Mission Dam Traditional Cache
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You can look but not enter this historically significant landmark guarded by the Sunnyslope Water Co. Bring your own pencil and no stickers please.
The "Mission Dam" was built 1821-1822 and provided water to support the San Gabriel Mission located 2.5 miles S-SW from here. It helped to establish early agriculture with vinyards and citrus as well as water supplied to operate the fulling mill (a process used to soften woolen fibers) no longer standing but formally located just south of the San Gabrial Mission bell towers where the railroad now runs through.
Joseph Chapman (Jose El Ingles) was an American carpenter and blacksmith from Maine. He was impressed into service by Captain Bouchard in the Sandwich Islands and participated in the attack on California and was taken prisioner in Monterey. This "reluctant pirate" was imprisoned and later freed. In order to work off his debt to society, he was commissioned to build a fulling mill at Mission Santa Ines, the ruins of which still stand. He oversaw the building of a grist mill for Mission San Gabriel (to replace "the old mill" located in San Marino and now a museum), and prepared timbers for construction of the first church in Los Angeles.
He did not actually build this dam but may have played a significant role in it's construction. Chapman was a clever fellow and gifted at anything mechanical. Contributions that he may have made have recently been revealed by the use of GIS/GPS technology. Students at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School, through the use of GPS have discovered and mapped sections of an underground aqueduct, believed to be used to transport water from a dam situated 5100 ft. northeast of Mission Santa Ines. California history has the potential to be rewritten if schollars agree with the findings. If this is true, the fulling mill built by Chapman at Mission Santa Ines predated the first industrial application on the West Coast of the United States by 25 years.
In 1824 Joseph Chapman bought land in Los Angeles and developed a vinyard that may have been supplied with water from this dam, but still continued to do odd jobs for the missions, being a jack-of-all-trades who apparently could make or repair anything that was needed. Chapman was a favorite among the friars. He became a naturalized citizen and a grantee of the San Pedro Rancho. The historian Hugh Bancroft says of him "among all the early pioneers of California there was no more attractive a charactor, no more popular and useful man, than Joseph Chapman the Yankee." The "reluctant pirate" died in 1848.
Placed with Permission.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Whfg Unatvat