Damage to Bells and Surviving Structure
- When
- December 8, 1812
- Where
- Great Stone Church, Mission San Juan Capistrano
After the earthquake the two largest bells cracked and split, yet the 1850 sketch shows several domes of the stone church survived.
In the aftermath of the 1812 earthquake, the two largest bells cracked and split open. The oldest surviving sketch of the Mission, dating to 1850 and held in the Bancroft Library, shows that the domes above the stone church's transept, along with the main dome and cupola (lantern house) above the sanctuary, survived the 1812 earthquake. The church itself, however, was all but leveled, and its ruins remain a renowned architectural wonder.
Sources
- Mission San Juan Capistrano Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-29
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.