Mission San Francisco Solano, the Last Mission
Near Sonoma Sebastopol, California
On the northeast corner of Sonoma Plaza stands the last and northernmost of the twenty one Spanish missions of Alta California. Mission San Francisco Solano was founded in eighteen twenty three, and it holds a strange distinction. It was the only one of the California missions established after Mexico won its independence from Spain.
The others were all Spanish creations. This one was born under the Mexican flag, the product of a young Franciscan friar named Jose Altimira, who pushed north into the Sonoma Valley partly to escape the crowded missions near San Francisco Bay. Soldiers raised a large redwood cross here on the fourth of July, eighteen twenty three, and Father Altimira dedicated the adobe church nearly two years later.
The mission never thrived the way the older ones did. It had fewer converts among the Coast Miwok, Pomo, and Wappo peoples of the valley, and less of the sprawling ranching and industry that made missions farther south rich. In eighteen thirty four, only eleven years after its founding, the Mexican government secularized it and turned it into an ordinary parish church.
The building you see is now the anchor of Sonoma State Historic Park, a survivor of the entire mission chain that stretched all the way south to San Diego.
