Sonoma, CA Photo - Sonoma Mission, Sonoma, California

Sonoma Mission. The mission buildings were barely finished when Sonoma Mission was secularized on November 3 1834. General Mariano Vallejo, Commandant of the San Francisco Presidio, took control. He was supposed to distribute the property to the Indians, but he took it for himself instead. Vallejo founded a town, now the town of Sonoma, around the mission. The old chapel was used as a parish church until 1880, and was eventually sold to a man who built a saloon in front of it and used the chapel as a storehouse. The Historic Landmarks League bought the mission property in 1903, and they finished restoring the mission in 1926, when they turned it over to the State of California. After further restoration, the mission is part of the Sonoma Mission State Historic Park

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.