The Camposanto at Mission San José

By Cristóbal López

One of the many characteristics and customs of Spanish Missions along the borderlands was the establishment of a camposanto (sacred burial ground) for baptized Native Americans and citizens of New Spain. Generally, Spanish missionaries established camposantos in front of the church or as near to the front of the church as possible. Today, there are two grave markers in a small camposanto located in front of the church at Mission San José.
Were these graves part of a larger cemetery? What is the history of the Mission San José camposanto?

In February of 1740, Benito Fernández de Santa Ana, president of the Queretaran missions, reported that 431 adults and children had been baptized since the inception of Mission San José in 1720. He recorded ninety-five people living in the mission during his visit and stated that the rest of the population had perished.¹ During the first few decades after its founding, the population of Native Americans at Mission San José experienced many fluctuations due to disease, attacks, and Native Americans leaving the mission. By the end of the year, the population at Mission San José dwindled to forty-nine Native Americans.²

The following decade, Jacinto Barrios Y Jauregui provided a detailed report of the structural and social conditions at Mission San José. In his 1758 report, Gov. Barrios noted that “the said reverend father likewise showed me three folio books for this mission from which it is evident that 964 persons have been baptized, 145 couples have been married according to the laws of the Church, and 466 deceased persons have received Christian burial.”³ Gov. Barrios was also the first to provide a detailed description of a cemetery's location at Mission San José. He noted that in the space between the church and soldiers’ quarters was “the cemetery which is more than 80 varas (222 feet, 4 inches) square and is surrounded by a rubblework fence having three entrances,” which served “as the military plaza. Here the natives have their gun and arrow practice and their drills.”⁴ (Figure 1)

Figure 1: 1721-1761 Landscape Chronology of Mission San José.

Exhibit F, page 2-5, Juarez and Juarez Mission San Jose Cultural Landscape Report 1995.

In 1768, Fray Gasper José de Solis also recorded the conditions of Mission San José in his diary, which included drastic changes to the mission compound. He described the mission compound as having formed a perfect square, which was previously reported to have been composed of blocks and streets rather than an enclosed compound (Figure 2). Lastly, Fr. Solis noted that since the establishment of Mission San José, there had been 1,054 baptisms, 287 marriages, and 359 adult funerals.⁵ Fr. Solis only counting adult funerals, rather than all funerals, could explain why his reported number was lower than the number given by Gov. Barrios ten years prior.

Figure 2: 1761-1794 Landscape Chronology of Mission San José.

Exhibit I, page 2-19, Juarez and Juarez Mission San Jose Cultural Landscape Report 1995.

Gov. Barrios and Fr. Solis were the only ones to record numerical figures of interments at Mission San José. Unfortunately, neither of them provided a biographical description of the people who were married, baptized, or buried at the missions. Moreover, the book of burials that they referenced no longer exists, so the biographical information of the individuals buried at the missions from 1720 until 1781 are lost to history. Only one book of burials for Mission San José from the colonial era survived the trials of time, and it recorded burials from 1781 until 1824. The burial book contained 352 entries, with most interments occurring at Mission San José.

Figure 3: Exterior of Mission San José, c. 1860

Photograph courtesy of the University of Texas at San Antonio Special Collections.

Since there are no remnants of the cemetery that Barrios described in his report, we cannot definitively pinpoint the exact location of where burials occurred. However, his report, along with various source material, provided us with a general location of where the cemetery might have been. As described in his report, the cemetery was located between the soldiers’ quarters and church, which measured 222 feet on a side. The distance from the church's southern wall – the wall where the Rose Window is located and what would have been the front of the church before the 1760s – to the ruins found on the southeast section of the plaza measured 280 feet. That distance allowed for a cemetery and plaza, as described by Barrios. ⁸

Even if this area served as the cemetery, we do not know if most burials took place in the entire plaza, remained close to the front of the church, or inside of the church. In his report, Barrios specifically stated that the 466 people buried at Mission San José received a “sepultura eclesiástica” or an ecclesiastical burial. Therefore, it is likely that most burials at Mission San José occurred on consecrated ground, either being within the church structure or in a camposanto located in front of the church before the construction of the new church during the 1760s.

