Throughout the 17th century, Mission Santa Catalina de Guale remained the northernmost extension of Spanish control over eastern North America. But the founding of Charles Town in 1670 challenged Spanish hegemony of the Georgia coast. A decade later, when British-led forces of 300 Yamasee Indians overran St. Catherines Island, the Franciscan mission effectively disappeared.

Three centuries of treasure hunters, historians, and archaeologists searched in vain for that missing mission – the crown jewel of the Golden Islands stretching southward to St. Augustine, the capital of Spanish La Florida (which included present-day Georgia). Nearly a century ago, historian John Tate Lanning took note of the ongoing search and optimistically forecast that “if some unwitting hands have not pulled them down [and] if the weather has not beaten too fiercely through the centuries…some fortunate hunter may yet stumble upon the mission remains of Santa Catalina de Guale.”

As fate would have it, I became that “fortunate hunter.”

Finding Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

New York’s American Museum of Natural History sent me to the Georgia coast in 1974 to explore the archaeology of St. Catherines Island. Eight years later, I telephoned Bishop Raymond Lessard (of the Diocese of Savannah) with some good news: “Sir, I believe we’ve found something that belongs to you…the oldest Christian Church in Georgia.” After a pause, Bishop Lessard replied, “It better be Catholic.” And it was.

Finding the long-lost mission was an “overnight” discovery that took five years. Combining probabilistic sampling theory with geophysical remote sensing technologies (proton magnetometry, soil resistivity, ground penetrating radar), we eventually found the mission site hiding beneath a dirt road I had unknowingly driven over dozens of times.

Below considerable hurricane debris, the remains of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale proved remarkably well preserved, including the iglesia (church), the convento (where the friars lived), the adjacent mission well (source of holy water), and cocina (mission kitchen). The first Santa Catalina church was destroyed in the September 1597 revolt, in which were martyred the resident Franciscans, Miguel de Añon and Antonio de Badajoz (two of the five Georgia Martyrs soon to be beatified). Fr. Conrad Harkins (Director, Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University) joined our archaeological crew in 1982 to help find their graves, which we did.

The never-looted ruins of Mission Santa Catalina all contained an astounding assortment of liturgical accoutrements – more than all other 16th- and 17th-century Spanish missions in this country put together. When returning 17th-century friars rebuilt their convento, they cached dozens of bronze mission bell fragments behind the back door, many with punch and axe marks from their deliberate destruction in the 1597 revolt. Aware that the mission bells had been consecrated and blessed, the friars gathered up these still-consecrated fragments for re-casting into new bells.

Near the church altar, we found paired glass cruets that once held sacramental wine and water, both buried by friars anticipating their return. Three centuries later, the cruets remained unbroken. More than two dozen gold, silver, and bronze religious medallions (some blessed in the Vatican) were found in the mission ruins. One gold medal depicts the Virgin Mary with a Latin inscription: “conceived without original sin.” A gold-plated silver medallion illustrates the Pietà with a shroud-draped cross in the background. An unbroken clay tablet has St. Francis on one side and St. Helena on the obverse. Several of the dozens of medallions and wooden crosses also featured St. Francis, sometimes with inscriptions. The ruins of Mission Santa Catalina contained more than 67,000 glass beads from China, Venice (Italy), the Netherlands, France, and the Baltic.

For years, we studied the mission artifact assemblages in the New York labs of the American Museum. But also believing that “what comes from Georgia should stay in Georgia,” the St. Catherine’s Island Foundation gifted the entire collection of mission artifacts to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta and the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia.

The Living Church

A shell-covered subplaza (atrio) fronted the mission church door. Although buried for three centuries, the single-file walkway leading inside the church was strikingly well-preserved – mute traces of the thousands of parishioners attending countless 16th- and 17th-century Masses, funerals, and weddings at Mission Santa Catalina. Today, we follow those same footprints into the successor church. After the mission excavations were largely completed, Royce Hayes (then Island Superintendent) and Spyder Crews (present Director of Operations) planted 14 tall cabbage palm trees marking the exact position of the uprights that once supported the original mission church. In this stunning “living church,” Fr. Conrad Harkins celebrated the first Mass in 300 years on St. Catherines Island, and the Diocese of Savannah has carried this tradition forward in multiple Masses hosted by Bishops Raymond W. Lessard, J. Kevin Boland, Gregory J. Hartmayer, and Stephen D. Parkes. The “living church” today remains a silent tribute to the beatification of the five Georgia Martyrs.

Losing Mission Santa Catalina Again?

Massive and unparalleled erosion along Georgia’s Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway today threatens the rediscovered Franciscan mission complex. Digitizing historic and recent imagery, geologist Brian Meyer documented that the marshland cutbank bordering the western margin of Mission Santa Catalina has eroded more than 200 feet toward the mission church between 1951 and 2010.

Archaeological teams have also intensively surveyed and conducted rescue excavations along this cutbank. Since discovering Mission Santa Catalina in 1982, we have documented that the northern shoreline has eroded at least 92 feet toward the church, destroying the likely garrison headquarters. In 2026, the erosion rate has increased to 4–8 feet/year.

A decade ago, just two football fields south of the mission church, shoreline erosion exposed a previously unknown cemetery of Guale ancestors buried a century before the Franciscans arrived. We recovered 92 ancestral burials shortly before they would have washed away into the marsh, and we are presently working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation to rebury their ancestors at a place of their choosing on St. Catherines Island.

Without significant intervention to protect the surviving shoreline, the entire Franciscan church complex at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale – including the graves of 2 Georgia Martyrs and more than 400 Indigenous neophytes buried inside the church – will erode without a trace into the North Newport River marsh by the year 2100 – just 74 years from now.

Multiple stakeholding communities share contemporary connections to the threatened Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. St. Catherines Island is privately owned, and the Edward John Noble and St. Catherines Island Foundations have long fostered a relationship with the American Museum of Natural History to jointly sponsor scientific research, conservation, and education on the island. St. Catherines is the ancestral home of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, two of the most powerful federally-recognized tribes in the nation. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah will soon celebrate the beatification of the five Martyrs of Georgia, two of whom died and were interred on St. Catherines Island. I remain cautiously optimistic that these potent and influential enterprises can find the common ground required to preserve one of the most consequential Spanish colonial settlements on the continent.