WHAT
DID THE NEXT MISSION LOOK LIKE?
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Actually, we have a pretty
good idea of what Mission Santa Cruz looked like when they rebuilt it on the top
of the hill. There was a French artist named Leon Trousset who painted it
when he travelled through Santa Cruz in the 1850s, and his painting is still
hanging in the Misión Galería
Gift Shop. If you'd like to make it bigger, just click on the
picture.
You can see that the part in
the middle is a church, but you can also see that they had walls on the sides of
the church. In fact, part of one wall is still standing behind the Holy
Cross Parish Church. Click on the picture to make it bigger and then we
can talk about it:
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You can tell that they made the wall out of whatever rocks they found around the Mission. They would put the rocks together with a kind of a cement called "mortar," and just keep piling on more rocks until they had a wall.
Why did they have walls beside the church, anyway? Most churches don't, you know. There was a lot more that happened at the old Missions than just going to church, though church was the most important part of it.
We know that the Padres were wonderful farmers, for instance. They were responsible for bringing agriculture to California. The Padres harvested wheat and barley and corn and peas and beans. They were also pretty good ranchers. When they arrived at the first Mission site, they only had 33 cattle. By 1814, they had 3,300 cattle, 3,500 sheep, 600 horses, 25 mules, and 46 hogs. Besides growing all of that food and taking care of all of those animals, they also cut down trees and sent lumber out to the other Missions. Santa Cruz was an important source of redwood for the whole mission system.
Of course, the Padres
couldn't do all of that themselves. There were Native People who lived at
the Mission, and they did a lot of the work. Here's a model of the Mission
that a 4th grader made. Click on it to make it bigger.
Isn't that a wonderful model? Perhaps your class could make a model, too. You can see that there were rooms for the people at the Mission, and they had very busy days there. They would get out of bed when the sun rose and go to church to pray. Then they'd have breakfast and work until noon, when they would go to church again. After that, they'd take an afternoon nap that the Spanish call a "siesta." Then more work, until the evening, when the bells of the church would ring out and call them home. They'd go to church one more time, have dinner, and then go to bed.
It probably sounds like they went to church a lot more than we do, and you're right. You have to remember, though, that worshipping God was the most important thing to the Padres. They wanted to teach people about Christianity and baptise them. Baptism is what priests do when a person decides to become a Christian. The priest draws a cross on your forehead with special water, called "holy water," that they keep in a container called a "baptismal font." The Padres baptised 1,684 people in the first 23 years that they were there.
If you'll go back up the
page and click on the picture of the model again, you can see that there's a
container of water in the middle of the yard. That's the baptismal
font. The original baptismal font that they used is still at Mission Santa
Cruz. It is nicely carved of local limestone. If you'd like to see it,
click on the picture:
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Imagine all of those Native People and their babies being baptised in the font. That was one of the most important activities of the Mission, introducing the Native People to the sacraments of Christianity. The baptismal font sits in a peaceful courtyard behind the Misión Galería now. When you come to visit, ask the curator in the Mission to show it to you.
Now let's talk a little more about the Native People who helped to build the Mission. Click on the bell, and we'll tell you a little bit about them.
