Today the Alamo, a National Historic Landmark, is located in the heart of downtown San Antonio and remains an important part of Texas history. Illustration of the Alamo as a mission as imagined in By William Ludwell Sheppard Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The Spanish Mission. In the late 17th century, Spain's settlement of Texas was designed to deter French colonial expansion west from Louisiana.
As they did in other parts of Spanish America, the Franciscans established missions in the lands of native peoples, spreading Spanish culture and Catholicism.
It was moved a year later to a different location. Father Olivares reported 50 different tribes in the area north of the Rio Grande and San Antonio rivers, but over time raiding, epidemic disease, and the concentration of people at the missions caused an enormous drop in population.
One of the reasons these people chose to enter missions was the protection the presidios and missions offered against Apache raids. In , a devastating hurricane destroyed the mission church and the entire mission community moved several hundred yards to the north where The Alamo stands today.
Construction of the current stone mission complex began in The complex included the chapel, a convento, small dwellings, storehouses, and workshops. The native people at the mission learned quickly, becoming adept weavers, carpenters, stone masons, blacksmiths, and farmers.
Miles of acequias, or irrigation ditches, some of which remain visible, were dug and fed fields where corn, beans, cotton, watermelon, grapes, figs, and chili peppers were grown. Thousands of sheep, oxen, cattle, burros, and horses were also part of the mission's holdings. The first person listed as a vaquero , or cowboy, at the mission in what became Texas was a Ziaguan Indian named Carlos who was killed by Apaches in As Apache raiding continued, the mission was fortified with a large gate, a turret, and three cannons.
The Franciscan mission there lasted until the end of the 18th century, when disease, desertion, and raiding took its toll on the native population of the settlement.
The mission was secularized in and became the self-governing Pueblo de Valero. Postcard depicting a float in the "Battle of Flowers" parade in a rally to support restoration of the Alamo Mission Valero in San Antonio. The mission becomes a fort. At that time the mission's old convento became the barracks for the unit. Thus, The Alamo took its name from the company's popular name. Many of the resulting misconceptions have unfortunately become fixed in the popular image of the Alamo.
Regarding the church, for example, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers assumed it had once been completed, then damaged by later military action. Contemporary reports indicate, however, that the mission church that now dominates Alamo imagery was never completed or actually used for religious services. Construction on it proceeded from the late s, when Father Francisco Xavier Ortiz reported the collapse of an earlier stone church with tower and sacristy, until the decline of the mission during the late s and early s.
The design for the new church was an ambitious one, clearly intended to be the architectural masterpiece of the mission. It followed a traditional cruciform plan, with a long nave crossed near its eastern end by a short, broad transept.
The walls were sturdy, over three and one-half feet thick, and well built of limestone blocks, but only roughly finished. Inside, the church was probably paved with flagstones and was intended to have a barrel-vaulted roof, supported by stone arches, and a dome or cupola over the crossing.
The walls were evidently completed at least as high as the cornices, and several of the arches with their supporting pilasters were installed. Vestiges of these arches survived into the nineteenth century and are visable in Edward Everett's painting depicting the interior view of the Alamo. There, the project apparently stalled, however, as the mission's Indian population declined precipitously from a high of in to a mere 44 in Surviving evidence suggests that the roof itself, the dome, and a second-story choir loft, designed for the west end, were never put in place.
Outside, the western facade of the church, which opened onto the mission plaza, was the chief architectural glory. The mission inventory of described this facade as "a showy and impressive piece of Tuscan architecture," with arched doors surrounded by elaborate floral carvings, twisting columns, and shell-topped niches for statuary.
The convento of Acolman. Atrial Cross at Acolman. Frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza. Featherworks: The Mass of St. The manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal. What does the music of heaven sound like? The Virgin of the Macana and the Pueblo Revolution of Nativity group, from Guatemala. Miguel Cabrera, Virgin of the Apocalypse. Casta paintings: constructing identity in Spanish colonial America.
Crowned nun portraits, an introduction.
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