City Moves to Protect Its History

Ventura city officials rushed this week to boost protections for historically significant structures in the wake of the unexpected demolition of a portion of one of the county’s oldest structures.

Builders of a west Ventura house last month leveled a 20-foot section of an aqueduct built by the Chumash to bring water to the San Buenaventura Mission, city officials said.

“We want to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again,” said Barbara Fosbrink, a city employee who heads a task force to look into the mission aqueduct demolition.

The demolition came less than a month after the Ventura County Board of Supervisors petitioned the State Historic Resources Commission to designate another portion of the aqueduct a state historical landmark. That portion is on county property along Canada Larga Road east of Foster Park.

“This is exactly the sort of thing that the Cultural Heritage Board is trying to avoid at Canada Larga,” said David Mason, president of the Ventura County Cultural Heritage Board, which had recommended landmark status.

City officials last week ordered a halt to grading at the construction site, between Cedar and Wall streets, until the damage could be assessed by an archeologist.

Monica Nolan, administrative assistant for the city’s Historic Preservation Commission, said city officials were powerless to penalize the property’s owners because they had extracted only “a gentleman’s agreement” to preserve the aqueduct. That segment had not specifically been declared a landmark.

But city officials expressed optimism that an ordinance passed Monday by the Ventura City Council would prevent such losses in the future. The ordinance requires owners planning to subdivide, grade or build on property with known historical or archeological significance to appear before the city’s Environmental Review Committee.

The committee could veto the plans or require owners to take steps to reduce the impact of development. Failure to do so could be a misdemeanor, punishable by a $1,000 fine or six months in jail. In the past, only owners of designated landmarks have come under such scrutiny.

The steps were of little consolation to scholars familiar with the cobblestone-and-mortar structure that once carried water along a seven-mile course from a dam near the confluence of San Antonio Creek and the Ventura River.

“The city really should be protecting these resources,” said Santa Paula historian Judith Triem. “People have never been able to figure out how the water system works, and a lot of people would like to know.”

Archeological Clues

Robert Lopez, an archeology professor at Moorpark College, who alerted the city to the existence of the Cedar Street section, said the Cedar Street piece “looked quite complex.” He said it may even have contained a lock that would have given archeologists clues to some of the water’s uses in old San Buenaventura.

“We didn’t even get a chance to study this,” he said.

The owners, who the city identified as Ron Smith and Jack Tracey of Ventura, could not be reached for comment.

But Nolan said they may not have been warned of the ruin’s historical value when they bought the property, which was dominated by the 3-foot-high, 20-foot-long structure. They had also complained that a request by the city to alter their building plans to protect the aqueduct proved “too expensive,” she said.

The application for state historical status describes the waterway that ran beside what is now California 33 as “among the most interesting landmarks on the Pacific Coast left to us as a legacy of the California mission system.”

The aqueduct, one of nine in California, is considered a remarkable scientific achievement because it was built with few tools by Chumash Indians, probably under the direction of stonemasons brought from Mexico.

Survey Difficult

When engineers built the highway in the late 1960s, they commented that merely surveying the aqueduct’s course, which had to descend at a constant slope, would prove difficult today because the line of sight along the Ventura River Valley is obstructed by slopes and dense vegetation, said Robert O. Browne, curator of the Ojai Valley Museum.

Some archeologists have speculated that the covered 100-foot-long, 7-foot-high Canada Larga section may have served as a siphon, drawing water uphill in a sophisticated engineering feat.

“It’s an incredible feat when you think it was built nearly 200 years ago,” said Mason of the Cultural Heritage Board.

But the aqueduct is more than a monument to engineering. Some historians say it sparked the transformation of the Chumash from hunters and gatherers to farmers by introducing a dependable water supply for agricultural use.

“When the Spanish missionaries came with the technology of irrigation,” Browne wrote, “it can be seen why it was accepted by the natives of the area surrounding the mission. It was when the shift from hunting, fishing and gathering to a centralized community . . . took place that the real impact of the Spanish water control system is seen.”

Historians believe that the aqueduct, like the mission itself, was inspired by the ancient Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, whose “Ten Books on Architecture” was found in a 1787 Spanish translation at the Santa Barbara Mission.

Stone Ditches

The system, which consisted of a series of stone ditches punctuated by elevated gutters, served as a wellspring for the activities of San Buenaventura missionaries.

It supplied a filtration tank, two reservoirs, several fountains, public troughs for washing clothes--or lavanderias --and a network of irrigation ditches that nourished orchards, a vineyard and a four-block garden that was reputed to be the finest in the string of missions along the California coast.

Clay pipes carried aqueduct water to at least one other chapel on what is now East Thompson Boulevard, and water is believed to have been diverted to another chapel north of the city along today’s California 33. Excess water poured into the lagoon where the Ventura River meets the Pacific Ocean.

The aqueduct fell into disuse after a flood in the 1860s, but the mission waterworks hardly faded from view. The city continued for many years to get its water from a wooden flume built to replace it. Ventura Avenue is believed to have been laid out along the aqueduct’s alignment. And the filtration tank that it fed later became Ventura’s first jail.

Today, the filter, one reservoir and sections of clay pipe have been preserved at the San Buenaventura Mission and the Albinger Museum.

Yet for all the attention that the mission waterway receives, little is known of its precise course, where it started or even when it was built.

Aqueduct’s Mysteries

Early historians have said construction began as soon as Father Junipero Serra founded the mission in 1782. But later historians have placed its construction between 1805 and 1815, just after the arrival of Mexican stonemasons at California missions.

The aqueduct’s origin is no less mysterious. No remnants of a dam have been found, although one was believed to have been built on San Antonio Creek near what is now the Arnaz cider stand on California 33.

Historians have pieced together portions of the waterway’s route from a handful of aqueduct remnants, including a partially covered cobblestone channel east of Ventura Avenue between Vince and Lewis streets. City officials also suspect that property north of the Cedar Street plot may contain sections.

The Canada Larga section was listed 14 years ago on the National Register of Historic Places. The following year, it was made a county landmark.

The county’s Cultural Heritage Board had meant to petition earlier for state historical status, which is more prestigious and difficult to obtain than the other designations, but did not realize that it had not until this year, said Katherine E. Garner, the board’s administrative assistant.

The Cedar Street section appears to have slipped through broader cracks.

Roberta S. Greenwood, an archeologist who directed a study of the aqueduct in 1967, said Tuesday that she was under the impression that the entire aqueduct--not merely the Canada Large section--is protected by landmark designations.

Goes Undetected

If that were so, the computer used by Ventura city staff didn’t indicate as much when Smith and Tracey submitted their building plans in mid-December. City officials approved the plans without suspecting that the property included a structure of archeological significance, said Fosbrink, assistant to City Manager John Baker, who is head of the aqueduct task force.

They only found out about the Cedar Street portion when Lopez, who was studying the aqueduct, told them about it a few weeks after building plans had been approved. The city’s Environmental Review Committee reviewed the plans in January but felt powerless to demand anything more than an informal agreement to build around the structure because of the city’s prior approval, she said.

City officials also saw that if they challenged the owners, they would be on shaky ground because city ordinances at that time only offered protections to designated landmarks, she said.

The ordinance passed this week is supposed to close that loophole. As an additional protection, city officials plan to computerize all known historical sites--not just landmarks as in the past--so that officials know to treat them differently.

“It’s a tragic loss,” said Nolan of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.

“But if its loss means that we’ve come up with a new, tighter method of seeing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the future, maybe something good can come of this.”