Mission San Rafael Arcángel
Near San Francisco, California
Mission San Rafael Arcángel began not as a full mission but as a hospital. Founded on December fourteenth, eighteen seventeen, it was established as an asistencia of Mission Dolores in San Francisco, where Indigenous people were dying in large numbers from the damp fog and the crowded conditions of the peninsula. Spanish missionaries chose the warmer, drier hills north of the bay and named the station after the Archangel Raphael, patron of healing.
Within a year, nearly three hundred Indigenous people had come to the new station from San Francisco and from surrounding Marin villages. By eighteen twenty-two, the asistencia was doing so well that Spanish authorities elevated it to a full mission, making it the twentieth in the California chain. The mission's original buildings did not survive secularization, the Gold Rush, and decades of neglect.
The current chapel is a reconstruction completed in nineteen forty-nine, built near the site of the original.
