Remnants of California’s Mission era were hidden inside SLO County barn. How’d they get there?
Occasionally a photograph doesn’t seem to occupy a fixed place in time.
I was visiting Santa Margarita Ranch when Tony Ortega was saddling a horse in a moment that could have been from 1991 or 1881. The barn’s internal stone walls were part of what had been the late-1700s-era chapel.
The rocks in the walls were witness to the transition from Native American villages to the Mission Era, Mexican independence, secularization, war with America and decades of ranching.
The tales those walls could tell.
Since 1991, there have been a variety of public and private events at the ranch that are listed on their website.
Longhorns graze on the property across the freeway that was once a part of the original rancho.
The May 7, 1949, Telegram-Tribune carried a history of the ranch written by Terry Clark and Marshall Wilson.
Aged chapel walls defy time at Santa Margarita
Traces of old El Camino Real, of the activities of Mission-building Spanish padres, and of the glorious days of the Dons, may still be seen on the Santa Margarita ranch, within sight of the busy stream of traffic on State Highway 101.
Most intriguing of the ancient adobe and stone buildings which still stand around the ranch headquarters after more than a century are the last remaining stones of an early house of worship, now serving a purpose far less holy that that for which they were first assembled.
Interesting not only for their sacred past, the chapel ruins may represent one of the first stone buildings ever built in California, being erected in a period when adobe was the accepted building material, and mortared stones walls were rare indeed.
These scarred stone walls are those of the former “asistencia” or branch chapel of Mission San Luis Obispo, which now stands crumbling among the other ranch buildings, scarcely noticed by the people of history-conscious San Luis Obispo county.
Horses now reach from their stalls to eat hay through the windows which once looked in upon holy services conducted by the Franciscan fathers for their Indian neophytes.
Although time has erased the records of this chapel’s construction and exact period of its use as a place of worship, the thick stone walls of today were all that was standing more than a hundred years ago when Don Joaquin Estrada was granted “the four square leagues of Santa Margarita;” and these are still a reminder of the structure’s original function.
Since that time, the building’s rock skeleton has withstood earthquakes, fires and at least one dynamiting, yet still provides a solid footing for the large barn, which now encloses it.
Ruined Long Ago
There is no one living today who ever heard a mass said in the chapel, for as early as 1840, the building had already fallen into a state of disrepair, and had been abandoned by the Franciscan friars, who had rested there so often from their laborious journeys over the Cuesta, after leaving the mother mission at San Luis Obispo.
History is sketchy on this point, but in Engelhart’s “Mission San Luis Obispo” is recorded a letter written on Dec. 31, 1830, by Fr. Luis Gil y Taboada, pastor of the Old Mission, to the Superior of the Missions, which stated: “All of the walls of the house at Santa Margarita have been cracked by earthquakes.”
And in the same book is an account of Fr. Gil on Dec. 15, 1833, “at the Rancho of Santa Margarita de Cortona, whither he had gone to celebrate Holy Mass for the neophytes occupied in planting grain.”
Less than two years later came secularization, with Manuel Jimeno Casarin named as civil commissioner by the Mexican government to take over Mission San Luis Obispo and its properties.
Fr. Ramon Abella, then in charge at the mission, remained on, but reported in 1840 that the parish was so poor he could not even buy candies.
Grant to Estrada
In 1841, the Mission-owned ranches, Santa Margarita and Asuncion were granted to private individuals—the former going to Don Joaquin Estrada.
Little wonder, with the mother church in such dire financial straits, that money was not expended to keep the “asistensia” in operating condition. Almost completely wrecked, it was never restored after the church reclaimed title to Mission property with American occupation of California.
Former justice of the peace Albert Estrada, one of the sons of Don Joaquin Estrada, first owner of the Santa Margarita rancho under the Mexican government grant, now resides in the town of Santa Margarita. His father told him, he says, that the chapel was a ruin when he first moved to the ranch in 1842.
The judge says that when he was a small boy he would often peek through the old building’s gaping windows but was afraid to go inside. To him and to his father, there was never any reason for believing the remains were from anything other than a chapel. Even then old partitions still divided the building, and tiles from the roof were littered on the floor.
Diary of Early Trip
This is in direct contradiction to some historians of the latter 19th century, who referred to the Santa Margarita building as a storage place for grain.
William H. Brewer, who traveled through California between 1860 and 1864 as a member of a geological survey party from Yale university, wrote the following entry in his journal (published in 1930 under the title “Up and Down California”): “The Mission of Santa Margarita was in ruins. It is the seat of a fine ranch which was sold a few days ago for $45,000. The owner, Don Joaquin Estrada, now lives at Atascadero ranch, all that he now has left of all of his estates.”
A footnote to this quotation says: “this was not a mission but was the chapel of Santa Margarita, an asistencia of the Mission of San Luis Obispo.”
Albert Estrada, son of Don Joaquin, living with his memories now in a small cottage on the outskirts of Santa Margarita, recalls how he protested when the chapel’s ghostly remains were first being dynamited to convert it into a barn. He took the matter up with the parish priests, but no action was ever taken by the church, he reported.
Then a strange thing happened. Coincidence perhaps, but no sooner had the chapel, converted into a barn, been filled with its first barnful of hay, than it was destroyed by fire.
The only things still left standing when the coals died down were the stones placed there by the Franciscan fathers. Twice since then, fire has swept away the barn’s principal structure, returning each time to the original state of the ruins, just prior to their conversion into a barn.
Possessor of one of the keenest historical minds left in California today, and conversant on first hand information of California in the making, Estrada speaks freely of the stories his father told him when he was just a small boy … of the days when his sisters were eagerly sought as eligible wives for the descendants of Don Carlos, pretender to the throne of Spain … and when no ball was complete in highly social Monterey, without the lovely Estrada girls.
Captured by Fremont
Fresh in Albert Estrada’s memory is his father’s story of his capture by Fremont’s army, Don Joaquin knew that the Americans were approaching from the north, and had Indians working for him gather up his best horses and put them in a corral.
The plan was to take the horses over toward Pozo and hide them out. It was raining hard that night, and Don Joaquin never thought the Americans would keep coming, but advance they did, and he had no more than dropped into a light doze, than he was awakened by an advance crew of the Fremont army.
Walla Walla Indians, used by the Americans, were all through his room in an instant, and it was the chief of this group of Indians who later rode off on his father’s favorite saddle horse.
One of the American officers, named Murphy, who later became the Don’s close friend, could speak a little Spanish and acted as interpreter.
Don Joaquin was forced to walk over the mountains to San Luis Obispo, where the Americans promised to return his horses and pay him for the cattle which had been destroyed, if he would guide Fremont’s forces on their way to Los Angeles. He refused!
“Years later, he used to tell me he was glad he had fed the advancing American armies,” the judge said.
The present Santa Margarita ranch, still encompassing more than 30,000 acres, and representing one of the larger Spanish land grants still intact in this area, is owned by the Santa Margarita Land and Cattle Co., and is operated by Claude Arnold.
Historic Landmarks
Other historic buildings still in use on the ranch include the old adobe ranch house in which Don Joaquin Estrada was living when Fremont’s army confiscated the Don’s best horses, and a small adobe building which served as a Wells-Fargo stage depot and post office in the days when El Camino Real would past the ranch buildings.
No living person should know better than Albert Estrada the true tale behind the mystery of the Santa Margarita asistencia. But whether the present stone ruins were a chapel or not, a better fate should be in store for possible the earliest stone building in California.
This story was originally published August 10, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
