Birthplace of Santa Cruz
Mission Hill is the birthplace of Santa Cruz and the first permanent European settlement in Santa Cruz County. Until the gold rush era, Mission Santa Cruz was the religious, commercial, industrial and agricultural center of the county. Its only rival, the secular community of Branciforte, was not viable, and became only a place-name.

When Thomas Larkin established a branch of his Monterey trading post in Santa Cruz, he selected an adobe building on the Mission quadrangle. When William Blackburn arrived in Santa Cruz he operated his hotel on the Mission quadrangle. The reasons for their choice was clear, there was no other location in the county that would have supported their business.

Holy Cross Church, the successor to the Mission, continued to be important, replacing the ruins of the adobe chapel with a wooden church in 1857, and replacing the wooden church with the present brick one in 1884-1887. The development of Mission Hill was a gradual transition from the center of activity at the start of the gold rush to a predominantly residential district by the turn of the century.

Perhaps the greatest asset of the Mission Hill Area is its undisturbed character. Except for the construction of a few structures, the area is relatively unchanged from the early 1900's. Architectural styles range from the Mission Era to the Colonial Revival. As one of the California mission sites, the Mission Hill area has a wealth of history. The Neary-Rodriguez Adobe has been continuously occupied from the Spanish Era to the present. Few buildings in California can claim this distinction. All but nine buildings on Mission Hill are in a Special Use (Historic) District, to maintain the area’s historic character.

Architecture
The Mission Hill district contains several buildings of special architectural interest. Holy Cross Church is known for its painted ceiling and spire, and serves as a landmark for the entire city. The Neary-Rodriguez adobe is the only building to survive from Mission Santa Cruz and is one of only two adobes in the city.

Although the Neary-Rodriguez Adobe was once thought to have housed the Mission guardhouse, with the commander of the guard and his family in one side and his subordinates housed in the other, it was found by archeological excavations in the 1980’s to have been the Native American neophyte family housing, with one family assigned to each of the original 17 rooms. This is the only example of its kind still standing in California today.

Early Santa Cruz was developed lot-by-lot, house-by-house, over a period of years. Before the turn of the century, developers laid out subdivisions that could accommodate many homes, but almost never built any more than two or three houses in any one location. Nineteenth century Santa Cruz developed by filling in between widely spaced houses or lot-splitting. There has never been an entire neighborhood dating exclusively from any one decade, or period in Santa Cruz.

What is special about Mission Hill is that the process of demolition and infilling was largely complete by the time the building boom of the mid-1880's was over. By that time, it was already being described as a desirable and attractive residential area. Mission Hill has the best representation of buildings in each decade from 1850 to 1900, and can claim a variety of historic uses.

An Agricultural and Commercial Center
As the center of Mission Era Santa Cruz, Mission Hill was the focal point of the area's commerce. The Mission had more than 4,000 head of cattle, extensive vegetable gardens and a gristmill. The mill was presented by Captain George Vancouver to the Mission when he visited it on December 2, 1794, to buy fresh vegetables. The Mission also had more than 8000 sheep, and 900 horses by 1828. Herds roamed and grazed from near the Pajaro River up to New Year's Point, a distance about 42 miles.

Santa Cruz County's first hotel was an old Mission adobe, with two stories and an attic and porches running around it. It stood on the southwest corner of School and Emmett Streets, facing the Plaza where Holy Cross Elementary School is today. No record exists as to when it was built, and the first transaction regarding it dates from 1848 when Job Francis Dye sold it to Joseph L. Majors. When Santa Cruz County was created by the Legislature on February 18, 1850, its first courthouse business was conducted in the old Eagle Hotel. In 1852, the new county paid Thomas Fallon $3,500 and moved into his combination home, store and hotel which stood just across School Street from the Eagle, in the former Mission vegetable garden.

Judge John H. Logan, whose house was in the Mission Hill area, in 1890, discovered something unusual in his garden: a cross between a native blackberry sprout (Auginbaugh) and the Red Antwerp Raspberry. He sent samples of the hybrid cross to a firm in Salem, Oregon, where it created great interest. The new berry was named the Loganberry in honor of Judge Logan.