Even in an imperfect world, a few things are best left alone.
The Castro-Breen Adobe in San Juan Bautista is one of them.
The state Department of Parks and Recreation should listen to
the outcry from the San Juan Bautista City Council and the
descendants of John Breen, who purchased the family home with a
fortune dug from California’s gold fields.
Even in an imperfect world, a few things are best left alone. The Castro-Breen Adobe in San Juan Bautista is one of them.
The state Department of Parks and Recreation should listen to the outcry from the San Juan Bautista City Council and the descendants of John Breen, who purchased the family home with a fortune dug from California’s gold fields.
The Parks Department’s plans to fill the building with $1.8 million worth of interactive exhibits represents the kind of high-tech meddling best left to more appropriate venues, not the historic home of one of California’s founding families.
The building is now filled with the furniture and trappings of daily life in the latter half of the 19th Century. A stroll through its small rooms reveals glimpses of a bygone reality that cannot be improved through application of misguided technology.
The Castro-Breen Adobe is unique for its setting, located as it is among several historic structures linked to Mission San Juan Bautista. Founded in 1797, Mission San Juan is the largest of California’s 21 missions. It remains an active Roman Catholic parish. The mission and its associated buildings remain part of the daily life of their community, a vital historic bridge to the present.
The mission plaza and the buildings surrounding it also are the destination of thousands of fourth-graders annually. Students studying California history visit San Juan for the opportunity to touch the past they study.
What greets them when they arrive is real in a way that technology cannot duplicate. They can enter the tiny cells where mission padres lived, search for animal tracks in the adobe tiles of the church floor, gaze at the coaches parked in the livery stable, and in the process, learn about life in California when it was an outpost at the edge of a large, lonely planet.
They also see a place of many paradoxes, a bastion of colonialism, religious faith, courage and determination that has adapted enough to survive, but retained enough of itself to preserve its historic integrity.
Would their experience be improved, or their learning enhanced through installation of push-button history displays? We think not.
The Castro-Breen Adobe, like the rest of San Juan State Historic Park, is as real as it needs to be.
