BY ANDREW
FEBRUARY, 2004
BY ANDREW
FEBRUARY, 2004
My report is about Mission San Antonio de Padua. San Antonio de Padua was built 60 miles southeast of Monterey Bay. Mission San Antonio's exact location if five miles north-west of the community of Jolon in Monterey county, and is surrounded by the Hunter Ligget Military Reservation. It was founded by the mission president Father Juniperro Serra and named after Saint Anthony of Padua, a 13th century Franciscan priest known as the "miracle worker". It was the third mission to be founded in the chain of missions.
Mission San Antonio de Padua was established July 17, 1771. Father Serra hung a bronze bell on an oak tree, put a cross in the ground, rang it and also named the river nearby Rio de San Antonio. Father Serra left Father Buenaventura Sitjar to start building the mission buildings. After moving the mission 3 miles to San Miguel Creek in 1773, Father Sitjar built the first (out of 3) mission churches and buildings in 1775. They built the mission mostly as a quadrangle which is 4 sides with a little hole in one side. The roof was made of red tile bricks and the front of the church was made out of adobe bricks. The church is 200 feet long and 40 feet wide. The walls are 6 feet thick at the bottom and 5 feet thick at the top. The second larger church was completed with a red tile roof four years after the first one was built and the third and current church was built in 1810.
The mission people dammed the San Antonio River and brought water in aqueducts to the mission where it was stored in reservoirs. This water was used to power the first water-powered grist mill built in California. It ground wheat into flour for their bread.
At its biggest, more than 1300 Indians worked at handicrafts, produced crops, and herded some 17,000 livestock.
Today the mission is used as a museum. The mission is an exact copy of what it was like in 1813. San Antonio is an active church and used by the people who live nearby. The surroundings of all the missions in California have changed except San Antonio de Padua maybe because it is in the middle of a military reservation and you cannot build around it.
I found the most interesting aspects of this mission is that it was the first mission to have a red tile roof and that from 1771 they didn't have a church for 4 years until 1775. It's also cool that they built the first water-powered grist mill in California.