by Jane St. Clair

Tumacacori Mission stands near the San Padro River where it has been standing for almost two centuries.

The walls are crumbling down, especially on the inside, but you get the feeling it will take many more centuries for the whole church to crumble away.

The walls are crumbling more on the inside of the church because for a long time she was missing her roof.

Tumacacori is Arizona’s oldest mission. It’s one of 24 missions that Padro Eusebio Francisco Kino established in the Southwest. He came from Europe with his small but mighty band of Jesuits in 1691.

You might think he must have been an aggressive person, but Father Kino was not. He was a dreamer, a man who watched the stars, who drew maps of the lands he explored, and who learned the languages of Native Americans.

Father Kino did not build the church, but he did start the Catholic mission here. He baptized people, married them, and conducted services under a thatched canopy that shaded his congregation from the blistering Arizona heat.

The church itself was built around 1820. In its glory years, Tumacacori was painted all kinds of bright colors inside and out. You can still see a bit of color on the front of the church.

The inside of Tumacacori is dark and a little creepy. The crumbling stairway to the bell tower, the walls that once held statues and candles, the altar, once as bright as the front doors and pillars. Once it looked like the picture below.

Today it looks like the second one.

Tumacacori is a National Monument run by the United States Park Service. President Theodore Roosevelt saved it in 1902, but the Park Service never restored it. Their idea was people should see the church as it once was, and to allow it to slowly decline as a way of showing the passage of time.

The gardens and smaller buildings near the church are lovely, perhaps something like they looked so long ago. Sadly, looters raided everything here, and even opened up graves looking for Spanish gold they never found. However, you can still get the idea of that this was a little community of people who shared their lives and rituals.

Unlike San Xavier Mission nearer to Tucson, Tumacacori is not a working church. Its bells no longer ring, its choirs no longer sing, and no one kneels there every week for prayers. This gives it a lonely quality. Yet with some imagination it is easy to picture how it once was so many years ago – serene, tranquil, beautiful — the active center of a small community in this isolated desert.

It is still beautiful in its own way, even as its walls are crumbling down.

Jane St. Clair’s short story, “Hair Like Julia Roberts,” has been accepted for publication by Weber, Journal of the Contemporary West. The story is about a couple who tries to escape a religious desert cult.

To plan a visit to Tumacacori Historical National Park, go to here.