Mission San Francisco Solano: The Last Mission and the Secularization Fight
Near Sonoma Sebastopol, California
The building on the edge of this plaza is the last mission the Spanish established in California, and it was not established by the Spanish.
Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma was founded in eighteen twenty-three, two years after Mexican independence ended Spanish rule in California. The mission system that had driven northward from San Diego since seventeen sixty-nine had already been in decline for years by the time Solano was built. The Mexican government was hostile to the power the Franciscan missionaries had accumulated, and plans for secularization, the transfer of mission lands from church control to civilian governance, were already circulating in Mexico City.
Mission Solano was founded anyway, for reasons that had as much to do with geopolitics as with religion. Russian traders had been operating Fort Ross up the coast since eighteen twelve, and Mexican California wanted a military and religious presence at its northern frontier. The mission was as much a territorial marker as a place of worship.
Secularization came in eighteen thirty-four. The mission lands were transferred to Vallejo's military administration, and the Indigenous converts who had built and maintained the mission since its founding were left without land, without legal standing, and without the institutional structure the mission had provided them, however coercively. They had been gathered from their home territories, relocated to the mission grounds, and trained in agricultural and craft labor under the supervision of Franciscan priests. When the missions were secularized, the church departed and the land went to the Californio elite. The people whose labor had built the mission received nothing.
The building standing today is largely a reconstruction from the eighteen forties. The mission building that the Indigenous converts actually built is mostly gone. The reconstruction commemorates the colonial project; the people who did the work are, as usual, not in the exhibit.
