E.A.S.T. is best in West
By Joanie Perciballi

    What do the Old Mission Santa Inés, a boatload of pirates, a fulling mill, Joseph Chapman, and 19 Santa Ynez Valley High School “Pirates” have in common? Read this article to find out.
    Our Old Mission Santa Inés, the nineteenth of the twenty-one California Missions, and one of the best preserved, is commemorating its Bicentennial Anniversary this year. Dedicated on September 17, 1804 by Father Estevan Tapis, the Mission is situated on a spectacular location between the Santa Barbara and La Purisima Missions. It looks south toward the beautiful Santa Ynez Mountains, and to the southeast overlooks a fertile plain cut by the sparkling Santa Ynez River. The buildings, once ravaged by earthquakes and storms, have been tenderly restored and maintained.
    In the first half of the nineteenth century, Old Mission Santa Inés was a thriving enterprise. In the his 1934 book, Mission Santa Inés Virgen y Martir, Friar Zephyrin Engelhardt explains how the material and spiritual assets of the Mission were tallied each year. Between 1804 and 1834, the Mission’s average livestock base included herds of cattle ranging from 2000 to 7000 head, flocks of about 5000 sheep, 500 to 700 horses, 50 to 150 each, goats and pigs, and about 100 mules. An irrigation system watered fields of wheat and corn with a harvest of between 1,000 and 2,000 bushels per year to provide food for the mission population and livestock, with some left over to sell. Beans and peas were minor crops, as were pears and olives. The saving of souls was also vital. Records show that confessions and communions numbered somewhere between 200 and 300 a year.
    Mission workers also produced goods for their own use or for sale to support the Mission. Weavers spun wool from the sheep, creating blankets, rugs and textiles; a tanning operation fashioned leather goods; and there was a room dedicated to soap making. All of these agricultural and manufacturing activities were water dependent.
The ruins or remains of two lavenderias, large man-made water retaining basins, are assumed to have been common washing areas for residents’ clothing and utensils (and perhaps children). The first structure, which can be seen today in front of the Mission, is submerged 10 and a half feet in the ground and measures approximately 23 feet by 9 and a half feet and is 3 and a half feet deep.
     A registration form filed to submit Old Mission Santa Inés for consideration as a National Historic Landmark provides these descriptions. (The National Park Service approved this status in 1998.) The registration form states, “The deep recess of this location appears to have been required to meet the low grade of the aqueduct supplying water from the adjacent Alamo Pintado Creek. The water inlet, located at the base of the northern retaining wall has an opening 4 feet high and 3 feet wide…Behind this opening is the terminus of the buried water pipes of the Alamo Pintado aqueduct.”
    Although the aqueduct construction date is not known, it was probably an early endeavor, since water was essential for the many manufacturing and agricultural activities of the new community. The same document observes that, “Maintenance of the aqueduct likely deteriorated after 1855, when the remaining Chumash population was removed to a nearby reservation.” There are few actual records of this aqueduct’s construction and only scattered archeological remnants have been discovered, so until this year the actual path of the aqueduct has been based on speculation.
    One thing we have known for sure is that in 1820, Fr. Francisco Uria directed the construction of two connected reservoirs a half mile from the Mission. He also ordered a gristmill with a horizontal wheel, in the old Spanish style, as well as a fulling mill. (Fulling is a beating process that softens, cleans and interlocks the fibers of rough woven wool, while treating it with an alkaline substance such as lime or ash.) But Uria needed someone with the expertise to construct such a machine.
    During this time, Joseph Chapman, a New England craftsman and a conscript of the French pirate, Hippolyte de Bouchard, came to Refugio Beach with de Bouchard to prey on travelers using the Gaviota Pass. Spanish soldiers captured the pirates and Chapman was held prisoner in the Santa Barbara Presidio for a year, until he was befriended by and released into the custody of Father Uria, who hired him to build his fulling mill. Since a gristmill only operated during harvest, the same water path could provide water to power the fulling mill the rest of the year. Chapman constructed a vertical “overshot” waterwheel, turned by water spilled onto the paddles at the top of the wheel. That wheel powered the wool beaters, turned the cloth and rinsed it. The used water then irrigated the wheat and cornfields on the flat plain below the mills.
