After numerous setbacks, another attempt to restore San Miguel Chapel
Maybe the third time is the charm. Once again, Cornerstones Community Partnerships and St. Michael’s Corporation are trying to get a project under way to restore the “Oldest Church” — the San Miguel Chapel on Old Santa Fe Trail.
This time, though, they’re taking smaller steps at the beginning. After a 2004 partnership for a $46 million large-scale restoration that foundered on a project manager who eventually fell out with the corporation and a tentative proposal that never really got off the ground in 2006, the local groups have come together for a conditions assessment and preservation plan, the first step toward restoration.
“Our process always begins with a thorough conditions assessment. That’s the only way we can tell what needs to be done. From there, we move to a preservation plan, including estimated costs and proposals for resources,” Cornerstones executive director James Hare said.
After previous attempts to partner for the church’s restoration failed, Cornerstones moved to other projects, Hare said. “But then the Getty Foundation gave us a $54,700 grant, which was supplemented by grants from the National Park Service, the Las Campanas Fund and the Catholic Foundation,” he said. With money in hand, the conditions assessment was begun in late spring.
The assessment will be finished this month. A public lecture is slated for noon June 25, to provide the public with information about the old church.
“I am always amazed at the number of people who’ve lived in Santa Fe for years, some of them all their lives, and who’ve never been inside this historic building,” Hare said.
He said the public lecture is also admittedly a beginning salvo in what he hopes will be a public campaign to restore San Miguel Chapel.
“That’s part of what we bring to the table,” Hare said. “We bring technical expertise, training and fundraising support. But we also try to leverage community support wherever we work. It makes it easier and it’s a lot more fun.
“The interesting thing is that after 22 years and projects all over the Southwest and in Mexico, this is our first effort in Santa Fe,” he added. “San Miguel Chapel is a cultural centerpiece and an absolute historical treasure, not just for Santa Fe but for the greater Southwest. We hope our assessment and preservation plan will raise awareness of the need to come together to do the preservation work after our plan is completed.
The chapel, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968, was preceded by a similar building erected between approximately 1610 and 1628, when Santa Fe was established. The building was badly damaged in 1640 but rebuilt by 1680, the year of the Pueblo Revolt, when the chapel was severely damaged again. The present San Miguel Chapel was reconstructed in 1710.
Located about a half-mile from the Plaza, the chapel is in the oldest continuously inhabited residential neighborhood in the U.S., the Barrio de Analco, established in 1610, which leads to the ongoing “mystery of San Miguel,” as Hare termed it.
Who built it?
The mystery is, who built the church? Was it built, as legend has it, by a group of Christian Tlaxcaltecan Indians who had arrived in the new settlement with the Spanish? That’s one of the questions Cornerstones is trying to answer as it assesses the condition of the church.
Tradition holds that both the Barrio de Analco and the Oldest Church were built by Tlaxcaltecan Indians who traveled north to the new settlement of Santa Fe with the Spanish. The Tlaxcaltecans allied with Cortez and his troops in toppling the Aztecs in 1519, converted to Christianity and helped other military and political endeavors as the Spanish conquest moved north. Their presence in Santa Fe has been assumed, but no evidence for it has been uncovered.
A delicate process
This mystery might be solved by the strict protocol that has been followed by Cornerstones Community Partnership and its consulting archaeologist, Elizabeth Oster, in assessing the condition of San Miguel Chapel, Hare suggested this week.
Assessors have worked under a host of guidelines from the City of Santa Fe and the National Park Services. These guidelines include protection of any bones or human remains that might be unearthed in the assessment process — likely, considering the existence of an old graveyard beneath the paved entrance of the chapel and, probably, burials under the church itself.
In order to properly assess the condition of San Miguel Chapel, Cornerstone’s project managers have had to remove samples from the middle of the adobe walls after removing layers of stucco, and to disturb the foundation — although as minimally as possible — to ensure that internal conditions and any signs of damage are documented, such as water damage in the adobe walls.
The project must also comply with guidelines for communicating with a long list of American Indian tribes in this region, to solicit their concerns about work that might impact the pre-Spanish Puebloan remains that are known to exist in and around the chapel.
Oster calls the work she is contributing “cultural resources archaeology.”
“This is a great opportunity for a new kind of archaeology,” she said. “The work and the knowledge gained from the fieldwork and resulting analyses will be conducted so as to directly contribute to the long-term preservation of San Miguel, and the stories of the people who built it and used it over hundreds of years in Santa Fe.”
Oster has been researching the mystery of Christian Indians in Santa Fe. She has published a paper for the San Miguel Chapel and Barrio de Analco Preservation Project titled “Who were the Tlaxcaltecans de Santa Fe?” She said the assumption seems to be that any “Mexican Indians” assisting the Spanish would have been from Tlaxcala, although by the end of the 16th century there may have been some other logical candidates. Notable among the latter would be the Caxcans of Nueva Galicia, the region of the modern states of Jalisco and Zacatecas, where Don Juan de Oñate’s family settled, and from whence he came to colonize northern New Mexico.
In her work, Oster has found that though the Spanish documented every detail regarding their colonization of Santa Fe, including personal possessions and all family members, she has not found any proof that the founders of San Miguel were Tlaxcaltecans. She is trying now to piece together how the assumption that Christianized Indians were from Tlaxcala came to be believed.
Meanwhile, work moves ahead toward a full preservation of the 1710 church, Hare said, integrating Spanish Colonial and early New Mexico architecture. The first and only archaeological work performed on the church until this year was done from 1955-58, and turned up evidence of two earlier church buildings and, at a lower level, remnants of a 13th-century Ancestral Puebloan structure.
This means, he said, that San Miguel Chapel is not only one of the most significant examples of earthen architecture in the U.S., it also is in a very small group of buildings that are examples of the earliest historic preservation projects in the country.
If you go
WHAT: Public lecture about San Miguel Chapel
WHEN: noon June 25
WHERE: San Miguel Chapel, 221 E. De Vargas
HOW MUCH: Free