The last reference of the cemetery’s location during the colonial era appeared in Antonio Huizar’s grant of the granary and land at Mission San José in 1815. When describing the measurements of the plot of land being granted to Huizar, José Antonio Bustillos noted that “the house has 40 varas in frontage facing the East, and is bounded by the little plaza which is in front of the chapel cemetery and by the house of Damian Cordova.” ⁹ The “vara” was a common unit of measurement used by colonial Spain and Mexico. One vara roughly equaled 2 ¾ feet. Therefore, the description and area of the cemetery in Antonio Huizar’s grant suggests that burials were taking place in front of the new church, in the vicinity of where the two gravestones are today. No official Mission San José church records were kept following the secularization of the Spanish missions in 1824. However, that does not imply that that the community at Mission San José did not continue and burials ceased. The Camposanto (downtown San Antonio Cemetery) burial book from 1808-1865 recorded multiple Mission residents buried at Mission San José after secularization. However, the location of these burials is unknown. ¹⁰

Figure 4: Exterior of Mission San José in 1873. Notice the fence around the perimeter of the church yard and a smaller fence surrounding a burial plot in the back-left corner of the cemetery/church yard.

Photograph courtesy of the Catholic Archives of Texas.

Advancements in technology allowed visitors to take and reproduce photographs of Mission San José beginning in the middle and late nineteenth century. These photographs showed the deteriorating physical condition of Mission San José and provided evidence of burials taking place in front of the church. A photograph from 1868 of Mission San José depicted the rocky landscape of the mission grounds, the dome was still intact, and two people posed in front of the church doors (Figure 3). A stereograph taken in 1873 of the facade of the church depicted a large wooden fence and a smaller grave fence that outlined a burial location, not previously seen in the picture taken five years prior (Figure 4). Two photograph taken in the late 1880s and early 1890s depict more grave sites outlined by wooden fences (Figure 5 and 6).

Figure 5: Exterior of Mission San José with multiple graves outlined by grave fences c.1892.

Photograph courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

Despite the presence of a growing cemetery, it is unknown if the Catholic church sanctioned the cemetery or if it was a continuation of a cemetery that had long existed. Regular church services also ceased after the Holy Cross Fathers relinquished the ownership of the church in the late 1880. The physical condition of the church during the late 1800s also raises questions to why there was a cemetery in front of a ruined structure. Part of the north wall collapsed in the 1860s, and the dome fell in the 1870s. The main doors to the front entrance of the church were stolen sometime between the 1880s and 1890s. Given the deteriorating structural condition of the church and the lack of regular services, the cemetery in front of the church might have been an unsanctioned cemetery for the families of Mission San José or have been a continuation of Catholic tradition to conduct burials in front of a Catholic church.

Figure 6: View of portal of Mission San José c. 1889-1893. Photograph provides a closer view of grave fences.

Photograph courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Sothern Methodist University.

By the turn of the twentieth century, San Antonio residents began to stabilize the deteriorating condition of the church. One of the first groups to work on the restoration of Mission San José was the Adina De Zavala Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. A photograph taken in 1900, around the time of De Zavala’s work, depicted significant changes to the cemetery and the church landscape. ¹¹ By this time, the large wooden fence that outlined the entire cemetery and the small wooden fences that outlined individual graves were gone.

Burials in front of the church likely ceased after attention to the restoration of Mission San José grew. It remains unclear what happened to the graves depicted in the photographs. There is no written record if reinternments occurred at separate cemeteries or if burials remained in front of the church. To this day only two grave markers remain, one belonging to Juan Huizar who passed away in 1893 and the other is illegible.

¹ Benito Fernández de Santa Ana, “Description of the Mission of the College of Santa Cruz on the San Antonio River, 1740,” San José Papers Part 1, 1719-1791, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Library: 59.

² Toribio Urrutia, “Captain Urrutia of the Bexar Presidio, Reporting to the Viceroy, Praises the Padres for the Work done in all of the San Antonio Mission, December 17, 1740,” San José Papers Part 1, 1719-1791, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Library: 80.

³ Jacinto Barrios y Jauregui, “Informe del Gobernador Sobre la Misión de San José, May 28, 1758,” San José Papers Part 1, 1719-1791, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Library: 130.

⁴ Ibid, 132.

⁵ José de Solis, “Fr. Solis 1768 Report on Mission San José, March 191768,” San José Papers Part 1, 1719-1791, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Library: 156-160.

^{6, 7, 11} Architects James and Juarez, San Antonio Missions Cultural Landscape Report, (U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Southwest System Support Office, 1998), 5

⁸ Ivey, Of Various Magnificence, 240-241.

⁹ “Grant of Land and Granary to José Antonio Huizar,” MR-70, Bexar County Spanish Archives, San Antonio, Texas.

¹⁰ John Ogden Leal, “Camposanto, an ancient burial ground of San Antonio, Texas 1808-1865 i.e.,1860,” FamilySearch, Last Modified 1975. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/2060263.