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Post by Jake on May 16, 2014 12:26:44 GMT -5
Wait, back up a bit. Although I gave Rick, Mike, and Craig information about the excavations and about some deeds, my position was, "The conclusions you reach from this are yours, and you can interpret the evidence in the way you see fit."
Myself, I think the five three-room buildings are the correct interpretation of the evidence, and in no way do I accept or agree with the continuous building and continuous arcade interpretation.
Oh, and that deed mentioning the 7-foot-high wall along most of the south half of the west wall? That was in 1827, well before any fortification took place.
And wow, Rich, that view of San Antonio from the east is terrific.
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Post by Jake on Mar 29, 2013 13:27:05 GMT -5
I was at the world premier of "Davy Crockett" at the Alamo Theater (of course) in San Antonio in 1955, when I was 11. My father was in the Air Force, and we were stationed at Kelly Air Force Base, where I had watched the Davy Crockett series on television.
I got curious about when exactly in 1955 that world premier happened, and I just spent an hour trying to find out. Oddly enough, I couldn't find a single description of the event online. I suppose I didn't hit the right combination of search terms ... Anyway, I have two different dates, May 25 and June 8, 1955, for the world premier. Which was it?
It was quite an event -- Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen came out onstage after the movie, and Ebsen did this little dance step and heel-click, and said, "That's to show you I'm not as dead as I looked in the movie!" I'd suppose the Light or the Express News covered the premier, since it was major news at the time -- too bad a story about it doesn't seem to be easy to find online.
I had visited the Alamo for the first time several years before the movie, on a school tour in 1951 or 1952, when I was like 8. I was going to Robert B. Green Elementary off-base, and they took us downtown to visit the site. The Long Barracks had no roof at the time, just weeds and scattered rock and sunlight inside. It came as quite a shock to me when I went back for the second time something like ten years later, and they had converted the rooms to the first version of the museum that's there now. So my earliest memory of the Alamo is with the Long Barracks an unroofed, empty ruin next to the church.
Come to think of it, I was in a crowd scene in the filming of Viva Max! But I didn't get invited to the world premier ... oh well.
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Post by Jake on Apr 5, 2012 14:09:43 GMT -5
Allen, you touched on a detail I'm curious about:
"Although the Texans were able to sustain fire for a while, they soon ran out of loaded rifles and were then simply overwhelmed by sheer numbers."
How long do you think that would have been? How many loaded muskets would you expect, and how quickly would they have been fired? If it was me, I'd be through those muskets as fast as I could pick them up and point them -- and if they had been sitting all night or longer, I'd also expect some of them not to fire.
What I'm suggesting here is that the attack was very quick, that troops were coming over the north wall very soon after the command to attack was given. They rose up, ran to the wall, swirled into a mixed mess looking for a way over, found it, and were in.
Maybe fifteen minutes or less?
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Post by Jake on Mar 20, 2012 15:23:41 GMT -5
It is a striking effect. The one on the right really, really looks like a statue, with a big nose and chin.
But the thing on the left looks like a statue of the ghost of a Christmas tree. Not the sort of Santo I would go downtown to look at. I began to lose confidence in the interpretation of these things as statues at that point. My ectoplasm ran off with my protoplasm.
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Post by Jake on Mar 8, 2012 15:12:31 GMT -5
I worked with a guy back in the 1970s who was sorting photographs of the missions, and came up with one of Concepcion that appeared to show no decorative carving around the main front door in the 1890s or 1910s or so, and he insisted that this proved that the carved panels had been removed and then replaced with blank stone panels sometime around 1900, just like the doors of San Jose were "bought" and hauled away about that same time -- and that the panels were recarved later at the same time that the other replacement stonework was being replaced at the missions. But to my "prejudiced" (to use his implication in the discussion) eyes, it looked like a combination of slight overexposure and the angle of the light simply making the fairly flat carved panels appear featureless in that one picture.
Photographs don't always tell you the truth, no matter how often you hear that photos don't lie.
