Mission Santa Barbara: The Queen Who Was Also a Prison

Mission Santa Barbara was founded on December fourth, seventeen eighty-six, by Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. The name it acquired over the following centuries, the Queen of the Missions, refers to the setting, the twin-towered facade, the relative architectural completeness, and the continuity: Mission Santa Barbara is the only California mission to have been operated continuously by the Franciscans from its founding to the present day. That continuity has given the mission a particular relationship to its own narrative.

The Chumash people who were brought into the mission system at Santa Barbara encountered what all the missions offered: baptism, labor, confinement, and exposure to diseases against which they had no immunity. A diphtheria epidemic between eighteen hundred and eighteen oh-two killed roughly fifteen percent of the mission's population. A measles epidemic in eighteen oh-six, the first measles the Chumash had encountered, struck with a force that the mission records document in rows of deaths. The Chumash population across the mission region fell from an estimated tens of thousands at contact to a few thousand by the secularization era of the eighteen thirties.

In eighteen twenty-four, the revolt that began at Mission Santa Inés reached here. Approximately four hundred armed Chumash fighters engaged the presidio's soldiers in a battle on the mission grounds that lasted three hours. The Chumash held their position and then chose to withdraw into the hills above the city rather than wait for a larger military response. This was not a defeat. It was a strategic retreat by people who had just demonstrated they could hold the mission against the military and had decided that holding it permanently was not worth the casualties that would follow.

The building is genuinely beautiful. The twin towers are visible from most of Santa Barbara. The garden is well-maintained. Mass has been celebrated here for nearly two hundred and forty years without interruption. What happened inside the walls over those centuries, the epidemics, the labor, the confinement, the revolt, is also part of what the building contains. The setting and the history are both real. Neither cancels the other.