San Jose

We ended up with a couple days of cushion, so we wandered up to San Jose. We had never been here, and now with our interest generated in the California collection of Spanish missions it was a great stopping point.

We visited the home of Sarah L. Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester, son and heir to the company that manufactured the Winchester repeating rifle. Her infant daughter who died in 1866 followed by her husbands, mothers and fathers deaths 15 years later, Sarah felt estranged in her New Haven Connecticut home. She decided to move west on the advice of a spiritualist and bought a quaint family farm in San Jose.

Sarah bought a ranch and home and began to build. She had been told that her multiple family tragedies were the result of the dead souls from the effects of the Winchester repeating rifle reaching back from the beyond. She was told that if she moved west and built a home, and never completed it, that she could escape these demons. So apparently, that is what she set out to do.

The home is bizarre. Doors in the home may exit to no balcony or anything but space. Staircases often lead up just to end at a ceiling with no way out. While it is immense, there is no feel of “home” here, just a lot of rooms patched together.

From the day she arrived she had a construction crew on site working 7 days a week so that the home was continuously under construction as she had been advised by her mediums. Before she died 38 years later, her construction fanaticism managed to turn the quaint 1,200 foot farm home into a bizarre 24,000 square foot mansion. Because construction was the goal, not functionality or design, the results were often strange, unexpected. For example, there were 7 commercial scale kitchens in the mansion and we toured them all. We visited the séance room and many of the bedrooms that Sarah slept in. It was said that she slept in a different one of the 40 bedrooms every night in order to hopefully confuse the demons that may be after her.

At the height of its construction the mansion towered to 7 stories. However, being adjacent to the San Andreas Fault, it was the lucky recipient of many earthquakes, one of which was successful in lowering it to 4 stories by placing its famed tower into one of its two basements. It was during that particular earthquake that staff indicated that Sarah was actually trapped in one of the bedrooms. Since the staff never knew where she would chose to sleep it took them several hours to locate her and free her from her potential tomb.

We visited Mission San Juan Bautista. The 15^th of the 21 California missions it was founded by Father Fermin Francisco de Lausen on June 24, 1797.

Named for Saint John the Baptist, baptizer of Jesus and patron saint of monks, the mission is the largest of the 21 Spanish missions along the Camino Real. The extent of the scale of the mission was such that it took the local Native Americans over 15 years just to build the 4 foot thick walls of this mission.

This must be the closest mission to the San Andreas Fault. The Fault literally runs within 20 or 30 feet along the length of the main chapel. Also, remains of the original Camino Real also run atop the Fault alongside the chapel.

Across the street from the mission is the historic Plaza Hotel. Several buildings from the 1800’s in the town of San Juan Bautista have been salvaged and restored by the State of California as a historical park. Again, economic failure of this small town is what resulted in these old buildings not being remodeled or removed for newer development. Once we finished with the mission and thought about touring the State Historic Park many hundreds of screaming grade school kids had descended. The ranger told us that was the routine during the week – dozens of school buses show at opening time. She suggested we might want to return after lunch – we decided to take a pass.

We stumbled on one last interesting thing about Mission San Juan Bautista. All the missions have an attached museum, usually in the buildings where the padres lived, ate and worshipped. At the far back of this mission museum we found Alfred Hitchcock’s death mask on display, with no real explanation anywhere of why it was there. We sought out a docent and learned that much of the Hitchcock thriller Vertigo had actually been filmed on site in the 1950’s. Maybe they were here filming when the Woman and I were being born!

We discovered another agricultural capital of the world in Gilroy California. While at the Rose Parade we met a couple who lived in Gilroy and told us about its unique place in the world. While I can’t figure out how to verify this, Gilroy is the self-proclaimed Garlic Capital of the World. I have not been able to find stats like I did for the Castroville area to prove the claim, but we did ogle some garlic farms and sampled some garlic delicacies, including the garlic wine. We drew the line, however, at the garlic ice cream. Maybe we should have drawn the line before we sampled the garlic wine as well.

We visited Mission Santa Clara de Asis. The 8^th mission founded by Padre Serra on January 12, 1977, the mission is now in the center of the campus of the University of Santa Clara. As we had to park on the periphery – as on many large campuses there is limited vehicle traffic allowed inside – we asked a group of students if they could point us in the direction of the mission. It was funny - they had to think about it a bit, but then they said “Oh, you mean the church?” and then they were able to get us headed the right way.

Being surrounded by a university campus with hundreds of folk walking around, this mission did not have the same kind of remote, historic feel of many we had seen so far. However, once we got inside where it was peaceful and quiet, the beauty revealed itself to us. Named for Saint Clare of Assisi, founder of the Order of Poor Clares, this mission was located near the Guadalupe River and the largest population of Natives in all California.

We couldn’t help ourselves when we were this close to the action. Because of the massive preparations for the Superbowl, Levis Stadium tours have unfortunately been suspended. But that didn’t stop us from stopping by just to take in the sight. We couldn’t have guessed just how many scaffolds and temporary buildings we would see – the entire area surrounding the stadium was littered with them. The money that must be involved here is unimaginable!
 

Before moving on we visited Mission San Jose, the 14^th mission founded June 11, 1797. This mission was another founded by Fray Fermin Francisco de Lausen, and still incorporates some of the original chapel buttresses in its construction.

Talk to you soon!