Another roadside surprise was the Chapel of Saint Francis of Assisi.

This adobe chapel was founded in 1830, under the direction of the Varona Fathers at Santa Ysabel Mission. It was here the Cupeño Indian village of Kúpa thrived for many generations. The history is sadly the same as most of California's native people. Spaniards entered Cupeño lands in 1795 and took control by the 19th century. After Mexico achieved independence, its government granted Juan Jose Warner, a naturalized American-Mexican citizen, nearly 45,000 acres of the land (1844).


The wood and adobe was brought in from the hills nearby and built with the labor of the Cupeños who considered the area to be of great medicinal and spiritual value.  There is still a mass conducted weekly at the chapel, and the nearby cemetery still conducts burials.

In 1903, the Cupeño people lost their home. The United States Supreme Court ruled that they had no right to the land that had been their home for centuries. Ordered by the government to a reservation at Pala, the Cupeño were forced to make a new home. This eviction was the last of Indian “removals” in the United States, ending a federal policy of forced relocations that had begun 75 years earlier, and is best-remembered in the Cherokee trail of tears.
The cemetery was established in 1830 as a burial ground for the Cupeño Indians.  A total of 62 markers were counted. Most of them are wooden crosses with no inscriptions.
This was a surprise discovery of long ago injustices. A sad but welcomed history lesson.