Alamo Mission

The Alamo is a historic Spanish mission and fortress compound founded in the 18th century by Roman Catholic missionaries in what is now San Antonio, Texas, United States. It was the site of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, where American folk heroes James Bowie and Davy Crockett died.Today it is a museum in the Alamo Plaza Historic District and a part of the San Antonio Missions World Heritage Site.

 

Originally named the Misión San Antonio de Valero, it was one of the early Spanish missions in Texas, built for the education of local American Indians after their conversion to Christianity. The mission was secularized in 1793 and then abandoned. Ten years later, it became a fortress housing the Second Flying Company of San Carlos de Parras military unit, who likely gave the mission the name Alamo. During the Texas Revolution, Mexican General Martín Perfecto de Cos surrendered the fort to the Texian Army in December 1835, following the Siege of Béxar. A relatively small number of Texian soldiers then occupied the compound for several months. The defenders were wiped out at the Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. As the Mexican Army retreated from Texas several months later, they tore down many of the Alamo walls and burned some of the buildings.

 

For the next five years, the Alamo was periodically used to garrison soldiers, both Texian and Mexican, but was ultimately abandoned. In 1849, several years after Texas was annexed to the United States, the U.S. Army began renting the facility for use as a quartermaster's depot, before again abandoning the mission in 1876 after nearby Fort Sam Houston was established. The Alamo chapel was sold to the state of Texas, which conducted occasional tours but made no effort to restore it. The remaining buildings were sold to a mercantile company that operated them as a wholesale grocery store.

 

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) formed in 1891 and began trying to preserve the Alamo. Adina Emilia De Zavala and Clara Driscoll successfully convinced the state legislature in 1905 to purchase the remaining buildings and to name the DRT as the permanent custodian of the site. Over the next century, periodic attempts were made to transfer control of the Alamo from the DRT. In early 2015, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush officially moved control of the Alamo to the Texas General Land Office.The Alamo and the four missions in the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site on July 5, 2015.

 

In 1716, the Spanish government established several Roman Catholic missions in East Texas. The isolation of the missions—the nearest Spanish settlement, San Juan Bautista, Coahuila was over 400 miles (644 km) away—made it difficult to keep them adequately provisioned.To assist the missionaries, the new governor of Spanish Texas, Martín de Alarcón, wished to establish a waystation between the settlements along the Rio Grande and the new missions in East Texas.

 

In April 1718, Alarcón led an expedition to found a new community in Texas.The group erected a temporary mud, brush, and straw structure near the headwaters of the San Antonio River.This building would serve as a new mission, San Antonio de Valero, named after Saint Anthony of Padua and the viceroy of New Spain, the Marquess of Valero. Alarcón, acting in his capacity as "General of the Provinces of the Kingdom of the New Philippines," formally entrusted the mission on May 1 to Father Antonio de San Buenaventura y Olivares in a foundation document, still preserved.The mission was located near a community of Coahuiltecans and was initially populated by three to five Indian converts from Mission San Francisco Solano near San Juan Bautista.One mile (two km) north of the mission, Alarcón built a fort, the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar. Close by, he founded the first civilian community in Texas, San Antonio de Béxar, which later developed into the present-day city of San Antonio, Texas.

 

Within a year, the mission moved to the western bank of the river, where it was less likely to flood.Over the next several years, a chain of missions was established nearby.In 1724, after remnants of a Gulf Coast hurricane destroyed the existing structures at Misión San Antonio de Valero, the mission was moved to its current location.At the time, the new location was just across the San Antonio River from the town of San Antonio de Béxar and just north of a group of huts known as La Villita.

 

 

 

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