the world? Yes, some of them were quite old when Jesus was born. We know now that they are very special and we mustn't ever cut them down, but the Padres didn't know that. This is what they did to make boards out the redwood trees:
Once they cut them down, they had to make them into flat sections for boards and beams. They would take large iron spikes called "wedges," and hammer them into the trees in a long line. This would make the trees split into pieces which they could cut up into smaller pieces. Then they'd use other tools to smooth them out, and that's how they made their boards.
Here's a picture of what they looked like: just click on it to make it bigger.
Isn't that interesting? Do you see where they joined the two boards together? That's called a "half-lap joint."
Would you like to see a picture of what their roofs looked like? Click on the picture to make it bigger, and then we'll talk about how they made it.
As you can see, they would put up boards, called beams, that they'd cut out of the redwood trees. Then, they'd make the roof out of straw and reeds and branches that they wove together like you'd weave a basket. And, finally, they'd tie the roof onto the beams with strips of rawhide.
They were pretty smart, weren't they? Even so, they made some mistakes when they built their first Mission. Would you like to know some of the mistakes that they made? Just click on the bell and we'll tell you all about them.
