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Post by Jake on Dec 28, 2011 13:41:05 GMT -5
I checked the San Antonio sites, and although there's several mentions that the 300th is upcoming among both the civic sites and the church sites, there's only a few vague references about "we ought to do something really good ..." with no suggestion of what that might be.
One problem is a 300th celebration is a pretty big thing, and it's hard to think of something(s) that really does it up right without going Disneyland all over.
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Post by Jake on Dec 27, 2011 21:04:54 GMT -5
I'm having trouble with the website. The images are the width of the screen, like they should be, but only about 3/4 inch high, and show only the topmost parts of the tops of the two Alamo pictures. I can sort of move around in the pictures, but can't see enough to do much comparison.
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Post by Jake on Dec 27, 2011 14:26:39 GMT -5
On May 1, 1718, the mission of San Antonio de Valero, that was eventually to become the Alamo, was founded about two miles south of San Pedro Springs, just west of San Pedro Creek near present Military Plaza in San Antonio. The town and presidio of San Antonio was established nearby a few days later, on May 5.
May, 2018, only 6 1/2 years away, will be the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Alamo and the city of San Antonio. In 1968 the city celebrated its 250th anniversary with Hemisfair and all the accompanying events. What would be an appropriate celebration for the 300th anniversary of the founding of the mission and the city?
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Post by Jake on Dec 24, 2011 14:00:54 GMT -5
Oh, man, when they're so happy to see you, you better start thinking you made a mistake.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2011 12:01:11 GMT -5
Yes, the level of the surface at the front in 1848-1860 seems to stay about the same and matches the surface found there by Eaton's work. I thought that the rubble level inside the church would make a difference to any thinking about the cannon platform there, but while I was sleeping last night (I do my best work sleeping -- I tried to convince my teachers of this in elementary school, but oddly, they wouldn't buy it) I realized that it is the height of the ground at the front door, where the ramp starts, that determines how high you can get at the back wall, where the platform is -- the level of rubble inside the church affects only how much work you have to do to build the platform to a given height. So it seems we've solved that problem, and I'd guess that Zaboly was looking at the same information and arriving at the same conclusions. About height, at least.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2011 0:52:29 GMT -5
Hollowhorn -- most of the dirt on a site comes from human activity, digging foundations, ditches, wells, post holes, trash pits, graves, and everything else, all of which gets slowly spread across a site. But a surprising amount comes to a site in the form of blow-in, where the wind brings dust, dirt, and sand a little at a time but constantly. I worked on a mission in New Mexico that, when it was first excavated in the 1930s, was full of dirt and sand inside to a depth of about six feet, of which 3/4s was blow-in over a period of only about 100 years, and the rest came from the walls and flat earthen roof washing into the building.
Glen, thanks for the link back to Bruce's discussion of Eaton's work, and the subsequent discussion. The thing is, neither Eaton nor Meissner, who excavated inside the church, gives us any information on the level of the floor in 1835 when the cannon platform was built -- in fact, they can't, since we don't know how much fill was removed from inside the church and from the plaza in front during the construction of the plaza and the cleaning up of the church in the later 1800s.
However, maybe we can guess at the ca. 1835 ground level: Everett and Eastman show a fair amount of additional base below the carved faces of the bases of the pilasters on the front of the building, much more than is visible today, so you'd be tempted to say the ground was at least a foot lower as of the 1840s before the remains of the cannon platform were removed, but if you look at other pictures and the architectural drawings, and Eaton's excavation drawings on pl 57, you find that Eastman and Everett show the pilaster bases incorrectly - they never had any significant amount of additional flat base below the bottom rounded ridge across the bases, but they did have a narrow flat slab and then rough stonework below that. In fact, the photograph in Nelson's Illustrated History on p. 77 of his second revised, 1998, taken in the 1860s from the Grandjean Collection in the DRT Library shows the surface at the front is all the way down to the highest level shown by Eaton in his profile drawings, p. 56 and 57. In that 1860s photo you're looking at the top of what Eaton has labeled as "Level A white caliche."
Other photos from farther away or less focused give a visual impression of the bases of the pilasters that sort of look like the Eastman and Everett drawings, and suggest that they just simplified this lowest area to flat surfaces. The other Eastman drawing of the facade at a sort of 3/4 angle, on p. 76 of that same edition, supports this -- here, Eastman shows the left two pilaster bases simplified, and the right two with more detail that appears to show the same amount of pilaster base as in the 1860s photograph. Since no significant work on the plaza or inside the church had happened by then, I think we can assume this is also the approximate 1835 surface at the front of the church. However, inside the church would have had large amounts of blow-in fill and rubble from the weathering of the walls, as well as rubble from the knocking down of the ribs over the internal pilasters and the one section of roofing vault that actually got built over the apse end of the building. Presumably the building of the cannon position would have started from this roughly leveled mass of rubble, and it is unclear what depth that mass might have had. I would be tempted to suggest that the inside of the church was at least a foot higher than the surface outside at the front.
