Thursday's Mission Dolores: Part I

Mission Dolores

The Declaration of Independence was signed in1776, establishing the United States of America.

Every school kid knows that.

But what most don't know is that same year, and across the continent, San Francisco as we know it was established just three months later.

Misión San Francisco de Asís was established on October 9th, 1776, and is where San Francisco got its name. Yet it was actually named for the nearby Arroyo de los Dolores ("Creek of Sorrows"), or simply Mission Dolores. It was an integral part of the 21 Missions the Spanish established along the Pacific coast and designed so each mission was only one day's horse ride apart.

When the Spanish arrived, they built two buildings: a military fort (the Presidio) and a church, thus establishing the predominant institutions in Spanish colonial society. The San Francisco the Spanish found wasn't the post card image of the city we know today.

Along the waterfront lay wetlands and marshes. The hills were barren and windswept, but what the area did have was one of the best natural harbors in the world. Soon thereafter the village of Yerba Buena (Good Herb) was established.

Architecturally speaking the original church, which is still standing today, utilized the predominant building materials available to the colonizers - mainly adobe and wood. The beams supporting and buttressing the church are connected not by nails, but through wooden slates fitting into each other. Kind of like a sophisticated version of Lincoln Logs. Remarkably this 18th century technology has stood the test of time well, surviving three major earthquakes and countless floods and fires.

Of course, the Spanish were not the first inhabitants. Several thousand years earlier the native settlers, known as the Ohlone, established villages along the San Francisco Peninsula. When they first encountered the Spanish explorers, they were subjected to the same treatment as all the other indigenous people the Spanish met, oppression and exploitation.

Father Junípero Serra is the ubiquitous name many in the San Francisco Bay Area know. There is no shortage of streets and schools named after him because he was the Franciscan administrator who held the authority of the church. He was even canonized as a saint by Pope Francis on September 23rd, 2015, becoming the first saint canonized on U.S. soil.

Statues and paintings depict him as an avuncular pacifist, but in reality, history had a less than stellar opinion of him. Serra believed that the indigenous people should accept Catholicism as the one true religion, adopt European agriculture to sustain themselves, and live their lives at the missions, “under the bell.”

Franciscans resorted to coercion and physical punishments to force the native Californians to follow Catholic doctrine. They even tried to enslave them, but many of them simply ran away into the interior of the state.

The Mexican War of Independence in 1821 ended Spanish rule in California. Unlike with the Spanish hierarchy, relations were strained between the new Mexican Government and the Franciscans overseeing the California missions. The Mexican Secularization Act of 1833 required the missions to start selling their vast commercial properties. This meant that each mission could only own its church, the rectory, and small plots of land surrounding the church for agriculture. The Mission Dolores sold most of its property in 1836.

During the decades of Mexican rule (1821 to 1848) the secularized missions were no longer the center of the community and had to survive without the tutelage of the Catholic church. Some of the buildings were repurposed into everything from a saloon to a hospital. Many of them fell into disrepair and disregarded as anchors to the community.