KAREN'S GALLERY (est. 2005)

El Camino Real (King's Highway) Mission Bells. Monterey (see description)

El Camino Real (King's Highway) Mission Bells. Monterey
Wikipedia - Between 1683 and 1834, Spanish missionaries established a series of religious outposts throughout the present-day California and the present-day Baja California and Baja California Sur, stretching for 600 miles from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego in the south to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma in the north.

To facilitate overland travel, mission settlements were approximately 30 miles (48 kilometers) apart, so that they were separated by one long day's ride on horseback along the 600-mile (966-kilometer) long El Camino Real (Spanish for "The Royal Highway").

El Camino Real was often referred to in the later embellished English translation as "The King's Highway", and also known as the California Mission Trail. Heavy freight movement was practical only via water and it was basically a horse and mule trail till about 1920. Tradition has it that the padres sprinkled mustard seeds along the trail in order to mark it with bright yellow flowers.

In 1892, Anna Pitcher of Pasadena, California initiated an effort to preserve the route of Alta California’s Camino Real. Given the lack of standardized road signs at the time, it was decided to place distinctive bells along the route, hung on supports in the form of an 11-foot (3.4 m) high shepherd's crook, also described as "a Franciscan walking stick." The first of 450 bells were unveiled on August 15, 1906 at the Plaza Church in the Pueblo near Olvera Street in Los Angeles.

For over 100 years the company that made the original bells and the replacements is still in existence today and continues to maintain the bells.

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