What to See in San Juan Bautista - Top Sights and Attractions

Picturesque mission church with mass. Mission San Juan Bautista is a Spanish mission in San Juan Bautista, San Benito County, California. Founded on June 24, 1797 by Fermín Lasuén of the Franciscan order, the mission was the fifteenth of the Spanish missions established in present-day California. Named for Saint John the Baptist, the mission is the namesake of the city of San Juan Bautista.

Barracks for the soldiers, a nunnery, the Jose Castro House, and other buildings were constructed around a large grassy plaza in front of the church and can be seen today in their original form. The Ohlone, the original residents of the valley, were brought to live at the mission and baptized, followed by Yokuts from the Central Valley. Mission San Juan Bautista has served mass daily since 1797, and today functions as a parish church of the Diocese of Monterey.^[1]

The Benjamin Wilcox House, at 315 The Alameda in San Juan Bautista, California, was built in 1858. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

It was designed by local builder George Chalmers in Gothic Revival style. It is a clapboarded balloon-frame L-shaped house built with redwood floor joists and sawn redwood studs. It has split pillars with Tuscan-order capitals, somehow involving fleur-de-lis.

Its National Register nomination describes its significance as follows:

The Benjamin Wilcox House was built to plans drawn by local builder George Chalmers, with construction carried out by Chalmers, aided by Wilcox's sons Edward and Sylvester and by his grandson Joseph (son of Sylvester). Wilcox's sons were local carpenters. Wilcox had been born in 1796 in New York City. He and his family joined the goldseekers in California, finally settling on San Justo Rancho in the early 1850s. When the Rancho was sold in 1855, Wilcox purchased approximately ten acres of land from General José Castro, and erected this house on the west side of the Alameda (which is the route of El Camino Real). In the context of San Juan Bautista, where architectural styles run the gamut from the Spanish period Mission, through Mexican period adobes, through most of the major nineteenth century eclectic revival styles, to the styles of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Wilcox House is the only Gothic Revival Style structure. As the sole representative of this style in the local context, this structure occupies an important niche in portraying the stylistic development of the built environment. Integrity of location, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association are relatively intact, integrity of design has been compromised to a small degree by the alterations previously described in Item 7, while integrity of setting has been compromised by land-use changes and location of nearby State Highway 156 expressway. The house has a peripheral relation to the Gold Rush, which drew Benjamin Wilcox to California where, like most, he found his livelihood far from the gold fields (criterion A). Its main significance lies, however, in its architectural qualities: it represents a type (Gothic Revival Style), period (mid-nineteenth century, specifically the late 1850s), and method of construction (balloon frame on heavy timber floor joists, all on stone foundation, indicative of a carryover of traditional building methods), and may be considered the work of a local master (Chalmers was responsible for at least one other house in San Juan Bautista, and the level of detail present in both houses reveals a keen awareness of style development).^[7]