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Post by Jake on Mar 30, 2011 19:15:02 GMT -5
Yeah, for those of us who work on the physical reality of the Alamo, Giraud is ... well, he's Eric Clapton, I guess.
Oh, the urge to put one of the smileys there was almost irresistable.
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Post by Jake on Mar 30, 2011 12:25:21 GMT -5
Yeah, that was Ehrenberg who called it that -- but in German, which he wrote in originally, the word "sandstein" can mean either sandstone or an easily-carved stone of any kind, so he would probably call any of the local limestones by that same word.
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Post by Jake on Mar 29, 2011 18:43:03 GMT -5
Yes, Hiram, you're right, the Adams references specify wood -- and the same reference link you gave us includes a footnote that mentions Nangle and his stone-carving operation, making pipes and vases from stone from the Alamo.
And yes, Kevin, there were several statues on the altar in the sacristy being used as a church, some of them pretty big (three or four feet high, if I recall correctly). Certainly some of the wooden statues being talked about in the Adams quotations could be some of those.
But like Hiram says, it remains possible that wooden statues were placed in some of the niches on the front of the Alamo during the period of renewed interest in the place in the period from 1803 or so to maybe 1810 or 1815 (or maybe later) when statues were placed in the upper niches. We just don't know enough about the history of the place in this period to know what might have happened.
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Post by Jake on Mar 29, 2011 18:22:07 GMT -5
Yeah, the white clay (kaolin) pipes are an archaeological prize when you find them, because there's a strong relationship between the size of the little hole that runs down the stem to the bowl (through which you suck the smoke) and the date of manufacture, so they're useful for dating archaeo. deposits.
In this country, Native Americans made pipes of catlinite and argilite, both soft siltstone, as well as soapstone, steatite, gypsum, and soft limestones. Making pipes from these stones and others is an ancient tradition here, and maybe anywhere that tobacco or other smokables are available. The requirement seems to be that the stuff be soft enough to be workable with the available tools -- the better the tools, the harder the stone can be. In the San Antonio area, we have quite a range of good fine-grained stone from a hard white limestone that is strong and fairly weather-proof and takes a good polish, to soft white stuff called caliche or caliche block (there's also a soft white clay called caliche, as well) that's pretty much chalk. So given good tools, you could make a pipe out of almost any of it.
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Post by Jake on Mar 29, 2011 13:40:39 GMT -5
Hiram, I read back through the article I co-wrote on the statues that you gave the link to, over in the Compania Volante archives. It has this: "Thomas Falconer, who visited the Alamo on April 22, 1841, indicated that only two statues remained on the front of the church by that date, both in the upper niches. The lower niches were empty, but the two statues that had been in them were still nearby. One was lying 'in a stream of water near the building [the church] & the other was in the workshop of an Englishman who made pipes, vases & various ornaments as remnants of the Alamo ...'" Sounds like he's talking about your man Harvey Adams.
But, vases of wood? Still sounds more like stone than wood (you'd think wooden statues lying on the ground would have rotted away by then) ... indulge me, Hiram: go back and look at the Adams story about pipes again and tell us, does it specifically mention "wood" as the material the pipes were made of? You can make pipes of stone (meerschaum, isn't it? Fine, white limestone-like stuff?) as well as clay (kaolin, pipeclay), so I want to be sure you're not reading "wood" into Adams's statements because that's what pipes should be made of.
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Post by Jake on Mar 25, 2011 17:03:55 GMT -5
P. S. And you'll understand why I say "somehow in" the City Surveyor's Book when I tell you this rather complicated story.
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Post by Jake on Mar 25, 2011 17:01:20 GMT -5
I apologize most sincerely for being away so long, but I retired at the end of December, and the three months before and the three months since have been -- well, hectic I guess is the word.
OMG, this is a beautiful map. Not only that, I haven't seen such a good copy of it, only b&w xeroxes, not all that sharp.
This is somehow in the long-missing City Surveyor's Book, that was last seen sitting on the desk of a city councilor or something in the late '80s or early '90s, and disappeared when he left office. We (me and Albert Rodriguez the county archivist) figured that he had just taken it home with him. Now it appears it was stuck into the cold storage warehouse, or whatever, without being cataloged, and some fabulous person had the sense to recognize it as important when they fell over it recently.
Let me put together what I can of an outline of these maps, and put it up for you. Maybe Tom will be able to post some scans for me along with the descriptions.
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Post by Jake on Mar 25, 2011 13:05:38 GMT -5
You guys want more information on this map and the other Giraud plans? I'm hesitating about putting up a long post on this ... maybe a short summary of what I know about this?
One thing I can say now is that I don't recognize this specific version or copy of the map, although the image is too small to be sure of that.
We thought that record book had been carried off, not (quite) to say stolen, about fifteen or twenty years ago -- I'm greatly relieved to see it's still in City hands and has been found again.
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Post by Jake on Oct 1, 2010 12:27:06 GMT -5
Dustin, you're really getting into the innards of this thing now.
Go back and look at the plan of the excavatioin Bruce posted on the first page of this thread. You'll see that we excavated along the wall surface for the west and south walls, so we can say that there was no doorway through them to a staircase, and we've all seen the pictures of the east side, the front, so we know there's no doorway and external staircase there. That means access to the choir loft and the upper levels of the bell tower were either in the church or within the ground-level room of the bell-tower. Since the ground-level room in the tower was probably the baptistry, a staircase would probably not have been in there -- certainly we saw no trace of a stone staircase in the part of this room that we opened up, so I figure that means there wasn't one anywhere in there.
