Most of Mission Santa Cruz is gone. On Mission Hill, a single-story adobe remains: the only surviving building of the 12th California mission, which Franciscans founded in 1791. California State Parks restored it to its original look, and it is the centerpiece of Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park, which also has a patio, gardens and views over the city.

A home, not a church

The adobe was built in the early 1800s. Wikipedia dates it to 1822-1824 and calls it the oldest surviving structure in Santa Cruz County. Archaeological digs in the 1980s showed it was housing for Indigenous families. State Parks says it is the only example of its kind still standing in California.

The seven rooms now tell the story of the Ohlone and Yokuts people at the mission, with exhibits and a wall-sized film projection. They also cover Ohlone life before European contact, the excavations, and the Rodriguez and Neary families who later lived in the building. Visitors can take a guided tour or walk through on their own.

How the park tells the story

State Parks says that for California Native Americans, the mission is a place of great loss and trauma, marked by forced labor, harsh punishment and deadly disease. The mission was built on the traditional lands of the Uypi people, ancestors of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and the exhibits have been updated in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun. The park also runs an online exhibit on the changing meaning of California mission bells.

The mission's history

Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, who succeeded Junípero Serra, founded the mission on Aug. 28, 1791, near the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. That first winter the river flooded the site, so the padres moved the mission up the hill. Wikipedia recounts that in 1812 mission neophytes killed Father Andrés Quintana, angry over his use of a metal-tipped whip on laborers. The 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake destroyed the church's front wall.

In 1889 the Gothic Revival Holy Cross Church was built on the site of the original mission church, and it remains an active parish. In the 1930s, Gladys Sullivan Doyle paid for a reduced-scale replica chapel on the condition that she could be buried inside it. With no photos of the original to work from, the design was based on an 1876 painting by Léon Trousset, which now hangs in the chapel's nave.

The surviving adobe is at 144 School Street.