[Noozhawk’s note: First in a series.]
What does a historian do while shut in during the coronavirus pandemic? In late 2019, I finished a manuscript on art historian Norman Neuerburg and the Getty Villa in Malibu, and then the COVID-19 crisis burst on the scene.
We were in Ashland, Oregon, at the time and actually saw several plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, including an excellent production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Literally the week after we returned to Santa Barbara, the world closed down and I took to writing again, this time about my 35 years at the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.
The result has been a 120,000-word manuscript that I am now editing for future publication. Thanks to Noozhawk, I’ll be providing excerpts from the manuscript, Creative Mudslinging: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Santa Barbara Presidio.
What follows is the first installment:
I could have never guessed as I began my career as a historian that it would be defined by 100,000 adobe bricks cast from local Santa Barbara earth.
My world was totally German back in the 1970s — German literature, German history, German food, study in Germany, teaching in Germany, all of which culminated in a dissertation in history at UC Santa Barbara on German intellectuals who escaped the Nazis and ended up in Southern California.
But after four-plus years in the Fatherland, and two in Washington, D.C., due to my wife, Michele, working at the Pentagon, we landed back in Santa Barbara, and I was hired as the lead administrator in charge of rebuilding El Real Presidio de Santa Bárbara, an 18th-century Spanish adobe fort at 123 E. Canon Perdido. Mud was to be my future.
In retrospect, it was a harbinger of things to come that I used to take my university students in Germany to see Saalburg, the rebuilt Roman fort near Bad Homburg, Germany. The site has in recent years been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and perhaps someday El Presidio de Santa Bárbara will attain such a high status as well.
Founded on April 21, 1782, Santa Barbara’s was the last Spanish Presidio built in North America — during the reign of King Carlos III, one of Europe’s best known “enlightened despots.”
The Presidio marked the beginning of the town of Santa Barbara, which has grown into one of the most famous destinations on the California coast.
The original adobe fort was built over a period of about five years, with extensions and other changes taking place into the 1790s. It took around 300,000 to 400,000 55-pound adobe bricks to build the fort — bricks made by the paid labor of 20 to 30 local Indians and a near equal number of Spanish soldiers and sailors.
The size of the rectangular fort was about that of a typical modern city block. Unfortunately, as Santa Barbara expanded outward from the Presidio, an American grid was laid over the city in the 19th century, and streets crossed through the footprint of the fort.
This meant that to rebuild it, modern city streets would have to be closed. Trouble ahead.
Fast forward to the 1950s, as a result of earthquakes and neglect only two rooms from the original fort survived.
Enter Pearl Chase, a civic leader whom many described as a “Force of Nature.” She began to organize the men of Santa Barbara, as well as some women, under the aegis of a nonprofit called the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation (SBTHP). The organization was founded in 1963 and shortly thereafter the Presidio site was designated a state historic park.
Besides being crisscrossed with modern streets, the remaining fort foundations were overlaid with later construction and decades of accreted soil.
Most striking was the 20th century wood-framed Japanese Buddhist church that the City of Santa Barbara demolished when the temple relocated to a new site in the Lower Eastside neighborhood.
The original Hispanic settlers had spread throughout the community and were replaced in the Presidio area in the 20th century by newcomers, among whom were Japanese- and Chinese-Americans.
It is one thing to rebuild a historic fort, such as has been done at places like Fort Vancouver, in Vancouver, Washington. There, at least, the fort lay outside of town, unlike the Santa Barbara Presidio that became and remained the center of our city.
Thus there was the formidable task of trying to acquire expensive commercial real estate. And the later residents of the site were not too happy that someone was going to take away their businesses and residences.
But before jumping too far ahead with this historic preservation tale, first let us in more detail survey the early Spanish history of the Santa Barbara Presidio, a frontier history much less known than the American Western movement that stretched eventually to California from the East Coast.
The next installment on the history of the Presidio itself will emphasize the magnitude of the construction of the adobe fortress on the California frontier and the Presidio’s socio-political, cultural role in the development of the Santa Barbara region.
Future installments also will provide more detail on the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation’s early years and on a group called the Presidio Volunteers. That will be followed by a discussion of the political controversy of the project, the sale of El Paseo, and rebuilding projects from beginning to completion.
Excerpts from reintroduction of Asian history to the Presidio area, the Casa de la Guerra restoration, and much else I had the good fortune — and a few times misfortune — to oversee over the years will, I hope, round out the story.
Siempre Adelante.
— Jarrell Jackman is the former executive director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. After receiving his Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Barbara, he taught for six years in Europe and Washington, D.C. In 2015, he was honored as a knight of the Royal Order of Isabel la Católica by Spain’s King Felipe VI and was named an honorary state park ranger by the California State Park Rangers Association in 2016. Click here for additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.