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Post by Jake on Mar 8, 2012 15:06:48 GMT -5
OK, let's fight about this.
I don't think you're seeing statues in the niches. I think you're seeing weathering in the backs of the two niches. Look at Nelson, 3rd ed., pp. 105 in 1912, 111 top in 1918 (111 bottom is interesting because it shows people standing in the lower niches, clearly without being obstructed by statues in the niches), 114 top in 1936.
This is a Rorschach kind of thing -- some of us see statues, some of us see just blotches.
The really low contrast, lack of shadows and sort of hazy look makes me figure we just can't see the detail we need to be able to decide what we're seeing.
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Post by Jake on Mar 1, 2012 13:26:27 GMT -5
Yes, David, that's correct -- although we can make a really good case for one over another by reconstructing the plan of the place from all the available information. I guess that's enough like archaeology that I can discuss it in my posts in the archaeology section. I'll put in some plans I've put together as well, although it will be some days before I can get to that.
For views of the 1912-1913 excavations: If you have the third revised edition of Nelson, look at pp. 104-105, the wide-angle along the bottom (pp. 89-90 in the first edition, pp. 94-95 in the second). This shows the excavation trenches along the north courtyard wall of today (but only one of the three parallel ones of the 1772 and 1793 inventories), as well as the east wall of the courtyard. There was at least one other east wall, parallel to this one, the one rebuilt, and possibly a third one, since the Franciscans were in the process of building a row of rooms with an arcade along the east side.
See also p. 103 top for a different view from one of the buildings across the Plaza (p. 88 top in the first edition, p. 93 top in the second).
See also bottom p. 107 for a view of the excavation for the back wall of the LB (p. 92 in the first edition, p. 97 in the second).
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Post by Jake on Feb 28, 2012 17:23:13 GMT -5
David - No, they didn't discover three different wall footings east to west, they only found one -- apparently found one and quit, and rebuilt the wall on that one. The inventories make it clear that there was a row of rooms with an arcade in front running along this side, just like the west side. That would give us an arcade line, a front wall line with doors and windows through it, and a back wall line, with no opening through it, so far as the inventories tell us, at least. They even give the sizes of the rooms and height of the ceiling. So we don't know if they, the excavators of 1910 or whenever, found the arcade line wall footing, the front wall footing, or the back wall footing.
Rich - The well works out to be pretty close to the center, within a few feet --- but the problem is that the plan of the convento appears to be the result of several changed plans over time, and some of the earliest plans are not clear. Nor is it clear when the well was dug, and whose plan was in effect at the time. In other words, we don't know where the center "should" have been.
But we can work out a fairly good approximation of the final, "as-built" plan as of 1772/1793, based on what survives, what was found in the early 1900s work, the Army plans of the 1850s (corrected) and the descriptions and measurements in the inventories.
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Post by Jake on Feb 27, 2012 13:01:30 GMT -5
And it was Clara who was trying to tear down the long barracks. Irony, or what?
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Post by Jake on Feb 26, 2012 22:55:28 GMT -5
You know, there is a life-sized memorial statue of Toribio Losoya across the street from the entrance to the Hyatt Riverwalk, at street level above the waterfall feature that runs down from Alamo Plaza, with a little plaque telling who he was -- pretty good work. Toribio and his uncle Domingo were mistaken for a single person up until 1980 when I sorted the two out and told the DRT they were making a mistake with "him." I wrote that up in 1982, in "The Losoyas and the Texas Revolution," Alamo Newsletter 4 March 1982, pp. 12-13.
But not enough is said about him, Seguin, who lived only to be badly treated later, or the other Tejanos that served at the Alamo. It is even possible that the skull we found in the fortification trench inside the north wall of the courtyard belonged to one of the Tejano defenders, rather than an attacker.
Isn't there a marker in the north courtyard mentioning the "unknown soldier" of the Alamo? There was discussion at one time about reburying the skull in the north courtyard and indicating the place with such a marker, but I don't know if they did so.
