The CCC and the Mission: A New Deal Reconstruction on Complicated Ground
Near Los Olivos, California
Between nineteen thirty-four and nineteen forty-one, several hundred young men employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps transformed the ruins of La Purisima Mission into the most completely restored mission complex in California. They worked with hand tools, made adobe bricks on site from local clay, fired roof tiles in a reconstructed kiln, and rebuilt thirteen structures using archaeological evidence, historical drawings, and original materials. It was, by any measure, extraordinary work. The National Historic Landmark designation that followed in nineteen seventy was warranted.
The New Deal workforce that did this work included Native American men. The CCC enrolled Indigenous workers across California throughout the program's years, and available historical records indicate some worked on projects in this region. Whether any of the men who laid adobe bricks at La Purisima Mission were specifically descended from the Chumash families who had labored in this same compound a century before, under conditions that reduced the regional Chumash population from thousands to hundreds, is a question that the archival record has not yet answered definitively in published form. The labor rolls and enrollment records that would settle it are in federal archives. The question of who rebuilt this place is not fully answered.
What is answered is what the original compound was: a mission where Chumash converts lived under confinement, performed labor under supervision, and died in epidemic waves that the physical conditions of the mission facilitated. The CCC rebuilt all of it: the church, the workshops, the soldiers' barracks, the monjerio. Each structure was carefully restored to its historical dimensions and materials.
The layers of the site run deep. The Chumash built the original. The New Deal rebuilt the reconstruction. Somewhere between those two moments of building is the history the architecture holds without speaking. You have to ask the question to get the answer.
