The Adobe Mission the CCC Put Back Together

The valley floor is the color of the hillsides, the color of dried grass and the earth turned up by the plow. La Purísima Mission sits in that expanse of pale gold, its long walls running straight as a rule across a land that otherwise rolls and dips without any order. The adobe walls glow in the late afternoon, not painted but the raw earth itself, smoothed by hand and weathered by the wind.

At the front of the church stands a bell wall, open arches holding the bells in the air. The sound of the wind through those arches is a kind of hush. A few cottonwoods shade the acequia that still carries water the way the padres had it carried. It is quiet here, a quiet that makes a visitor lower the voice without knowing why.

But the quiet is a second act. The mission that stands now was not here first. The first La Purísima lay in ruins, its walls melted into mounds, its roof timbers gone, its name kept only on old maps. What remains today was raised from that ruin by men who learned to make adobe bricks and lay them back in the old way.

Adobe on the Ground

The mission was founded by Franciscan friars in the late eighteenth century, one more link in the chain of settlements that ran up and down the California coast. The first buildings were put up quickly, of timber and thatch and then of adobe. The friars and the Chumash people who made up the mission community shaped thousands of bricks, dried them in the sun, and raised a compound big enough to hold a church, workshops, storehouses, living quarters, and a long quadrangle open to the weather.

It was a busy place. There was a soap works, a tallow works, a gristmill, a blacksmith's shop. Along the corridors hung hides and tallow, the commodities that tied the California missions to the ships that came slowly up the coast. Between the buildings, women ground grain on stone. Men worked the fields beyond the walls. Everything was for the mission itself; there was no other market and no other purpose.

Then the earth shook.

On a December night in 1812, a great earthquake ran through the valley. The adobe walls cracked and gave way. The roofs of heavy timber and tile came down. The church tower toppled. What had been a place of ordered work became a pile of broken mud and dust. When morning came, the survivors walked out into a land that had rearranged itself.

The padres did not rebuild at the same location. They moved the mission to a new site some miles away, on higher ground, near a creek. There they started again, making bricks again, running up new walls. But the new mission did not thrive as the old one had. Later, when the missions were secularized, the buildings here too were abandoned, the roof tiles carried off, the adobe left to the wet winters and the dry summers.

For a hundred years, La Purísima lay down.

The Years It Lay Down

Rain is the slow enemy of adobe. Every winter storm drove into the tops of the walls, softening them, slumping them. The corners rounded. The bricks delaminated, flaking away in thin layers — until there were no more layers to flake. What had once been a church became a long hump of earth with weeds growing out of its spine. Cattle grazed over the remains. Children from nearby ranches kicked at the lumps.

The place was not quite forgotten. People remembered that a mission had been there. Some old plans and drawings survived. Pieces of the wall still stood here and there, just enough to show the outline of the old quadrangle. But it was ruin, not history. It was the place you drove past on the way to Lompoc.

Then the 1930s came. Hard years, dry years, years when the country had more young men than it had jobs. The federal government started the Civilian Conservation Corps to put those men to work in the public lands of America. They planted trees, built roads, cut fire trails, and ran fences. And in California, some of them were sent to an old ruined mission to do something stranger and slower: to put it back together, piece by sun-baked piece.

The state had acquired the ruined land and had an idea for a park. The plan was not to preserve what was left but to reconstruct the mission as it had appeared in its best years. It was a job for people who knew adobe. The CCC enrollees did not, at first. They were clerks and farm boys and city kids from places that did not know what adobe was. But they learned.

The Boys Who Built It Again

They set up camp in the valley. The work began with tearing down the ruins, carefully saving any brick that could still hold its shape. Then they made new bricks. The process was the one used a century and a half before. Clay from the valley floor was dug up and laid out in pits. Water was added, and straw from the surrounding fields, then the mixture was trodden — often by men with bare feet, the way the old builders had done it. The mud was packed into wooden molds and the bricks were turned out to dry in the California sun.

It was slow work. A wall does not rise in a season. The men laid bricks and then let them cure. They mixed mortar the old way — mud and sand, nothing more. They roughened the surfaces with a trowel, then smoothed them with wet hands. The walls went up, course after course. The long walls of the quadrangle came back. The church gained its thick walls and its high peaked roof. The bell wall was rebuilt, the arches cut true, and the bells hung once more where they had hung before the earth moved.

They worked with their hands, and the work changed the shape of the land. The rooms that had been open to the sky got their roofs back, first the heavy beams, then the hand-wrought tiles — new tiles made in the same kilns, fired the same way. The craftsmen who supervised were part of the story: stonemasons, plasterers, a blacksmith. The young men learned from them. By the end, a CCC enrollee could read the landscape in a way the city boys never expected, could tell good adobe by its color and its streak of straw.

Some of the men lived in the mission rooms as they worked, sleeping where the padres had slept. Others were housed in the camp outside. The food came in trucks, but the work was the same as the work of the 1820s: water, earth, straw, and time.

It was not a quick restoration. It took years. The men who started it were not the same men who finished it; the camps turned over as enlistments ended and new crews arrived. But the adobe bricks kept having the same measure, the same size, the same weight. A brick made by one man in 1934 fit the wall next to a brick made by another in 1938. That was the discipline of the mold.

A Living Adobe

Walk the rooms now and the handprints are hard to find but there to be found, in the smooth skim coat over the brick. The plaster holds the line of fingers pressed flat, here at the edge of a doorway, there along a window seat. No one knows whose hands they were. But they were young hands, doing a young man's job in a hard time.

The rooms are furnished as they would have been in the mission years. The looms stand with half-woven cloth still in place. The blacksmith shop holds the vivid smell of coal and cold iron. In the kitchen, the fireplace is deep enough to stand inside, the oven round as a beehive. The gardens are planted with the old crops — grapes, pomegranates, figs, the things that came with the Spanish settlement. When the mission bell rings on certain days, the sound goes out across the valley exactly as it did before the ground broke and the walls came down.

What strikes a visitor, standing in the middle of the quadrangle, is the ordinariness. The rooms are not grand. The ceilings are low. The walls are thick but the whole place has the feel of a working farm, not a monument. The mission was rebuilt to be lived in, and that is how it reads: no roped-off relics, no glass display cases, just rooms with a scrap of light falling through a window and dust in the air.

It is a testament to the CCC that the place does not feel like a reconstruction. The adobe has aged into its own surface. The cracks that appear in the new plaster are the same kinds of cracks that appeared in the old plaster. The rain falls on the same sloped roofs and runs off the same tiles. There is no visible seam between the surviving foundation and the new wall above it, because every wall is, by now, new in some part. The entire mission is an artifact of the 1930s telling the story of the 1820s, and both stories remain true.

The young men who rebuilt La Purísima did not get monuments of their own. Their names are not carved on the walls. But the mission itself is their name. Every time a visitor runs a hand along a smooth adobe surface and feels no difference between what was made in 1820 and what was made in 1935, the men are present. They put the mission back on its feet.

The wind still comes through the bell wall. The valley is still the color of gold. The adobe stands, held together by mud and straw and the quiet labor of those who had been given nothing to do, and were given this instead.

La Purísima Mission State Historic Park

Photos: Ligocsicnarf89 (CC BY 4.0); JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, Elisa Rolle (CC BY-SA 3.0)