History of the San Jose Mission
Mission San Jose, founded in the late 18th century, is one of a number of missions established by the Spanish in California before it was part of the United States. In the centuries since then, most of the structures built by these early Californians have been destroyed and some of them have been rebuilt. All the while, the area around the mission has witnessed the massive growth of nearby San Francisco Bay region, including the mission's hometown of Fremont and nearby San Jose. Now the mission is a educational and cultural asset of northern California, as well as a functioning Catholic church.
One of Many Missions
The Spanish missions in 18th-century California served a number of purposes, but mainly they were built to help secure Spain's claims to such a remote place, and to introduce Christianity to the local Native America population. The missions also had the unfortunate side effect of introducing new and often deadly diseases to the Indians. Mission San Jose was the 14th such mission to be founded by the Spanish, located east of San Francisco Bay on the route to the San Joaquin Valley. Most of the nearby inhabitants at the time of the founding were Ohlone Indians, a hunting-gathering-fishing people.
Founding and Naming of the Mission
Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuen formally founded Mission San Jose, whose full original name was "La Mision del Gloriosisimo Patriarch San Jose," in June 1797, near the Ohlone village of Orisom. The mission was named in honor of Joseph, the husband of Mary, Jesus' mother. The city of San Jose, California, which was founded about 20 years before the mission, is named for the same saint, but otherwise has no historical connection to the mission.
Early Years of Mission San Jose
The mission flourish in its early years. According to the mission's website, "three years after the founding of Mission San Jose, several hundred Ohlones had come to live at the Mission... Thousands of cattle roamed the mission ranges [and] acres of wheat and other crops were planted and harvested under the direction of the padres." This was in accordance with the stated goals of Spanish missions in California and elsewhere, to refashion the native population's way of life into something more resembling that of the Spanish.
Father Narciso Duran
The adobe brick and redwood timber mission church at Mission San Jose was completed in 1809 under the oversight of Father Narciso Duran, who is probably the best-remembered pastor of the mission. He served in that capacity from 1806 to 1833, including the the tumultuous transition from Spanish rule to an independent Mexico in the years from 1810 to 1821, and was also head of all the missions in California for a number of years after 1824. Duran loved music, and trained an "orchestra of 30 Indian musicians, playing flute, violin, trumpet and drums, which was the wonder of the area," notes CaliforniaMissions.com.
Nineteenth-Century Decline
In the 1830s, the Mexican government secularized all of the missions in California--except for Mission Santa Barbara--and the lands belonging to San Jose were divided for ranches and apparently much of the other property once held by the mission was misappropriated. By the time the United States took possession of California in 1848, only a few buildings remained of the once-prosperous mission. The United States returned those buildings to the Catholic Church in the 1850s, but in 1868, an earthquake leveled the adobe church building. It was replaced by a wooden structure.
Twentieth-Century History
Mission San Jose languished in its diminished condition for most of the 20th century as this part of northern California grew around it, though there were some restoration efforts by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West that established a museum at the site and planted flowers and palm trees. In 1973, residents of the area with an interest in the mission's colorful history formed the nonprofit, nonsectarian Committee for the Restoration of the Mission San Jose. Its decade-long goal would be to restore the mission to its early 19th-century glory as much as possible in modern times.
Rejuventation Beginning in the 1980s
In 1982, work began on restoring the church building, with an emphasis on making it as much like the 1809 structure as possible, a task completed in 1985. More recently, the museum building (formerly the rectory) underwent a seismic retrofitting, to help it withstand future earthquakes. In the future, other rooms that were destroyed in the 1868 quake--between the church and the museum--will also be recreated with an early 1800s appearance.
Tags: Mission Jose, United States, church building, Father Narciso, Father Narciso Duran