Two Graves at Mission San José, and the Lost Cemetery Around Them

In front of the church at Mission San José in San Antonio, Texas, stand two grave markers. One belongs to Juan Huizar, who died in 1893; the other can no longer be read. Are they all that is left of a larger cemetery? Tracing the mission's camposanto — its sacred burial ground — takes colonial reports, a land grant and a run of 19th-century photographs.

Spanish missions in the borderlands customarily set aside a camposanto for baptized Native Americans and citizens of New Spain, usually in front of the church or as close to its front as possible.

What the colonial counts say

Mission San José was founded in 1720. In its first decades the Native American population rose and fell with disease, attacks, and people leaving the mission.

Barrios and Solís were the only people to record how many were buried at San José, and neither said who they were. The burial book they both used no longer exists, so the names and lives of those buried from 1720 to 1781 are lost. Only one colonial burial book survives: it runs from 1781 to 1824 and holds 352 entries, most of them burials at Mission San José.

Where the cemetery was

Barrios gave the first detailed description of the cemetery's location. Between the church and the soldiers' quarters, he wrote, was "the cemetery which is more than 80 varas (222 feet, 4 inches) square and is surrounded by a rubblework fence having three entrances." It doubled as the military plaza: "Here the natives have their gun and arrow practice and their drills."

The mission's layout, 1721–1761. Credit: Juarez and Juarez, Mission San José Cultural Landscape Report (1995), Exhibit F.

Ten years later, Solís described a compound that had changed dramatically: it now formed a perfect square, where earlier reports had described blocks and streets rather than an enclosure.

The mission's layout, 1761–1794. Credit: Juarez and Juarez, Mission San José Cultural Landscape Report (1995), Exhibit I.

Nothing of Barrios's cemetery survives, so its exact place cannot be fixed. But the measurements fit. From the church's southern wall — the wall with the Rose Window, the front of the church before the 1760s — to the ruins in the southeast part of the plaza is 280 feet, room enough for both a cemetery and a plaza.

Whether burials spread across that whole space, stayed close to the church front, or took place inside the church is unknown. Barrios did say that the 466 dead had received a sepultura eclesiástica, an ecclesiastical burial. So most were probably buried on consecrated ground: inside the church, or in a camposanto in front of it, before the new church was built in the 1760s.

After the new church

The last colonial reference to the cemetery comes from 1815, when Antonio Huizar was granted the mission's granary and land. Describing the plot, José Antonio Bustillos wrote 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." A vara, the common Spanish and Mexican unit, was roughly 2¾ feet. The grant suggests that burials were by then taking place in front of the new church, near where the two gravestones stand today.

The Spanish missions were secularized in 1824, and San José kept no official church records after that. The community did not end, and neither did burials: the burial book of San Antonio's downtown Camposanto, covering 1808 to 1865, records several mission residents buried at Mission San José after secularization — though not where.

What the photographs show

From the mid-19th century, visitors could take and reproduce photographs, and theirs show both the church decaying and graves appearing in front of it.

Why a cemetery grew in front of a ruin is unclear. Part of the north wall collapsed in the 1860s, the dome fell in the 1870s, and the main doors were stolen sometime between the 1880s and 1890s. Regular services ended when the Holy Cross Fathers gave up ownership of the church in the late 1880s. Nobody knows whether the Church sanctioned the cemetery or whether it carried on one that had always been there. It may have been an unsanctioned burial ground for Mission San José's families, or the continuation of the Catholic tradition of burying the dead in front of a church.

The graves that remain

Around 1900, San Antonio residents began stabilizing the church; one of the first groups to work on it was the Adina De Zavala Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Burials in front of the church probably stopped as attention to the restoration grew. What became of the graves in the photographs is unknown — there is no record of the dead being reburied elsewhere, or of their being left in place. Two markers remain.

Sources

Based on "The Camposanto at Mission San José" by Cristóbal López, National Park Service (San Antonio Missions National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on the San José Papers (San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Library), including reports by Benito Fernández de Santa Ana (1740), Toribio Urrutia (1740), Jacinto Barrios y Jáuregui (1758) and José de Solís (1768); the grant of land and granary to José Antonio Huizar (Bexar County Spanish Archives); the San Antonio Missions Cultural Landscape Report (National Park Service, 1998); Ivey, Of Various Magnificence; and John Ogden Leal's index of the Camposanto burial book, 1808–1865.