40 Fun Facts About Mission Santa Barbara

Which nickname is often given to Mission Santa Barbara, the tenth in California's chain of 21?

Queen of the Missions has a royal partner down the coast: San Luis Rey, the largest of the chain, is nicknamed the King of the Missions.

Which feature, finished in 1831, makes Mission Santa Barbara's church unique among all the California missions?

Two matching bell towers appear on no other California mission; the stone church was completed in 1820 with only one, and its twin was added in 1831.

Which prize-winning children's novel was inspired by Juana Maria, the Lone Woman buried at Mission Santa Barbara?

Island of the Blue Dolphins retells her 18 years alone off the California coast; she died just seven weeks after reaching the mainland in 1853.

Which US president returned Mission Santa Barbara to the Catholic Church in 1865?

Abraham Lincoln restored the mission to the Church on March 18, 1865, less than a month before his assassination; the friars received Santa Barbara's deed only in 1925.

Which 1812 disaster destroyed Mission Santa Barbara's third church and led to the stone church standing today?

An earthquake on December 21, 1812 wrecked the adobe chapel, and the padres chose to rebuild on a grander scale in stone, finishing the work by 1820.

Which Catholic religious order founded Mission Santa Barbara in 1786 and has lived there ever since?

Franciscans have been at the mission without a break since its founding, and it remains a home and a place of study for the order's friars.

In legend, who beheaded Saint Barbara, the martyr for whom Mission Santa Barbara is named, after she became a Christian?

Her father carried out the death sentence himself and, the legend says, was struck dead by lightning on his way home, which made her the patron saint of gunners and miners.

Which art form fills the pavement outside Mission Santa Barbara each Memorial Day weekend during I Madonnari?

Chalk art arrived at the mission in 1987, borrowed from Italy, where street painters were called madonnari for the Madonnas they drew.

Mission Santa Barbara sits on which historic 600-mile route that links all 21 of California's missions?

El Camino Real means the Royal Road; the old tale that padres scattered mustard seeds to mark it with yellow blooms has never been verified.

Spain founded Mission Santa Barbara partly to protect its California claim against Great Britain and which other empire?

Russia and Great Britain were the rivals Spain feared, so it planted missions and forts up the coast to turn local peoples into Spanish subjects.

Which mission president planned Mission Santa Barbara but died in 1784, two years before it was finally founded?

Junípero Serra blessed the site of Santa Barbara's fort in 1782, but quarrels between church and state stalled the mission until after his death.

Which Basque-born padre, second president of the California missions, founded Mission Santa Barbara in 1786?

Fermín Lasuén joined his order before he turned fifteen and went on to found nine of California's 21 missions.

Mission Santa Barbara was founded on December 4, 1786, a date that marks which occasion for its namesake saint?

Her feast day stayed on the Church's universal calendar until 1969, when it was dropped over doubts about whether her legend was historical.

Under which country's flag did French-born privateer Hipólito Bouchard sail when he threatened Santa Barbara in 1818?

Argentina was at war with Spain, and Bouchard's two ships left without attacking after the mission padres armed 180 Chumash to back up the soldiers.

Which Spanish term names the 1782 fort near Mission Santa Barbara, the last of four Spain built in Alta California?

Presidio was the name for Spain's frontier forts; a remnant of Santa Barbara's, El Cuartel, is the second-oldest surviving building in California.

Which attraction, begun in 1955 with 500 donated plants, is the showpiece of the park beside Mission Santa Barbara?

A rose garden named for A.C. Postel has grown to more than 1,500 plants, with varieties named after Julia Child, Henry Fonda and Marilyn Monroe.

Which country's congress passed the 1833 act that secularized Mission Santa Barbara and California's other missions?

Mexico took the missions' lands out of church hands, but Santa Barbara kept its friars, and the records of the other missions were gathered there.

Mission Santa Barbara's parish claims California's oldest unbroken tradition of which activity?

Choral singing has never lapsed here by the parish's own account, and the mission archives guard one of the richest known collections of colonial music manuscripts, most still unstudied.

Which part of Mission Santa Barbara's waterworks, built in 1806, was later taken into the city's own water system?

A reservoir of stone built by Chumash workers was sound enough that the city went on using it to store water well into the twentieth century.

In legend, Saint Barbara, namesake of Mission Santa Barbara, added a third window to a bath-house to symbolize what?

The Holy Trinity was the meaning of the extra window she ordered in place of the two planned, and it gave away her secret conversion to Christianity.

