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

• Harada House — 0.2 mi
  The 1884 cottage a Japanese American family bought in their children's names, and kept in court.
• Riverside Chinatown Site — 1.0 mi
  Riverside's second Chinatown — an empty lot on purpose, with eighty percent of it still underground.
• Mount Rubidoux — 1.2 mi
  The mountain all of Riverside walks — and the half-acre at the summit the city sold rather than go to court.
• Sherman Institute & the Sherman Indian Museum — 5.4 mi
  The federal Indian boarding school Riverside lobbied to get — still a school today, its 1902 building now a museum.

More markers nearby

• Harada House — 0.3 mi
• 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