These two different mills, sharing a water source, but powered by dissimilar wheels, probably represent the first industrial complex in California, pre-dating Gold Rush technology by almost 30 years. However, to function as an industrial operation, the mills required a year-round water source, and until this year there was no verification that this source was the aqueduct, which brought water from a spring that flowed continuously, as opposed to the nearby seasonal creeks.
    Such verification has been provided in the past few months by a group of 19 Santa Ynez Valley High School students who are members of a very special class that has existed for only two years at the school. Science teachers Chip Fenenga and Kim Merz obtained grants to fund the “Environmental and Spatial Technology” (EAST) class, in which students use high-tech equipment to work on projects that benefit their local community or state. The EAST program was founded in Arkansas by Tom Stevenson, an ex-policeman who believes that project-based service learning gives students a sense of value if it is relevant, challenging, student-centered and as self-directed as possible, with educators serving as resource guides and facilitators. Financial backing for the program comes from Axiom, a high-tech company located in Arkansas and a tracking system is in place at the University of Arkansas. Funding for the more than 250 individual schools in seven states that now participate in the EAST program comes from grants, and 40 scholarships are awarded to its students. Teachers are provided an extensive professional development program and selected students from the western states are trained in Sacramento on how to use the GPS equipment and the GIS software to utilize the data gathered by the GPS equipment. The students who receive this training are expected to return to their EAST classes and teach their fellow-students how to use the equipment and software.
    Fenenga and Merz can offer suggestions as to appropriate projects, but each year the students themselves choose a project for their main focus. Last year, the first year the class was offered, the students won an award for their work detailing frequent accident sites along Highway 154 and making recommendations about how to improve safety at those sites. Their work is now being used by CalTrans to do exactly that! This year, partly because of the bicentennial of Old Mission Santa Inés, they chose to attempt to chart the path of the mission’s aqueduct. They were uncertain about how successful they would be, because the existing information was scattered and sketchy.
    The Santa Ynez Valley High School EAST students call themselves “Piratechs” because the school’s mascot has long been a pirate. The school’s teams are all called “The Pirates” and the school’s logo sports a skull and crossbones, like a pirate flag. By an odd-coincidence, this was all based on the long-ago presence in our Valley of the pirate Joseph Chapman—the same man who designed and supervised the construction of the fulling mill at the mission.
    Once the EAST class chose the aqueduct project, students Tim Manchester, Erin Gnekow, Erik Glendinning and Clay Garland took GPS equipment into the field to plot any known remains of the Mission aqueduct system. They also located the site of a spring and a small dam on Alamo Pintado Creek behind the Santa Ynez Valley Cottage Hospital. Back in the lab, the students used GIS software to plot, extrapolate and map the locations. Anyone visiting the Santa Ynez Valley High School’s EAST class during that time found the 19 students working at 17 networked computers, conferring with each other, waving documents in the air, tracing contour lines on maps, printing posters and creating power-point and DVD presentations. They used GIS software to interpret data that they gathered in the field using GPS equipment. Science teachers Fenenga and Merz, provide guidance, but there are no lectures or note taking for quizzes and tests. This is the students’ own class and everything is “hands-on” work, with the students helping each other.
    When the students used this technology to connect the sites, they observed that many points were on an elevation contour of about 480 to 500 feet, but at some points in between, the elevation varied greatly. They recently explained, “Until we got a 1905 contour map of the area from the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, and we could see how much the original contour had been altered by construction, we couldn’t really see how the water could have flowed from the dam to the mission. But when we saw the original contours, the path of the aqueduct became clear.” The students located the dam site and several areas of exposed aqueduct by correlating their data with archeological facts, topographic maps, historic research and dialogue with archaeologists and local experts. They traced the probable aqueduct route along the historic 480-foot elevation contour and found where the aqueduct crossed-Highway 246 on its way to the lavenderia at Old Mission Santa Inés, thus solving a 200-year-old mystery. They were also able to chart the route of the water to the fulling and gristmills and on to irrigate the Mission fields.
