Mission San José

The Story

Lasuén founded Mission San José on June 11, 1797, at the foot of the East Bay hills. Under Father Narciso Durán, who served here for 27 years, it became one of the richest missions in the chain, second only to San Luis Rey in size. Durán taught music to the Ohlone and Yokuts people of the community and built a thirty-piece orchestra whose reputation carried up and down California.

The mission also stood at a hard frontier. In 1828 Estanislao, a Yokuts man raised at the mission, led hundreds of people in a revolt in the Central Valley that took several military expeditions to put down. His name survives in the Stanislaus River and county.

The 1868 Hayward earthquake destroyed the adobe church. A wooden Gothic-style parish church stood on the site for over a century, and in 1982 it was moved to Burlingame so the mission church could be rebuilt. Using original methods and surviving plans, the 1809 church was reconstructed and dedicated in 1985. The surviving monastery wing next door, the only original mission building left, now houses the museum. It is an active parish of the Diocese of Oakland.

Church Recognition

Mission San José was founded on June 11, 1797 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the fourteenth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is reconstructed mission church, active parish and museum.

The mission was built by Native Californians, and the Church has publicly acknowledged the coercion and harm that mission life involved. That history is told in full on the California Mission Trail page, and it belongs to this place as much as its founding date does.

Go Deeper

The thirty-piece Native orchestra trained here by Father Narciso Durán.

This mission is one of the twenty-one on the California Mission Trail, the fourteenth to be founded. The trail page carries the history of the chain as a whole, including the Church's own reckoning with it.