Wow, excuse me, I guess I got on a roll here.
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Post by Jake on Dec 20, 2011 18:02:41 GMT -5
I have to say I've been avoiding signing back on because I just didn't have the space in the day to focus properly on Forum discussions. You guys are a tough mob to deal with, not for only half my attention.
I thought I remembered a statement by Mark Lemon about where the floor level was in re: the "window"/"doorway" into the MBC -- maybe not.
Yes, you're right, Jack's report has useful information in it about this. Barbara Meissner, in her report on the excavations inside the south transept of the church, said that the present paved floor surface at the center of the transepts was close to 25 cm above where Jack showed the paving at the exterior front of the church (Meissner, The Alamo Restoration and Conservation Project: Excavations at the South Transept, p. 101). However, we have no idea, far as I can tell, what the level of fill was inside the church as of 1835 when the cannon platform was built there.
Zaboly, on p. S22, note i, seems quite certain he knows what the floor level was in 1836, and I was wondering what his source of information was.
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Post by Jake on Dec 19, 2011 21:41:48 GMT -5
Almost a year since I retired from the Park Service, and I think this is the first time I've posted to the Forum since then. Don't let them tell you retirement is easy. Especially if you have a lifetime of research books and files, and a house not intended to hold that stuff in such a way that you can find things. And actually putting together a life on a whole different schedule, or lack thereof ...
Sorry to be gone so long, but -- well, take the excuses as read, ok?
So anyway, I'm reading through the Defenses essay in the middle of Zaboly's new book, Altar For Their Sons, and I'm finding references to the floor of the church having been x inches or feet lower then than now, and I'm recalling that I've seen this mentioned before, somewhere on the Forum, and it occurs to me: I don't know anything about a determination of the probable floor level of the church at the time of the Battle. So among the lot of yez, I figure there must be some expertise, or at least opinions, on this. And since JohnK has brought up the topic of the height of the back wall, I thought I'd butt in and ask about it.
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Post by Jake on Apr 10, 2011 12:57:55 GMT -5
Paul, you must have sat there and paged through every page of the book. Sounds like a compulsive disorder of some sort to me.
Thanks for finding these other pages -- I can use some of them.
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Post by Jake on Apr 7, 2011 16:27:29 GMT -5
Tom, your mention of the Cuartel reminds me that the 200th anniversary of the Casas Revolt, that began in the La Villita Cuartel, was on January 21 of this year.
Bruce, there is a brief biography of Giraud in the Alamo Library: Emily Edwards and Mary C. Newell, F. Giraud and San Antonio (San Antonio: Southwest Craft Center, 1985). They will probably discuss what became of his sons, at least briefly.
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Post by Jake on Apr 7, 2011 16:13:39 GMT -5
Bruce: No need to go off-site, since the answer is "I don't know."
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Post by Jake on Apr 6, 2011 11:02:05 GMT -5
Tom, Bruce had posted a photo/map of La Villita with the Cuartel marked on it, but I can't find it now. What happened to it?
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Post by Jake on Apr 5, 2011 12:02:04 GMT -5
The Book is up on the San Antonio City website, for those of you who want to look: www.sanantonio.gov/clerk/ArchiveSearch/AdvancedSearch.aspxTo find it you go to the big box listing the collections at the bottom of the page, scroll down and check the "City Engineers Maps 1884-1901," then go up to Advanced Search, and in "Search Field" click the down arrow and select "Page #", then in "Condition" select "equals", and in "Search Phrase" type the page number you want, and click "Search" at the bottom of the page. This gives you a list of possible pages you might be looking for. The list is more or less by date, with oldest at the bottom, and the indication that it's The Book is "Survey Book 1" and the statement that this listing is for page "something" of 478. Note that the pages as indexed seem to be one number high -- for example, if you want the page with "52" stamped on the upper corner, you have to request p. 53. This is odd, but archivists have reasons for these things that regular mortals do not ken. P. 53 (p. 52 printed on the corner) is of interest because it has Giraud's survey and plat of the lot of the barracks of the Presidio of San Antonio on it. You can do a simpler and broader search up in the "Simple Search" block near the top of the page. For example, you can type in "giraud" and "maverick" (you need the quotation marks and the "and" without quotation marks for it to work), hit the search button within that block, and it will give you a list where both of those terms appear together on a page. Note that you have to clear all the search terms in the "Advanced Search" for this to work. This brings up a number of listings, one of which is "ALAMO PROPERTY PLAT AND FIELD NOTES-Page 1 of 2," where p. 1 is the 1885 Maverick map I described and you saw in the picture in the original article on mySA, and p. 2 is the 1914 version I showed you. I forgot to mention that the 1914 version has the more recent streets and the post office sketched in lightly on it. The original plat drawing of 1849 by Giraud has been flattened out and put back together (what's left of it), and is now easily recognizable in the color version as the same plat as reproduced in the 1885 and 1914 redrawings. It's on "Subdivision, Civil Engineer, Survey Book 1-Page 115 of 478," (p. 114 is stamped on the corner of the page) and looking good. Simplest of all is, once you have a page image of The Book up on the screen, there's navigation tools at the bottom that let you go forward or backward page by page, or jump to some other specific page number.
