Julia Costello’s house in Mokelumne Hill sits two-and-a-half hours and 130 miles from the nearest of California’s many Spanish missions.
Not the most likely place for the historian to pen her most recent book: “The California Missions,” a volume critics call an “authoritative” guide to the Golden State’s iconic adobe religious compounds.
But as Costello’s relationship with missions began more than three decades ago with a dash of chance and a pinch of serendipity, the unlikely is perhaps fitting.
It all started in 1974. Costello was living in Lebanon. She had traveled there two years before, not long after earning her master’s degree in anthropology, specializing in archaeology.
“I thought, ‘It’ll just be a couple months,’ ” she recalls. “Then I stayed.”
It wasn’t a family first. Her maternal grandfather, William Eddy, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel who had a doctorate from Princeton, had traveled to the small middle Eastern country in the 1860s to teach, one in a line of family educators to do so.
Costello was enthralled in Lebanon by the access she had to ancient Roman, Phoenician and Bronze-age sites. It was thrilling for a young archaeologist. Then war broke out.
Forced back to the U.S. by the Lebanese Civil War, Costello knew a former college roommate in Santa Barbara, so that is where she landed. And, shortly after, began her doctorate.
But there was a slight problem. She was a ceramic specialist. “And in California, they didn’t do pottery.”
In Lebanon she had been looking at Roman ruins: frontier settlements in a foreign land. She realized in California she could do the same with the Spanish’s crumbling settlements.
Plus there was another advantage to choosing them: Her colleagues were all interested in pre-historic cultures. “No one was looking at the missions.”
Some three decades later, Costello’s name now graces a lushly illustrated volume that aims to bring years of new scholarship on the missions to a popular audience.
The book was originally the project and passion of her close friend and fellow historian Edna Kimbro. The two go way back.
“We would room together at conferences and cause trouble and stay out late,” Costello said.
But after Kimbro’s death from ovarian cancer in 2005, Costello agreed to help finish the book.
She visited every mission again, reread her old sources, sifted through the new scholarship and researched the post-mission period. She worked “every weekend and every night” up until the publishing deadline in 2008.
Her greatest feeling now that the book is done?
Relief. “I lost my life for three years,” she said.
Her passion for the missions — and desire to relate their special role in California’s history, if not the world’s — has weathered that stress.
"It was the first time Europe came to indigenous culture,” she said. “For the Indians here, that was first contact.”
Luckily for anthropologists like herself, the Spanish were the “consumate bureaucrats,” documented everything in triplicate and, as if that wasn’t enough, filled their letters home with rich details.
And so much was just like in Lebanon.
“Essentially you had Rome and Roman technologies going on right here in Alta California,” she said.
Included in the book are a set of never-before-published watercolors from the Index of American Design, a government-financed project of the 1930s designed to document various American art.
The features they document were discovered by accident. While workers were preparing for a fiesta at the San Fernando Rey mission in 1936, a section of plaster fell from a wall — revealing a painting beneath.
“It was a serendipitous fall,” Costello said.
Costello is happy to see the missions achieve a more nuanced understanding in recent years.
While in the 30s and 40s they were romanticized and in the 60s and 70s they were vilified, their complexity is now more accepted.
The Spanish were “mean and small-mined and punished the Indians,” she said. “Stories of atrocities are true. And stories of bringing adobe architecture and agriculture and all that are true.”
Costello is already the author of “Melones: A story of a Stanislaus River Town,” and the co-author of a couple of books on Calaveras County history.
While she is pleased the new book is done, she isn’t predicting a bestseller.
“If anyone actually reads it I’ll be happy,” she joked.
Written by Michael Kay, The Union Democrat February 04, 2010 11:27 am
Contact Michael Kay at mkay@uniondemocrat. com or 890-7477.