    The extent of the technical expertise of these young people is amazing. Erica Valdez and Tyler Eubanks photographed and cataloged the located sites. Marcos Veldanes, Jason Lambert, and Erik Glendinning engineered an impressive three-dimensional Styrofoam scale model of the aqueduct’s path while Mikey Carlson made a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model which was then animated by Ian Blumenthal, Peter Oliver, Caleb Manchester and Nate Breen. PowerPoint presentations are the specialty of Jessie Gavlak, Breanna Schlags Erin Gnekow and Daniel Schley.
    Adrian Everts is the “Poster Person” and he and Breanna Schlags have created a handout for fourth grade classes. “It will help the teachers by adding depth to the standard Mission teaching unit.” says Breanna.
    Phil Hauck, using a $6,000 Casablanca System, is creating a very sophisticated, professional video that is being fleshed out by Emily Garland and Daniel Schley, who are gathering data and setting up interviews with Chumash tribal elders and local experts.
All of these parts were consolidated and presented in February at the California Missions Studies Conference in San Luis Obispo, as well as at the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. Each year an Eastern and a Western EAST conference are held.      This March, students from 65 schools in California and Hawaii took their projects to Sacramento to meet with other students, present their projects and vie for awards.
Representatives from colleges and businesses also had an opportunity to introduce themselves to the students. This year, the Santa Ynez Valley High School EAST project won the “Outstanding Project” award, the top award given. They were also the first class ever to win the “Founders Award,” which was created to honor the original intent of the EAST program. Their report has also been accepted for publication by the Pacific Coast Archaeology Quarterly and it has been nominated by the Chair of the UCSB Anthropology Department for a 2004 “Governor’s Historic Preservation Award.”
     Even the social interaction aspect has been invaluable for these students. Jessie Gavlak said, “I became a different person after last year’s conference. Before, I wouldn’t even talk to anyone, but being at the conference changed me more than I can tell you.”
    Also critical for the success of the program is its heavy emphasis on community involvement: presentations to local groups, assistance with technical projects, interaction to obtain data for projects and the sharing of information with other schools.
    The EAST class from the Santa Ynez Valley High School has been invited to present work, models and animations as a part of the lecture series celebrating the Two Hundreth Anniversary of Old Mission Santa Inés in 2004. On Sunday, April 25, at 7 p.m. at the mission, the class will present “A History of the Mission Water Systems” together with Anthropologist Jeremy Hass. The classes work will also be cataloged and will become part of the Mission’s permanent archives under curator Bill Warwick.
At the beginning of this article we asked, “What do the Old Mission Santa Inés, a boatload of pirates, a fulling mill, Joseph Chapman, and 19 Santa Ynez Valley High School “Pirates” have in common?” The answer is “water.”
    The Mission needed water for washing, tanning, weaving and irrigating their fields so they built an aqueduct to carry water to the Mission. The band of pirates came in boats by water to rob travelers and one of them, Joseph Chapman, came to the Santa Ynez Valley and built a fulling mill, run by water. His “Pirate” title was bequeathed to the Santa Ynez Valley High School.
    A crew of “Pirates,” the EAST class at the High School, used technology to chart the path of water to the Mission via the aqueduct, thus rewriting California history to show that our mission had an industrial complex that predates Gold Rush technology by close to thirty years.
    “Last year was the first year of our EAST program,” said Mr. Fenenga. “It was funded for just two years, and included on our curriculum as an elective class. As a result of the great work done by our students these past two years, we have been able to obtain new funding that will allow us to continue to offer the class. It will also be accepted by UCSB for credit as a lab science, which is very exciting, and we will be able to offer it to more students.
    The accomplishment of the students these first two years was not only completing two impressive projects—they have also ensured that the EAST program will continue to provide other Santa Ynez High School students a wonderful educational
opportunity.”