The sounds of Orthodox worship were heard for the first time in California at Fort Ross, where there resided a fortified Russian settlement for the purpose of trade with California Spaniards and the protection of the Russian-American Trade Company of Alaska’s sea hunting.1 In the small bay of Bodega, fifty miles north of San Francisco, a Russian schooner took shelter with Aleut leather kayaks. Not far from the bay on a prominence stood Fort Ross, in which could be seen a modest chapel. There Russians, together with Aleut and California Indian converts to Orthodoxy sang and prayed according to the Slavonic Psalter and Book of Hours. The first Indian converts were apparently baptized by lay people, as once were the Aleuts on Kodiak island. But later [converts] were unquestionably baptized by priests who came here from Sitka to conduct divine services and rites. Among those priest-missionaries was the famous Fr. Ioann Veniaminov, who visited here from Sitka. In 1884 the writer of this notebook observed children of Russian and California Indian mixed marriages in the settlement of Novoarchangelsk2 on Baranoff Island.
Thus Russia, or more precisely the Russian-American Company, first owned property in California back in 1808. Fort Ross was built and consecrated in 1812. The first Orthodox community in California comprised the major part of the population of these holdings. On feast days the entire population gathered for common prayer in the chapel, the ruins of which can still be seen today. The river, which flows through this region among the straight tall redwood trunks, has preserved the name Russian, as has one of the hills in the city of San Francisco itself. In 1840 all this part of Upper California was transferred to the Americans. And so when the American Captain Sutter raised the American flag over the former Russian fort in Sonoma County, the sound of those singing the Orthodox Lord, have mercy was no longer heard in the chapel. The site became desolate, and it seemed that the Orthodox Christian faith had left this land forever.
This is a digital edition of Beacon from the Bay: The Collected Works of Saint Sebastian Dabovich of Jackson and San Francisco, a several-month-long project to catalogue the out-of-print works of Saint Sebastian Dabovich, the first American-born Orthodox priest.
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Publisher’s Note: This history of the Orthodox Church in California was published as two articles in Amerikanskii Pravoslavnii Vestnik, or the Russian American Orthodox Messenger, issues 15 (1-13 April 1898, pp. 455-460) and 16 (15-27 April, 1898, pp. 479-482). These articles were originally translated from Russian by Robert A. Parent.
Or Sit-kha in the Tlingit dialect
Orthodoxy keeps the old prayers because old prayers know where the bones are buried.They have carried sinners, saints, widows, monks, soldiers, and sleepy children toward mercy.