For more than sixty years, Espada Mission's plaza was a busy place of learning in faith and works, language and traditions, where mission Indians practiced hymns, prayers, and doctrines while learning to grow crops, raise cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, work iron, produce textiles, make bricks, and build with masonry. Franciscan brothers, driven by powerful zeal, sought to teach the Coahuiltecans to work and worship as Europeans did, which in the Spanish mind was required for Indians to become productive servants of God and loyal subjects of the King of Spain. After the mission was secularized in 1824, a circular bastion was added, and intense fighting took place there in 1835 during the Texas Revolution. Espada was the only mission in San Antonio with a well-developed brick industry, and in 1772 its kilns fired 10,000 bricks, enough that a thatched-roof shed 58 feet long was built to shelter them. Rooms at the mission later served as part of a parochial school between the late 1800s and the 1960s, and now house museum exhibits, while learning remains an active legacy there with a Head Start kindergarten south of the historic complex.