Park Ranger Parish Rye
The locations where the first English immigrants settled on the east coast of North America are a big deal in Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts. But the site where the first Europeans settled on the west coast of North America gets no respect. Anyone who goes on the San Diego Insider Tours Time Travel Adventure gets to visit that historic spot, but otherwise it’s not so easy to experience it. That’s even truer now that budgetary constraints have forced the the San Diego Historical Society to suspend regular visiting hours at its Junipero Serra Museum, located just up the hill in Presidio Park from where Fr. Junipero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcala almost 240 years ago (on July 16, 1769).
Lots of people mistakenly assume that the museum originally housed that first California mission. In fact, it was designed by architect William Templeton Johnson in Mission Revival style and built in 1929, a gift to the city from local philanthropist George Marston. All the original settlement buildings disappeared long ago, after the site was abandoned in 1830. The ruins have been excavated at various times by several archeological teams, but the dig sites have always been buried to preserve them.
To appreciate the importance of this place, it thus takes a knowledgeable guide — like San Diego Park Ranger Parish Rye. Once a month, Rye gives a free hour-long tour of the original settlement. I was the only one who showed up for last month’s offering. But even for an audience of one, Rye deftly conjured up what life was like when several hundred people made their home on this hillside overlooking the San Diego River. Although the earliest missionaries left the site just 5 years after arriving and moved upriver to better land and a more predictable water source, the soldiers of the presidio (the fort) remained. Eventually the Spanish government permitted wives and children to join them. Rye can point out where the unmarried soldiers quarters were, the foundation of the dwelling inhabited by governor Gaspar de Portolá (He lived on the site now marked by a tall cross built from some of the settlement’s original adobe bricks), and a lot more.
Presidio Park is also an important botanical repository, and Rye knows a lot about what it includes. He’s been working to compile a comprehensive plant index for several years. His next free tour will be given this coming Sunday at 1 p.m. Find him near the museum doors.
