It’s everywhere: historic hilltop mansions from the 1920s and 30s with red-tile roofs and wrought iron fixtures and entire housing tracts from the eighties and nineties that echo those elements in mass production. Real Estate offers are replete with “Charming Spanish-Style Townhomes,” and “Stylish and Elegant Spanish-Style Homes.” Courthouses, hospitals, hotels, banks, homes, schools, and even beach bathrooms have been built to showcase California Mission Style and Spanish Colonial Revival, but the history of these architectural styles is not as straightforward as it might seem. In fact, it has about as much of a historical connection with the actual Spanish colonial period as Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty castle has with medieval European history.
“Mission Style” or “Mission Revival” burst onto the scene at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, when San Francisco Architect Arthur Page Brown designed the California pavilion to resemble a sort of fantasy version of a Spanish mission. The pavilion was a hit. A year later, A.J. Forbes, a San Francisco furniture maker, produced the first known piece of mission style furniture: a straight-backed wooden chair made for the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco. The term and the style were further popularized by Joseph P. McHugh, a New York furniture manufacturer, who mass-produced a copy of that fabled chair, and an entire line of “mission” furniture to go with it.
Mission style furniture was the perfect addition to one of the new Mission Style houses that were popping up all over. In California, where a population boom was underway—Los Angeles grew from a population of around 100,000 in 1900, to more than 1.5 million in 1930— houses with terra cotta tile roofs and stucco walls were economical as well as picturesque. Mission revival style soon became synonymous with the California dream.
Another exposition played a role in popularizing Mission Style’s more ornate cousin, Spanish Colonial Revival. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915, in San Diego, was a grand affair, despite the war raging in Europe. It attracted almost 4 million visitors. The official theme of the exposition was a celebration of the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal, but there was another motive—attracting business interests to San Diego, which was now the first US port of call for US ships traveling through the canal.
Balboa Park was created to house the exposition. Architect Bertram Goodhue and his colleague Carleton Winslow designed the California pavilion, and drew their inspiration from Spanish Baroque architecture. The basic material remained stucco and terra cotta, but now it blossomed out with all kinds of flourishes: balconies, courtyards and paradise gardens filled with orange trees and lavish fountains, cast iron railings, domes, bell towers bedecked with decorative plaster, and art tiles that echoed the Moorish designs found throughout Spain but with a distinctly twentieth century arts and crafts vibe.
Soon Spanish Colonial architecture was springing up everywhere, and merging with the more austere Mission Style. Silent era celebrities were photographed reclining on the balconies of their Moorish mansions in the Hollywood Hills, or playing crochet in their private versions of Spanish paradise gardens, fueling the fashion for the new architectural style. The wealthy vacationed at the spectacular Mission Inn, or the towering El Cortez hotel in San Diego.
Real estate moguls used California’s Spanish colonial antecedents to hype their developments. Some, like Harold Ferguson, who subdivided and began developing the La Costa Beach neighborhood in Malibu, built their own “mission ruins” to give their new developments a romantic cache.
That romantic cache was supposed to be rooted in California’s Spanish colonial history, but it owed more to the writings of popular authors. Helen Hunt Jackson’s romance Ramona was written to raise awareness for the plight of California’s indigenous people during the transition period from Mexican territory to US state. It ended up being used to glorify the earlier Spanish colonial period.
Sentimental reflections on the missions, like those in the popular 1905 book Old Missions of California, by George Wharton James also helped bathe the missions in a rosy light and helped make them desirable destinations.
History enthusiast Charles Lummis founded the Landmarks Club in 1895, and also helped spark interest in the missions, which he promoted at the “birthplace of civilization in California”. Other groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West and the Daughters of the American Revolution joined in, putting up plaques and signage. In 1915, the Automobile Club of Southern California began promoting motoring tours of the missions in 1915. The authors of the Auto Club’s California Mission Tour pamphlet described the California missions as “Cathedrals of the Sun. More splendid in their melting glory than the Cathedrals of the Old World.”
A sunny summer pilgrimage in one’s automobile, traveling from one mission to the next along the Camino Real—the road of the kings—offered the club’s 7000 members the thrill of something exotic and historic for relatively modest expense and effort.
Suddenly, there was a mission-based cottage industry producing Mission postcards, paintings, paperweights, decorative plates, and a host of other trinkets. Those missions that were still in use as churches added museums and gift shops. The ones that were disused or abandoned were restored.
All of this romanticizing was good for tourism and sold a lot of books and postcards, but it left out the fact that there were skeletons in the missions’ closets. A lot of skeletons. Tens of thousands of them. Those “Cathedrals of the Sun” were built by enslaved Native Americans, they functioned not as beacons of goodness and learning but as the sites of mass incarceration, and they played a significant role in the genocide of Indigenous people on the West Coast of America.