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Post by Jake on Apr 1, 2011 13:21:30 GMT -5
Stuart: Those two points are the edges of pilasters that frame the main south gate. We actually have some contemporary drawings by dependable (relatively) artists who show that the gateway is flat-topped, not arched. The size of the points are somewhat exaggerated on the Giraud plats.
Jim and Allan: Here's a bit of my own discussion about the northwest corner for you.
Both the northwest and southwest corner gun platforms were (apparentl) built in 1835 using the walls of the houses here. Both were destroyed after the battle. The Losoya house at the southwest corner was rebuilt, approximately but not all that precisely on its original foundation, but the northwest corner was not rebuilt, leaving the gap of the missing corner. Inexplicably, questions have been raised about the honesty of Giraud’s survey of the Maverick properties. In 1959, writer Charles Ramsdell argued that Giraud was a crony of Maverick’s, and had carried out the survey in such a way as to give Maverick portions of the Plaza illegitimately, so that he could build his house within the Plaza boundaries; Ramsdell implied that Maverick was a “squatter.” [Ramsdell, San Antonio, p. 86.] “Giraud obliged his friend by cutting off a northwest corner and the entire corral on the northeast, and making the boundary the inner line of the buildings around the wall instead of their outer line . . . Maverick’s house was built in the northwest angle, well within the old walls.” [Ramsdell, San Antonio, p. 86.] This suggestion of some sort of impropriety was repeated by archaeologist Feris Bass, who said that Maverick persuaded Giraud to “modify his survey to permit Maverick to acquire some of the Alamo property.” [Fox, Bass, and Hester, Alamo Plaza, p. 18.] Even Susan Schoelwer echoed the story: Giraud’s map had “a curious rectangular indentation in the northwest corner of the outer wall. This indentation, which is not corroborated or explained by any other contemporary source, marks the eventual location of Maverick’s house and was evidently created for his benefit.” [Schoelwer, “Artist’s Alamo,” p. 453.] Ramsdell and more recent Maverick critics seem to be operating under the impression that no private individual could own any property within the walls of the Alamo; this was presumably associated with the debate between the city, the Army, and the Church over who owned the Alamo property. But as the brief outline above of his purchases indicates, Maverick bought houses and land around Alamo Plaza long before the U.S. Army arrived and Giraud’s survey was conducted. Giraud “permitted Maverick to acquire” nothing; he surveyed what Maverick had purchased from the legal owners nine years before – property and structures clearly described in their deeds to him. Of course the survey ran along the inner faces of the buildings along the north end of the Plaza – they were the buildings he had bought, and were therefore within his property line. Giraud mapped an empty rectangular notch in the northwest corner because of two reasons. One was that the structures in this area had already been destroyed by the beginning of construction of the new Maverick house. But this had been an area of confusion where the surviving physical evidence was open to several interpretations even before the demolition of the northern Castañeda house in the 1840s. Everett, for example, in 1846 showed the buildings along the west wall ending short of the northwest corner, as does Giraud, but Everett showed by dotted lines that he thought the outer, not the inner, wall continued to enclose the original corner. F.E.B. recorded no wall traces at all in this area. The destruction of the gun platform simply removed the northernmost room in the corner, leaving the structural traces unclear. Maverick had purchased the northwest corner area as part of the Castañeda lot, and regardless of where the outside wall went, his land ran to the inner corner. Ramsdell’s criticism of Maverick and Giraud was based on ignorance of the original deeds and a peculiarly human urge to find conspiracy; the subsequent authors who repeated the story were simply accepting Ramsdell’s opinion without sufficiently checking the original record.
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Post by Jake on Mar 30, 2011 19:24:16 GMT -5
I should add that on the plat called Figure 6, the house at the southwest corner of the Alamo compound itself, the one labeled "house" at the southeast corner of the lot for Juan Losoya, is the outline of the rebuilt Losoya house. This whole corner was apparently destroyed after the battle, as part of the destruction to make the Alamo no longer defensible, just like the northwest corner was, only here Losoya rebuilt his house approximately on the foundations of the pre-battle building ... but not exactly on those foundations. So that bit that sticks out past the south wall line at the southwest corner is probably the result of the reconstruction, not the way the corner was originally. Probably.
But then, what else would you expect from even the most representative of the plats of Alamo property?
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