Alamo Church

[bmoses]

Here are the diagrams that Craig put together showing the comparison between the Concepcion and Valero Church plans.

Jake has promised a more thorough discussion of the images forthcoming. Generally, however, the first image shows the two structures drawn at their correct scales. The second image shows the two plan views of the churches corrected to the same relative scale.

[Jake]

These drawings are presented here as part of a discussion about the question of the original designer of the Alamo church plan. The drawings compare the plans of mission Purísima Concepción (C), and mission San Antonio de Valero (V).

I argue that the two plans were designed by the same man, Antonio Tello, about 1738 or 1739. I contend that Tello designed a single plan that he used both at Concepción and at Valero, making the size of the church somewhat larger for Valero, where the Indian population was greater. Further, I argue that the present church of Valero is built on Tello’s original foundations, and that the lowest three feet of wall of the present church are part of Tello’s construction. Hieronymo Ibarra and other architects continued construction on the building, but did not complete it.

Craig Covner and Mark Lemon argue that Tello built the original Valero church nearer the southwestern corner of the Long Barracks (the present Alamo Museum), and that part of the wall connecting the museum to the present church once formed the north wall of Tello’s original church. This argument is based on decorative stonework patterns shown on the south face of the connecting wall in the drawings of Theodore Gentilz in the 1840s through 1880s, decorative patterns that Covner and Lemon say indicate that the wall surface was once an interior surface within a church. In their view, the present church was built by Hieronymo Ibarra, perhaps following Tello’s original plan for the Valero church, or reusing Tello’s plan for Concepción.

Note that on the Concepción plan, the round object shown half in the wall of the right bell tower base is a baptismal fount placed here years after the original construction, and was not part of the original design. On the Valero plan, the two indented areas on the left and right transepts (the sections that extend out from the church to either side of the letter “V”) are only indented above the first three feet of wall, and the opening shown in the right-hand transept was not present in the building at the time of its early construction, but was cut through at some later date.

Other examples of multiple churches being built using similar plans are known across the northern frontier of New Spain. For example, in seventeenth-century New Mexico, the churches and conventos of Hawikuh and Halona were apparently built by the same, presently unknown designer and have plans very like each other. The churches of Remedios and Cocóspera were originally constructed about 1700 in northern Sonora by the Jesuit Eusebio Kino, and were again very like each other. Finally, the group of five missions built in the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro, Mexico, in the 1750s and 1760s, perhaps designed by a single architect under the direction of fray Junípero Serra, are also strongly similar, but not as much alike as are the Concepción and Valero plans shown here.