Their <i> Forte </i> Is Rebuilding Ancestors’ Fort : History: Descendants of the soldiers who founded Santa Barbara are among those reconstructing the original buildings in the city’s downtown area.

Leroy Villa, 79, and Mike Acosta, 71, are doing the same job at the same place their ancestors eight generations ago did in the 1780s.

They’re building a fort.

Villa is a descendant of Vincente Villa, and Acosta, of Ildefonso Dominguez, two of the 55 soldiers who came here with their wives and children from Mexico in April, 1782. Their arrival marked the beginning of Santa Barbara.

The soldiers constructed a large fortress behind two 11-foot-high defense walls. With the help of Chumash Indians, they fashioned their quarters, barracks, offices, shops and storage areas out of adobe bricks.

Now, 208 years later, the old fort, nearly all of it destroyed by earthquakes or replaced by other structures over the years, is being rebuilt to reflect its original design. With the help of hundreds of community volunteers and the California Conservation Corps, El Presidio de Santa Barbara is rising again, slowly and methodically on its original site.

Although the project has been ongoing for 27 years in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara, the fort is only about one-fourth finished. It is estimated that it will take at least 10 more years before it is completed.

For the young men and women in the California Conservation Corps, the Presidio has been a unique undertaking. “Over 2,000 members of the CCC have worked on the fort over the years making adobe bricks, building the chapel, doing archeological work. The Presidio is their legacy, too,” CCC District Director Nacho Pina said.

Some of the community volunteers, such as Villa and Acosta, belong to Los Descendientes, a 250-member organization of descendants of those 55 soldiers who founded Santa Barbara.

“We are making adobe bricks to help build the fort just as our ancestors did way back in the 1780s,” Los Descendientes member Villa said. “It is something I really feel good about, something that gives me a direct link to the person responsible for my being here today, a soldier named Vicente Villa.”

Acosta, a retired truck driver who serves as a guide at El Presidio de Santa Barbara, said whenever he tells visitors he is a descendant of one of Santa Barbara’s founders “it really comes as a shock most of the time. People don’t realize that many of the original families are still around.

“There are several thousand descendants of Spanish soldiers living in the Santa Barbara area. You go back far enough and you will find we’re all related, all intermarried, all cousins.”

El Presidio de Santa Barbara is where Spanish and Mexican commandants once governed the pueblos of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara, as well as the largest concentration of Indians in California.

Although it is a state historic park, the State Department of Parks and Recreation does not operate the old Spanish fort. There are no state park rangers assigned here, just volunteers such as Acosta and the staff of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, a group begun in 1963 to see the fort rebuilt.

At the time, only two small adobe buildings of the original fort existed, a guard house, built in 1788, and a soldier’s home. Since then, one row of buildings in the most prominent part of the fort and Santa Barbara’s first church, the Presidio Chapel, have been reconstructed.

Responsible for the reconstruction and interpretation of this unique historic site for the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Santa Barbara trust is supported by members’ dues and gifts from individuals and companies.

Through the years, the trust has maintained close ties with UC Santa Barbara. UCSB students have participated in archeological work, research and translating Spanish records into English--records that are scattered all over Mexico and Spain.

The interior design of the Presidio Chapel by art historian Norman Neuerburg, for instance, is based on exhaustive documentary research. The chapel is now a favorite community gathering place for weddings, lectures, conferences, concerts, recitals and plays, including the annual re-creation of the century-old “Una Pastorela” (“A Shepherd’s Play”) each Christmas season. Historical displays are also featured at the Presidio. Schoolchildren from throughout the area take tours of the completed portions of the fort as well as the parts under construction.

“Everybody knows about the Santa Barbara mission--started four years after and a mile north of the Presidio--but it’s surprising, most Californians are unaware that the only old Spanish fort being reconstructed and restored in the state is located in downtown Santa Barbara,” said Jarrell C. Jackman, 46, director of the trust for 10 years.