Mission San Luis Rey

* ****Mission San Luis Rey**** - founded by padre Fermín Lasuén on June 12, 1798, the eighteenth of the twenty-one Spanish missions built in the Alta California Province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It is a National Historic Landmark, for its pristine example of a Spanish mission church complex. Today the mission complex functions as a parish church of the Diocese of San Diego as well as a museum and retreat center.

At its prime, Mission San Luis Rey's structures and services compound covered almost 950,400 acres (384,600 ha), making it the largest of the missions, along with its surrounding agricultural land. Multiple outposts were built in support of Mission San Luis Rey and placed under its supervision, including San Antonio de Pala Asistencia in 1816 and Las Flores Estancia in 1823.

The current church, built in 1815, is the third church on this location. Mission San Luis Rey De Francia raised about 26,000 cattle as well as goats, geese, and pigs.

## Mission History

The first Peruvian Pepper Tree (*Schinus molle*) in California was planted here in 1830, now iconic, widely planted, and renamed the *California Pepper tree* in the state. After the Mexican secularization act of 1833 much of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia land was sold off. Indigenous peoples, previously forced to work on missions, were freed from direct subjugation in the mission system through this act. When Native people at San Luis Rey learned of their impending freedom, they proclaimed together: "We are free! We do not want to obey! We do not want to work!" and left the mission by the thousands, returning to their rural communities "which in some cases their forebears had left two generations earlier."

During the Mexican–American War in Alta California (1846–1847), the Mission was utilized as a military outpost by the United States Army. In July 1847, U.S. military governor of California Richard Barnes Mason created an Indian sub-agency at Mission San Luis Rey, and his men took charge of the mission property in August, appointing Jesse Hunter from the recently arrived Mormon Battalion as sub-agent. Battalion guide Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the Native American Shoshone child of Sacagawea who had traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition forty years earlier, was appointed by Mason as the Alcalde "within the District of San Diego, at or near San Luis Rey" in November 1847. Charbonneau resigned from the post in August, 1848, claiming that "because of his Indian heritage others thought him biased when problems arose between the Indians and the other inhabitants of the district."

## See Also

* Official Mission San Luis Rey website
* Calisphere – California Digital Library: Early photographs, sketches, and land surveys of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia.
* Elevation & Site Layout sketches of the Mission compound
* Satellite image from Google Maps
* Early History of the California Coast, a National Park Service *Discover Our Shared Heritage* Travel Itinerary
* Mission San Luis Rey – Pictures, videos and history
* Howser, Huell (December 8, 2000). California Missions (101). *California Missions*. Chapman University Huell Howser Archive.
* Mission San Luis Rey Cemetery at Find a Grave
* Oceanside, California Youth Clubs

## References

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