This implies that the access to the bell tower was through the choir loft, and since there's no indication of an outside straight staircase up either the north or south side of the building (it would have shown up on the plans and pictures, and interfered with the buttresses), and no indication of an exterior spiral staircase like at San Jose, I figure that people got to the choir loft by a wooden or stone stairway in the nave of the church under the choir loft. From there you would go through a second-floor (first floor for you Brits and other assorted Europeans) doorway from the choir loft into the bell tower second level -- this room would have been called the antecoro, or "after the choir loft." There you would find ladder-like stairs up to the higher levels, that would give you access to the church roof and on up to the bells. Yes, there should be a small doorway from the bell tower out onto the roof, probably on the north side of the tower. All this is the way both Concepcion and San Jose still do it today, except that Concepcion had an exterior straight staircase up the side of the convento and then the side of the belltower, and San Jose has a spiral stairway.
Does your model show anything of the interior of the building, or only the outside?
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Post by Jake on Jun 29, 2010 18:02:03 GMT -5
Well, I'm back -- sorry I gave no updates of beer consumption, but it turned out to be difficult to find free wifi spots near hotels, and I wasn't about to carry the laptop around with me -- the thing acquired the weight of a load of bricks after half an hour. Scotland, I have to say, is a great place (my hat off to Stuart) -- I was not happy to have to come back.
Ah, well, back to work -- break's over. It's fairly clear that the MBC was without a roof in the 1840s when the first plans were drawn, but how long it had been that way is unclear. Part of the problem is we aren't sure how much upkeep happened on the buildings in the 1820s and early 1830s, nor whether the roof survived the Alamo battle. It would have been a good supply of firewood or revetting material for a little while.
I'm still bothered by some of the details about our "window." I want to put together another sketch or two to get across what I mean, and add some further details to the discussion. It's like a sore tooth, it keeps nagging me. I figure there's more info to be squeezed from it if we keep picking at it. Gah, wrong phrasing, putting those two sentences together.
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Post by Jake on Jun 13, 2010 6:37:16 GMT -5
That makes sense, Mark. I was thinking yesterday that the roofing of the MBC area may well have been intended to be temporary, even though it may well have been kept in use after the completion of the church (think of all the "temporary" buildings on military posts that are fifty years or a century old), and that would explain why that roof, of all of them on the church complex, was such a light structure of wood.
OK, I'm happy with the general concept of this being a window within Mark's outlined architectural history. I think we'd still profit from a removal of the fill of the "window" (I'm keeping the quote marks until the fill is removed and we see what other evidence may turn up), while leaving the doorway as an opening into the MBC.
We're coming up on the English Channel west end late this afternoon (for you sailors, we pass Bishop's Rock at 6:00 this evening), heading for Southhampton, where we'll dock something like 4:00 or 5:00 tomorrow morning.
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Post by Jake on Jun 10, 2010 12:02:03 GMT -5
The roofs, doors, windows, etc., of all the north side rooms seem to have been built by the same person, as you pointed out, Mark, and that person is apparently Palafox in 1761 to 1763 or 1764. As I said, he apparently enclosed the MBC at the same time that he finished the sacristy and built the other doorws and windows, so that the MBC could serve as the sacristy to the new sacristy that was serving as the church. So the style of the work itself argues that the "window" was built at the same time the MHBC was being closed up. This is why I'm saying that it was apparently not built as a window. I lean in the direction of it being a confessional opening, if it was an opening.
By the way, this is being sent from the Queen Mary 2 about 500 miles east of where the Titanic went down (we passed a few miles north of the wreck last night about 9:00, ship's time), and I'm late for hight tea.
I promise to toss at least one pint for the Forum, probably in some pub near Exeter next week. I'll let you know so you can all feel envious.
And my father-in-law is paying for all of us to do this. Go figure.
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Post by Jake on Jun 4, 2010 18:05:27 GMT -5
This is a post-script to my previous message -- I'll be out of town on a trip to England and Scotland for the next three weeks (pubs and Roman ruins -- zowie!) and may have trouble connecting with the Forum occasionally. WiFi is a little thin in parts of Devonshire. But I'll try to be in touch at least every few days.
Jake
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Post by Jake on Jun 4, 2010 11:42:52 GMT -5
Mark is right. The documentary evidence -- that is, the statement that there's a window on the south wall of the MBC in 1793, is a clear and annoying obstacle to any arguments for a different interpretation of the thing. But still, the physical history strongly suggests that when this "window" (that's not sarcasm, I just don't know what to call it that's neutral) was built, it opened into a room, not to the sky. So it wasn't made as a source of light. So what was it made for, if it was an opening?
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Post by Jake on May 26, 2010 12:26:52 GMT -5
Gary:
You're right about the multiple interpretations by archaeologists about the palisade line, primarily Jack Eaton's in his report, based mostly on Chabot's descriptions, and mine based on what I saw in the ground. But don't take that to mean there were two different palisade lines in the ground. There was a single set of trenches, and Jack and I interpret them differently. Problem is that Jack kept all the field notes and drawings, so they aren't in the CAR files to be looked at as support for one view over another -- they give much more detail than the drawings in Eaton's report.
Oh, while I'm here: Gary, I'm uncomfortable about giving Filisola's description of the Alamo defenses any great weight as a separate source of information about those defenses -- I have a strong suspicion that the description was actually made from the Labastida map, rather than Filisola's notes onsite. And I suspect that this description was written by Filisoa's ghost writer/collaborator, whose probable name I don't recall right now.
Seriously, take the Filisola description and follow it on the Labastida map. I know, you can say they're both depicting the same defenses so they should be very similar, but the Filisola description reads like a verbalization of a map, rather than of real space and structure.
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