On the morning of June 29, 1925, the friars at the Old Mission Santa Barbara were getting ready to celebrate the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. 

Father Joe Schwab, president of Old Mission Santa Barbara, remembers Father Cornelius Snyder telling him years ago that he was the organist that day. When Snyder had sat down at the organ bench, he heard a roaring sound and was suddenly sent flying off the bench onto the floor. 

Schwab was told about clouds of dust filling the room as plaster fell. The friars tried to make their way out of the choir loft, but the door was blocked by fallen rubble.

The friars were eventually able to get to an upper hallway in the front wing of the Mission, but because of all the dust, they didn’t realize some of the inside walls had caved in and smashed through the floor down onto the floor below. 

Some of the friars fell onto the floor below. While most of them got out uninjured, Brother Erasmus Beier was seriously injured and died nine days later in St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard due to his injuries, according to Schwab.

The Old Mission Santa Barbara was one of several Santa Barbara sites damaged by the 1925 earthquake that killed 13 people.

The estimated 6.3-magnitude earthquake caused about 4 miles of damage. State Street itself saw damage extend as far as one and a half miles from the former Hotel Californian to Sola Street.  

The earthquake damage and rebuilding effort also paved the way for the city’s Spanish style architecture that is still prevalent today.

At the Mission, the towers were badly damaged, along with the second floor inside and the front wall of the church. 

St. Anthony’s Seminary Church nearby saw more extensive damage, according to Schwab. The walls of the chapel fell and the roof crashed down through the inside of the chapel, but it was caught on the choir loft in the back, according to Schwab. 

“They were trying to get out the main door at the chapel, but they couldn’t, because of the fallen stones, and that was good because the inside floors had collapsed all the way down into the basement, so they would have been killed had they gotten out the front door,” Schwab said. 

However, when they climbed out of the wreckage of St. Anthony’s through a side door, a gardener, John Shea, was fatally struck by a fallen stone.

In the weeks that followed, as the city was without water and gas, many residents slept and ate outside, including the 25 friars living in the Mission at the time along with the 10 friars at St. Anthony’s church across the street. 

Restoration work on the Mission started in the spring of 1926 and was completed in 1927; however, the repairs would quickly prove to be inadequate.

“By the 1950s there was so much mortar falling out of the front wall and the towers that it was decided we really have to tear the towers down and the front wall and rebuild them, which they did, with steel and concrete and stone,” Schwab said. 

In 1956, repairs were once again completed, keeping true to the original design and assuring the Mission’s longevity.

“The building is more secure than it was at that time,” Schwab said. “Had that not happened, we probably would have some serious retrofitting work to do today. In terms of future earthquakes of that magnitude, the building is probably pretty safe.”

Community events and historical exhibits are planned for the centennial anniversary of the June 29, 1925, Santa Barbara Earthquake.