The first Spanish mission was built in 1769, the last in 1823. There were 21 of them, spaced along a 600-mile stretch of coastline from San Diego to San Francisco. The official goal was to turn the missions into self-sufficient Spanish colonies, or pueblos, that would thrive and produce new tax payers who would be self-sufficient and bring glory and success to the Spanish empire.
When the Spanish arrived, they were met by what historian David J. Weber describes in his book The Spanish Frontier in North America as “cautious but friendly curiosity.” The Spanish responded by turning thousands of previously free people into indentured servants, stripping them of language, culture, names, identity and freedom, all in the name of religion, but even with all that conscripted labor, the missions failed to thrive.
Weber writes, “the Spaniards hung on, but only barely, enduring chronic hunger, deprivation, and anxiety. Their first attempts at agriculture failed. They had yet to understand California’s climate and terrain, and they could not exploit the knowledge of the coastal Indians who were not farmers in the European sense, but who managed game and plant life with techniques the Spaniards did not fully comprehend.”
That was just one of the things the Franciscan missionaries did not comprehend. Historian Robert Jackson describes the goal of the missionaries in his book Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840:
“Their ultimate objective was to ensure the Indians’ eternal salvation by their conversion, so there was no moral dilemma as long as the deaths of thousands of converts contributed toward populating heaven. Suffering on earth and receiving the sacraments were necessary for salvation.”
The Franciscans baptized an estimated 53,000 Native Americans and buried 37,000 of them during that fifty year period. The latter number does not include the tens of thousands of children and infants who died at the missions. Diseases like measles and smallpox took a terrible toll, but so did crowded, unsanitary living conditions, malnutrition, mistreatment, and what Jackson describes as a “climate of coercive social control.”
The Franciscan friars may have had the conviction that they were saving souls, but they weren’t doing it with kindness and gentleness. They were backed by the military force of the Spanish Empire. Many of the converts were held against their will. Revolts were not uncommon and neither was corporal punishment and institutionalized cruelty.
More than half of all the unpaid labor dying wasn’t the only problem. Mission buildings, built of unreinforced masonry, timber beams, and adobe bricks, were vulnerable to earthquakes, fire and water damage. Mission San Juan Bautista was badly damaged in an 1803 earthquake; the stone church at San Juan Capistrano collapsed in an earthquake in 1812, San Miguel burned in 1806. The San Gabriel Mission was built too close to the river and had to be relocated five miles away to avoid seasonal floods.
Water supplies were a constant concern. Drought years, groundwater contamination, and the risk of crop failure were major issues. At the Ventura Mission a seven-mile-long aqueduct was built to bring water from the mountains because there was no reliable water source at the actual mission site. Life at the missions was precarious at best.
When the missions were secularized in 1833, the Native Americans who still lived there were dispossessed a second time. The land was sold, and many of the churches were abandoned.
Things did not improve for the surviving Native American population when California was transferred from Mexico to the United States in 1849. The 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California estimated that California’s indigenous population plummeted from around 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1870 and then down to 16,000 by 1900. For California’s Indigenous people, the result of contact first with the Spanish missionaries and then under Mexican and US rule was catastrophic and resulted in genocide, but the academic world was slow to accept that. The myth of missions as the font of California civilization remained mainstream until the end of the twentieth century.
author’s collection
Historians and activists Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo received criticism in 1987 when they used the word genocide to describe what happened at the missions in their book The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, but the apologists have become fewer and fewer as more facts, including written first person accounts from survivors like the ones presented in the Costos’ book, have been uncovered and published.
In 2024, a new educational law changed how California Native American history is taught in the state. The new law requires “instruction that provides a foundation for understanding the Spanish colonization of California and the Gold Rush Era, including the treatment and perspectives of Native Americans during those periods.”
“It’s time that the voices of California’s first people drive the educational process, especially when the subject is our ways, our people, our history,” said Assemblymember James Ramos, who authored the bill and is the first Native Californian to serve in the state Legislature.
Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival style architecture has always been rooted in fantasy—the bell towers are just for show, in the same way that no one will ever shoot arrows from the arrow slits in the Disneyland castle or lower the portcullis on an attacking enemy, but reality is catching up to the missions. Many still operate on what historian Brenda Helmbrecht described in a 2019 essay as “heritage tourist sites that promote a kind of ‘fantasy,” but she added that “the story they tell is finally including the voices of the Indigenous people whose history has long been silenced.”
It’s a reminder that while history doesn’t change, our understanding of it can evolve. It’s something to think of while driving past all of those rows of “elegant, stylish, charming” and ubiquitous Spanish-style buildings…
Suzanne. Thank you