Rebuilding convento is no easy task

Photo courtesy of Arizona Historical Society
Mission San Augustín's deteriorating glory: This photo of the two-story convento was taken in 1874 by Albert Buehman. No interior photographs or photos of the mission chapel are known to exist.

Now that the archaeological evidence - or lack of it - has been analyzed, officials will ponder how best to interpret Tucson's historic Mission de San Augustín for future visitors and tourists.

The reconstruction of the mission, at a site known as Tucson's birthplace, will be heavily dependent not just on archaeological finds, photographs and documents, but also on conjecture.

"I think we're going to use the best evidence we have, and as part of the interpretation of it, be able to signal to people what we know, and what we're not so sure of," said John Jones, project director for Rio Nuevo, the Downtown revitalization plan that will pay for the mission reconstruction.

About two-thirds of the mission site west of the Santa Cruz River at the base of "A" Mountain was destroyed more than three decades ago by a clay-mining plant and a city landfill.

Built in the 1770s, San Augustín had a Spanish missionary chapel, a building called a convento, two cemeteries, a granary, and other smaller structures contained in a compound wall. Just southwest of the mission compound, another wall surrounded Mission Gardens, where fruit trees and crops were grown.

But the site of the mission has a much older history, as evidence uncovered by Desert Archaeology Inc. two years ago found American Indian pithouses, storage pits and other features that date to 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists also found part of the compound wall and the granary, but no trace of the chapel or convento buildings.

The mission buildings were already deteriorating by 1798, documents show, and a small section of the convento wall was all that was left by the 1950s.

"We don't have anything there now, because whatever was there was absolutely destroyed," said the Rev. Charles Polzer, a church historian. "But there is a sense of place, and if we have the intelligence, the ambition, the documents and the skills, we can re-create that sense of place."

States sales tax matched with city funds will pay for the reconstruction of the mission site. Just how to do that reconstructing was a popular topic at a public meeting held last week.

R. Brooks Jeffery, preservation studies coordinator for the University of Arizona, said he fears reconstruction will result in a false sense of history and devalue truly authentic structures like San Xavier Mission.

"There are other ways to interpret and present the site, ways that avoid a kind of 'Disney-fying' of something that we really don't know all that much about," Jeffery said.

No photographs of the mission chapel have surfaced, so a reconstruction would have to be based on archival information and knowledge of other contemporary chapels. While photographs do exist of the convento, none illuminates what the south side of the building or its interior looked like. In a computer walk-through of the mission site created by Doug Gann of the Center for Desert Archaeology, portions of buildings that can't be confirmed by evidence are distinguished with glass.

That's something that's done at many real reconstruction sites, said Richard Cronenberger, a National Park Service official who oversaw the reconstruction of an 1850s trading fort in North Dakota.

"I think that you need to be honest about what you know and what you don't know," he said.

Cronenberger added that several buildings at the fort were intentionally not rebuilt, to foster imagination.

"If we were to build all of them, you would lose a sense of imagination about what it was, and no matter how well you do the research, the reconstruction has present-day values in it, not historical values," he said.

Tucson City Councilman Steve Leal argued that giving visitors a true feel for the mission would be compromised by glass partitions or incomplete construction.

"If we put glass in where we're not sure, we then undermine the part of the reconstruction that we do know a lot about," Leal said. "What we have done is deprived people of experiencing a sense of place in another time."

Jones said the interpretation will include recreating some of the irrigation canals and fruit orchards on the site, and that buildings will probably not be broken up with glass or other means. There will also be attempts to somehow connect the mission site with the Tucson Presidio, the old Spanish garrison, across the river, he said.

"The mission was founded to grow crops to feed the soldiers, and then a half-mile away was the presidio to protect the people growing the crops," he said. "So, there's a symbiotic relationship between the two that we want to somehow connect in our interpretation."

Even the words used to describe the mission are a mystery, Polzer said. San Augustín was actually not a mission but a visita, which designates a church that doesn't have a residing priest.

The two-story convento building, possibly the largest building of its time period in the southwest, is also a mystery, he said. The building probably housed priests who journeyed to the site from San Xavier, but was also apparently a chapel, a storage room, and may have been used for social reasons, Polzer said.

Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino, the first European missionary in the region, came to the site in 1692. Father Francisco Garces later founded San Augustín.

Reconstruction efforts at San Augustín could begin as early as 2003. Several public meetings will be held during the planning process, Jones said.

* Contact Thomas Stauffer at 573-4197 or at stauffer@azstarnet.com.