Mission Inn

It started as a twelve-room adobe boarding house in 1876 and never stopped. Frank Miller spent forty years bolting on wings, arcades, flying buttresses, a rotunda and several storeys of collected Spanish and Mexican ironwork until the thing filled a city block. It is not a restored mission and was never meant to read as one. In 1903 Theodore Roosevelt helped plant one of Eliza Tibbets's two original navel orange trees in the courtyard here. It died in 1921. The other is three miles south and still alive.

What the plaque says

Frank A. Miller (1857-1935) made adobe bricks for a small 12 room guest house which he opened in 1876. Over the years by successive building additions he fulfilled his dream by recreating this early California Mission style setting of a hotel.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wigwam Motel — 8.7 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Original McDonald's Site — 11 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.
• Cajon Pass — 24 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Rubidoux Grist Mill — 2.1 mi
• Site of Louis Rubidoux House — 2.1 mi
• Cornelius and Mercedes Jenson Ranch — 2.6 mi
• Parent Washington Navel Orange Tree — 3.0 mi