Santa Gertrudis Asistencia
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Santa Gertrudis Asistencia, also known as the Santa Gertrudis Chapel, was an asistencia ("sub-mission") to the Mission San Buenaventura, part of the system of Spanish missions in Las Californias—Alta California. Built at an unknown date between 1792 and 1809, it was located approximately five miles from the main mission, inland and upstream along the Ventura River. The site was buried in 1968 by the construction of California State Route 33. Prior to the freeway's construction, archaeologists excavated and studied the site. A number of foundation stones were moved and used to create the Santa Gertrudis Asistencia Monument which was designated in 1970 as Ventura County Historic Landmark No. 11.
History
The Santa Gertrudis Asistencia was established as an asistencia or "sub-mission" of the Mission San Buenaventura, ministering to the Chumash people in the Ventura River valley where substantial agricultural activities were conducted. The precise date of its creation is not known, though historians place its establishment during the time when the second church was being built at the main Mission, somewhere between 1792 and 1809. The asistencia was named after Gertrude the Great, a 13th-century German Benedictine, mystic, and theologian who was canonized in 1677.
The asistencia was built along the route of El Camino Real, a historical trail that linked California's Spanish missions.
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This entry incorporates text from “Santa Gertrudis Asistencia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.