Mission Santa Barbara was the tenth link in a chain of missions that began in 1769 at which site?

San Diego de Alcalá was founded on July 16, 1769, and the church there today is the fifth to stand on the spot.

The ship Mission Santa Barbara, launched at Sausalito in 1944 and named for the mission, was which type of vessel?

A tanker of the T2 type, she later served the Navy as an oiler and was eventually lengthened and rebuilt into a cargo ship named Seatrain Carolina.

From 1869 to 1877 Mission Santa Barbara also housed which kind of institution for lay men?

A college for lay men ran at the mission for eight years, beside the apostolic college the friars had been chartered to run there since 1854.

Mission Santa Barbara's first chapel, built of logs in 1787, was topped with a roof of which material?

Grass covered the log chapel, which had an earthen floor; adobe churches with tiled roofs followed in 1789 and 1794, each larger than the last.

Which crumbling foundation material forced Mission Santa Barbara's church facade to be rebuilt in the 1950s?

Concrete under the church disintegrated as it settled into the ground, cracking the stonework above, so the facade was rebuilt from 1950 to 1953 to duplicate its original form.

Which supports held Mission Santa Barbara's walls intact when its church front was severely damaged on June 29, 1925?

Buttresses kept the walls standing, and by 1927 the church had been rebuilt to its original design with the original materials.

Francisco García Diego y Moreno made Mission Santa Barbara his seat in 1842 as California's first what?

Bishop of the Californias was a brand-new post, and García Diego, worn out by a diocese with no money, died in 1846 and was buried at the mission.

Which term did mission padres use for baptized Native residents such as the Chumash at Mission Santa Barbara?

Neophytes, meaning new believers, numbered 1,792 at Santa Barbara in 1803, and they were not allowed to leave without permission.

When a privateer threatened the coast in 1818, most of the 180 Chumash drilled at Mission Santa Barbara served as what?

Archers made up 100 of the 180 recruits, backed by 50 men with machetes and 30 mounted lancers, and the raiders sailed away without a fight.

Which institution stands immediately behind Mission Santa Barbara in a campus of Mission-style buildings?

Museum of Natural History, which grew out of an ornithologist's collection of bird eggs, greets visitors with the complete skeleton of a blue whale.

The stone dam Chumash workers built on Mission Creek for Mission Santa Barbara now stands inside which attraction?

The Botanic Garden in Mission Canyon, devoted to California native plants, surrounds the dam about a mile and a half upstream from the mission.

Which Southern California city takes its name from the Chumash, the people who built Mission Santa Barbara?

Malibu is one of many Chumash place names still on the map, along with Ojai, Lompoc, Pismo Beach and Simi Valley.

Mission Santa Barbara is now a parish church of which Catholic jurisdiction that also covers Ventura County?

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has covered just three counties, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura, since Orange County was split off as its own diocese in 1976.

On the night of the 1824 uprising, fifty Chumash fled Mission Santa Barbara for an offshore island in which craft?

Plank canoes called tomols, built of driftwood redwood lashed together and caulked with tar, carried them to Santa Cruz Island while most rebels went inland.

Which explorer gave the name Santa Barbara to the channel in 1602, long before Mission Santa Barbara was founded?

Sebastián Vizcaíno named the channel 184 years before the mission existed, and he named Monterey Bay and Point Conception on the same voyage.

Which governor of Alta California asked in his will to be buried at Mission Santa Barbara and lies in a crypt there?

José Figueroa died in office at Monterey in 1835, and his body was shipped south and placed in a crypt under the mission church a month later.

While designing Mission Santa Barbara's stone church, its padre consulted the works of which famous architect?

Vitruvius was a Roman architect of the first century BC; untrained in building design, mission padres leaned on books and on memories of churches back in Spain.

Besides its California state listing as No. 309, Mission Santa Barbara holds which federal heritage designation?

National Historic Landmark status sits alongside the state listing, which also protects the ruins of the mission waterworks in the park next door.

Which padre of Mission Santa Barbara drilled a Chumash militia in 1818 and won pardons for the 1824 rebels?

Antonio Ripoll wrote to the governor defending the Chumash who had risen up, and a general pardon was announced on May 16, 1824.

Juana Maria lies at Mission Santa Barbara in the family plot of which fur trapper, who led her 1853 rescue?

George Nidever found her on his third expedition and took her into his own home, where she marveled at horses and European food.