San Fernando Mission: Founded Seventeen Ninety-Seven

San Fernando Rey de Espana was founded on September eighth, seventeen ninety-seven, by Father Fermin Francisco Lasuen, who was at the time the president of all the California missions. It was the seventeenth in the chain of twenty-one Franciscan missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma. The mission became one of the most productive in Alta California, with thousands of cattle, horses, and sheep grazing the surrounding valley, and thousands of Tongva and Chumash people drawn into its labor system, by force and by conversion.

The mission was secularized in eighteen thirty-four under Mexican rule, fell into ruin, and was partially restored in the twentieth century. It remains an active Roman Catholic parish. The building you see today is a reconstruction, but the site itself is original, and the history embedded in this ground runs from the Spanish colonial era through Mexican California and into the present.