Mission Espada: The First Mission in Texas
Near San Antonio, Texas
Mission San Francisco de la Espada carries a distinction that even most Texans do not know: it began as one of the earliest missions established in Texas. In sixteen ninety, Franciscan friars from the College of Santa Cruz de Querétaro in Mexico planted the mission they called San Francisco de los Tejas near present-day Weches in east Texas, in the territory of the Caddo Hasinai people. Texas, in the Spanish colonial imagination, was a buffer zone against French Louisiana, and missions were the instruments of that buffer.
The east Texas experiment proved difficult. The missions were remote, the climate humid and hostile, and the Caddo peoples largely uninterested in conversion. After years of struggle, the Crown authorized a withdrawal and consolidation. In seventeen thirty-one, the same year Mission San Juan relocated to San Antonio, Mission Espada made the long journey west and was re-established on the west bank of the San Antonio River, receiving its new name, a reference to the Franciscan sword symbol, and a new population of Coahuiltecan-speaking peoples including the Pacao, Borrado, and Mariquita groups.
What the missionaries built at Espada's new location was a working agricultural colony. A friary went up in seventeen forty-five. The church, with its distinctive three-arched portal, was completed in seventeen fifty-six. But the most impressive achievement was hydrological: the Espada Dam, built across the San Antonio River to divert water into an acequia system, was engineering that would serve the region for centuries. The Espada Dam is the oldest European-built dam in the United States that remains in use.
The mission was largely abandoned in the eighteen twenties after Mexican independence and secularization. The church fell into ruin. It was restored in the eighteen eighties by Father Francis Bouchu, who rebuilt the roof and walls by hand. Today Mission Espada is the southernmost and quietest of the five San Antonio missions in the UNESCO World Heritage designation, still served by a small parish community on its centuries-old grounds.
