Mission San Rafael Arcángel

Why Go

A Mission Founded as a Hospital

Pilgrims come here for two reasons. The first is that the Camino de San Francisco begins at this door, and the passport is bought and first stamped inside. The second is older and quieter: this mission exists because people were dying at Mission Dolores.

San Rafael was founded in 1817 not as an outpost but as an infirmary. The sick of the San Francisco mission were brought north across the bay to drier, sunnier country, and the place was named for Raphael, the archangel Catholics have long invoked for healing and for safe journeys. Both meanings are useful to a pilgrim who is about to walk twenty-four miles.

Seventeen Years, Then Ruin, Then a Replica

Father Vicente de Sarría founded the asistencia on 14 December 1817, under the care of Father Luis Gil, a friar with some medical training. It was raised to full mission status on 19 October 1822, the twentieth of the twenty-one Alta California missions. It functioned as a mission for only seventeen years.

The buildings, orchards, fields and herds were the work of Coast Miwok people, whose country this was long before the Franciscans arrived. They built, farmed, adapted, left, returned and endured epidemics under a colonial system that pressed them toward settlement and conversion, and their descendants are present in Marin and Sonoma today as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. The mission's own parish records the numbers plainly: 1,873 baptisms in seventeen years.

After Mexican secularization in 1834 the mission emptied. By 1844 it stood abandoned, and John C. Frémont used it as a headquarters during the Bear Flag Revolt. A parish church was raised beside the ruins in 1861, and in 1870 what remained of the mission was cleared away for the growing town. One pear tree from the mission orchard survived. In 1949 Monsignor Thomas Kennedy and a group of supporters built the white chapel that stands here now, on the original site.

Two buildings share the frontage, and confusing them is the commonest mistake made here. The larger pink church, with the bronze archangel in a niche above its door, is the parish church of St. Raphael, dating from 1919. The smaller white building to its right, with the star window and the wall of three bells, is the 1949 reconstruction of the mission chapel. It reproduces the form of the mission church; it is not the building of 1817, and no part of the original mission survives above ground.