Getty Museum

[San Miguel Mission]

Creator

American Photographer · 1829–1916

AmbrotypistPublisherArtist

At twenty, Carleton Watkins headed out to California to make his fortune. After working as a daguerreotype operator in San Jose, he established his own practice and soon made his first visit to the Yosemite Valley. There he made thirty mammoth plate and one hundred stereograph views that were among the first photographs of Yosemite seen in the East. Partly on the strength of Watkins's photographs,

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Date: about 1876–1880
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Forced to rent out space for commercial use, the formerly religious adobe of Mission San Miguel housed the Howe Sewing Machine Agency and a tavern alongside the church itself. The deserted building reflects the condition of most of the California missions, abandoned by the Spanish government in 1810. Established in 1776, the Franciscan mission system involved a network of twenty-one sanctuaries stretching from north to south along *El Camino Real* (the Royal Road). After a series of political conflicts that resulted in the territory known as New Spain seceding from Spain, the mission system began to disintegrate. By the 1870s, when this picture was taken, the mission complexes were the property of secular administrations that had commandeered the buildings, leaving only the actual sanctuary under church control.

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