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James Steele (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/JSteele

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Old Missions

From Old California Days, 1889.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

At one time, the California Missions seemed like the dull remains of a bygone era. But with discerning eyes, you could always find that these negelected buildings still sustained a "quiet beauty" within their adobe walls.

In his 1889 work, Old California Days, James Steele wrote of the concealed beauty he found within the relics of San Juan Capistrano.

Dust, the dust of years, decay, forgetfulness, decrepitude, was everywhere. It filled the spaces of the cracked red tiles of the floor, and lay thick on the wide old window ledge. It had flown upward and perched on the beams of the ceiling. If one had swept it away it would only have alighted again, for it belonged there, a part of the material of the place. Some of it was the excretæ of generations of insects, and some of it was composed of their powdered wings and heads and legs. Some again was vegetable; the microscopic cosmos that could tell of fungi and lichens; of every minute growth of beam and rafter the dry, bright air could nourish. [...] There is a quiet beauty often hovering over decay and ruin, and no locality is so subject to such a spell as an old church.

Based on a trip James Steele made to California in the 1880s, Old California Days preserves in its descriptions some of the remnants of pre-Gold Rush California.