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Post by Jake on Feb 24, 2012 18:21:34 GMT -5
You clearly understand the strain the place puts on me -- I don't know if the Alamo is so archaeologically off the scale in interest because it's the Alamo, or if it's because it's the Alamo that so little real archaeology has been done in so few of the right places.
I was astonished in the '70s when they actually asked me to do the excavations in the north courtyard. So unlike their usual approach of "If we don't look, we won't see anything we don't want to know." ... Ah, that's a little mean. You could argue that they're being good stewards by keeping intrusions into the ground to the absolute minimum, and doing archaeology only when the project does intrude. Park Service is the same way, these days, although in the 70s-90s they were more willing to allow some work for the sake of research -- I don't think the DRT is likely to ever do that.
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Post by Jake on Feb 24, 2012 17:56:13 GMT -5
David-- We don't know whether the reconstruction of the arcade was on the original foundation. So far as I know, we don't have construction drawings for that work (although there could be drawings hidden in the vaults of the DRT Library) or any information on what excavation was done for the work.
Herb, yes, the wall between the north and south courtyards is on "the original foundation" (one reason we know this is because Greer's archaeology in the 1960s placed a unit against the wall and the profile of the unit showed the excavation trench that traced it, as was shown in a ca. 1913 photo in the newspaper), but the thing is, there were three wall lines going west to east in this area, and they built this wall on one of them. Which one? We don't know. Craig Covner and Rick Range and I have had a considerable amount of discussion about this, and the answer depends on which reconstructed plan of the Alamo you're using.
Greer also did some of his units down in the southeast corner of the south courtyard, the "well courtyard," and clearly hit on the foundations and floors of the south row of rooms over near the sacristy and Monk's Burial Chamber (gag). But a) he didn't know those rooms were going to be there, and b) he was unable to make any sense out of what he found, so QED: we know no more than if he hadn't dug at all.
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Post by Jake on Feb 15, 2012 19:58:17 GMT -5
Tom, the problem, as you're seeing, is many returns, usually, and not enough time to stop and sort them out to see where they are and what they are. But it's an interesting question, and we can pursue it.
And what's the deal with the subject line? Which thread are we in?
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Post by Jake on Feb 15, 2012 14:33:41 GMT -5
Turning back to the question of the top of the church as shown by S-N, here's a drawing I had never seen before that I found by accident on the TAMU site: i1175.photobucket.com/albums/r635/goodjive/AlamoPictureUnknown.jpgThis is one of the pictures that TAMU has on their "Alamo Images" page. Does anyone recognize this picture? The label on "Alamo Images" says: "Anonymous, 'Alamo Church' , 19th Century -- Anonymous painting, probably nineteenth century, of the 'Alamo Church.' A stucco coating is clearly visible on the walls." www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/history/alamo_images/images.htmlI suppose it's possible that this is a pre-1836 picture, although somehow the stylistics seem to feel more mid-19th c. But if it's mid-19th, what on earth were they doing? Why were they drawing it this way? If it was a pre-1835/36 picture, then it would certainly tell us what the base structure was that the fortifiers started with, and according to my reconstruction of the history of the building, it would probably have looked like this in the late 1820s after all the bad times.
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Post by Jake on Feb 15, 2012 14:20:53 GMT -5
Mike, you suggested the other possibility that I was going to post -- that the location of the Lockmar that I'm working from was wrong. Thing is, it's a lot of hours to trace ownership and work out the possible locations, so I haven't done that yet (fairly easy to do online, with the Bexar County deed records all available -- just time-consuming). We could put this on hold until I have a chance to track down Lockmar properties, or maybe someone in the group already knows this?
David, I had always thought, once we knew that there were no trenches along the west wall at the southwest corner, other than the acequia, that if we assume S-N was doing the best he could with the information he had, that yes, he was seeing the acequia and whatever dirt mounds hadn't been used, and thinking he was seeing fortifications (and to some extent being right) but couldn't work out what they were. And never got a good look at this area to get straight on what was there.
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