Mission San Juan Bautista

Other missions bearing the name San Juan Bautista include the Misión San Juan Bautista Malibat (Misión Liguí) in Baja California Sur and the Misión San Juan Bautista in Coahuila, Mexico.

**Mission San Juan Bautista**
Location	San Juan Bautista, California
A view of the restored Mission San Juan Bautista and its added three-bell campanario ("bell wall") in 2004. Two of the bells were salvaged from the original chime, which was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Name as Founded	La Misión del Glorios Precursor de Jesu Cristo, Nuestro Señor San Juan Bautista ^[1]
English Translation	The Mission of Saint John the Baptist
Patron	Saint John the Baptist ^[2]
Nickname(s)	"Mission of Music" ^[3]
Founding Date	June 24, 1797 ^[4]
Founding Priest(s)	Father Fermín Lasuén ^[5]
Founding Order	Fifteenth ^[2]
Military District	Third ^[6]
Native Tribe(s) Spanish Name(s)	Mutsun, Yokuts Costeño
Native Place Name(s)	Popeloutchom ^[7]
Baptisms	4,106 ^[8]
Marriages	1,003 ^[8]
Burials	2,854 ^[8]
Secularized	1835 ^[2]
Returned to the Church	1859 ^[2]
Governing Body	Roman Catholic Diocese of Monterey
Current Use	Parish Church
Coordinates	36°50′42.3″N, 121°32′9.2″W
California Historical Landmark	#195
Web Site	http://www.oldmissionsjb.org/

Mission San Juan Bautista was founded on June 24, 1797 at the present-day location of San Juan Bautista, California. Barracks for the soldiers, a nunnery, the Jose Castro House, and other buildings were constructed around a large grassy plaza in front of the church and can be seen today in their original form. The Ohlone, the original residents of the valley, were converted and brought to live at the Mission, followed by Yokuts from the Central Valley. Mission San Juan Bautista has served mass daily since 1797.

1 Precontact
2 History
3 Notes
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

Precontact

The current prevailing theory postulates that Paleo-Indians entered the Americas from Asia via a land bridge called "Beringia" that connected eastern Siberia with present-day Alaska (when sea levels were significantly lower, due to widespread glaciation) between about 15,000 to 35,000 years ago. The remains of Arlington Springs Man on Santa Rosa Island are among the traces of a very early habitation in California, dated to the last ice age (Wisconsin glaciation) about 13,000 years ago. The first humans are therefore thought to have made their homes among the southern valleys of California's coastal mountain ranges some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago; the earliest of these people are known only from archaeological evidence.^[9] The cultural impacts resulting from climactic changes and other natural events during this broad expanse of time were negligible; conversely, European contact was a momentous event, which profoundly affected California's native people.^[10]

History

Father Pedro Estévan Tápis (who had a special talent for music) joined Father de la Cuesta at Mission San Juan Bautista in 1815 to teach singing to the Indians. He created a system using colors for different types of music notes which made it easier for the novices to follow. His choir of Native American boys performed for many visitors, earning the San Juan Bautista Mission the nickname "the Mission of Music." Two of his handwritten choir books are preserved at the San Juan Bautista Museum. When Father Tapis died in 1825 he was buried on the Mission grounds. The town of San Juan Bautista, which grew up around the Mission, expanded rapidly during the California Gold Rush and continues to be a thriving community today. The structures suffered extensive damage in the earthquakes of 1800 and 1906; the Mission was restored initially 1884, and then again in 1949 with funding from the Hearst Foundation, and today continues to serve as a parish of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Monterey.

The Mission and its grounds were featured prominently in the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. Associate producer Herbert Coleman's daughter Judy Lanini suggested the Mission to Hitchcock as a filming location. A steeple, added sometime after the Mission's original construction and secularization had been demolished following a fire, so Hitchcock added a "bell tower" using scale models, matte paintings, and trick photography at the Paramount Pictures studio in Los Angeles. The Mission was built on the San Andreas Fault and has suffered damage from numerous earthquakes over the years, but it has never been demolished. An unpaved stretch of the original El Camino Real, just east of the Mission, lies on a fault scarp.^[11]

Notes

A photograph of Mission San Juan Bautista taken between 1880 and 1910. The steeple (far right), constructed after the Mission was secularized, was subsequently destroyed in a fire.

^ Bennett 1897b, p. 153
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Krell, p. 241
^ Ruscin, p. 121
^ Yenne, p. 132
^ Ruscin, p. 196
^ Forbes, p. 202
^ Ruscin, p. 195
^ ^a ^b ^c Krell, p. 315: as of December 31, 1832; information adapted from Engelhardt's Missions and Missionaries of California.
^ Paddison, p. 333: The first undisputable archaeological evidence of human presence in California dates back to circa 8,000 BCE.
^ Jones and Klar 2005, p. 53: "Understanding how and when humans first settled California is intimately linked to the initial colonization of the Americas."
^ Robert Iacopi, Earthquake Country (Menlo Park:Lane Publishing, 1964, 1971)

References

Bennett, John E. (February 1897b). "Should the California Missions Be Preserved? - Part II". Overland Monthly XXIX (170): 150-161.
Forbes, Alexander (1839). California: A History of Upper and Lower California. Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, London.
Jones, Terry L. and Kathryn A. Klar (eds.) (2007). California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity. Altimira Press, Landham, MD. ISBN 0-759-10872-2.
Krell, Dorothy (ed.) (1979). The California Missions: A Pictorial History. Sunset Publishing Corporation, Menlo Park, CA. ISBN 0-376-05172-8.
Leffingwell, Randy (2005). California Missions and Presidios: The History & Beauty of the Spanish Missions. Voyageur Press, Inc., Stillwater, MN. ISBN 0-89658-492-5.

Actor James Stewart stands on the ledge of Mission San Juan Bautista's "bell tower" at the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The Mission didn't actually have a bell tower, so one was constructed on the Paramount backlot for the film.

Levy, Richard. (1978). in William C. Sturtevant, and Robert F. Heizer: Handbook of North American Indians. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. ISBN 0-16-004578-9 / 0160045754, page 486.
Milliken, Randall (1995). A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area 1769-1910. Ballena Press Publication, Menlo Park, CA. ISBN 0-87919-132-5.
Paddison, Joshua (ed.) (1999). A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush. Heyday Books, Berkeley, CA. ISBN 1-890771-13-9.
Ruscin, Terry (1999). Mission Memoirs. Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, CA. ISBN 0-932653-30-8.
Yenne, Bill (2004). The Missions of California. Thunder Bay Press, San Diego, CA. ISBN 1-59223-319-8.