Tumacacori: The Mission That Was Never Finished

The crumbling adobe church you can glimpse from the highway began as one of the first missions in what is now Arizona. In January of sixteen ninety-one, Jesuit Father Eusebio Kino visited the O'odham village of Tumacacori and established a mission he named San Cayetano. After the O'odham rebellion of seventeen fifty-one, the mission was rebuilt on the west bank of the Santa Cruz River and rededicated as San Jose de Tumacacori.

Around eighteen hundred, the Franciscans who had replaced the expelled Jesuits started work on the large domed church still standing today. But funding dried up, Apache raids intensified, and construction was never completed. By eighteen forty-eight, the remaining community fled, leaving the half-finished church to the Sonoran winters.

President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument in nineteen oh eight, and it is now Tumacacori National Historical Park, one of the oldest mission sites on American soil.